Do you know traffic from of these search engines give Adsense publishers the most revenue?

Is it traffic from Google, Bing or Yahoo?

If you integrate Adsense with Google Analytics, then there is actually a way for you to find out.

The following are the steps:

1. Firstly you’ll need to log into your Google Analytics account.

2. From the left menu, click on Traffic Sources > Search Engines

3. Click on Adsense Revenue tab.

4. The default view shows you a list sorted by revenue amount.

What’s more important to find out is the eCPM that each of these search engines brings in.

So to do that, simply sort Adsense eCPM by clicking on the header Adsense eCPM.

Once I did that, I got the following results.

Looks like Lycos is giving me the highest eCPM, followed by MSN. Surprised huh?

But between Bing and Google, traffic from Bing gives me at least 100% more revenue than Google if just comparing eCPM.

This data tells me that if I want to earn more money via Adsense, I should try to get more traffic from other search engines besides Google. But the big questions is, HOW?

I guess the reason why Bing outperforms Google in terms of Google Ad clicks is because the search user may not fully understand how Google Ads work (leading to more ad clicks).

Whereas a Google search user may have developed blindness for Google Ads.

Just my thoughts.

What about your site? Do you specifically tweak your site in order to get more traffic from other search engines? If you do, please share with the rest of us on how you do it in the comment box below.

Usually traffic on Thursdays and Fridays are the best days but not on 1st April 2010.

This downtrend worries me because when traffic goes down, so too is our earnings / income.

I started to panic and got worried that maybe Google has decided to stop sending traffic to my site, or maybe I’ve done something wrong and got a penalty.

At times like this, it’s really important to look at information that we have from different perspectives.

First thing to look at is stats from Google Analytics and under Intelligence, this is what I saw.

Notice how on April 1, 2010, the traffic dropped to near weekend stats, something very unusual.

The number of alerts which is 28 is also trying to highlight something to me. Clicking on the alerts, I notice that total traffic dropped by 23% on 1st April (a Friday). See all the alerts below:

Many red indicators. Bad! Bad! Bad!

So the task right now is to find out why. Is it because of a Google penalty or are others experiencing the same traffic dip as well.

The following are a few things I did:

1. Ask a question at GetSatisfaction.com a community powered support. You can read my question here. Let’s see if it gets any responses.

2. Ask friends if they too suffered from a dip in traffic. In my case, 2/2 friends replied they too had the same problem.

Attribution Image by achichi

3. See if other sites with an open SiteMeter have the same trend. For example, HongKiat.com‘s 7 day traffic stats (Screenshot below).

4. Search in Twitter for traffic drop. Saw a few people tweeting about it.

5. Search if it’s a holiday or special day which is celebrated by people around the world. I found out that April 2, 2010 is Good Friday and April 4, 2010 is Easter.

Conclusion

All that was done above leads me to conclude that the traffic dip might just be temporary and we should all see our traffic going back to normal sometime next Tuesday, I HOPE!

Will update this post then to let you all know if that’s really the case. Till then, let’s stop worrying about our site traffic and enjoy the holiday season.

Do you allow placement targeting on your Adsense Channels?

It has been mentioned that by allowing our custom channels to be targeted by advertisers, there is a potential for us as Adsense publishers to earn higher revenues.

Because of this, a few months back I gave this a try by allowing all my custom channels to be targetable.

Once all channels are targetable, I realize one thing. Ads from a particular advertiser almost always appear on each blog post.

Previously when my channels were not targetable, the ads are very relevant to what the blog post is about. Say if the post is about SEO, ads will be related to SEO.

However, after channels are targetable, I see ads which aren’t that relevant anymore. Ads from advertiser X always appears.

Maybe advertiser X placed a bid which is quite high in order for it to appear prominently on my site, which may or may not be good.

Good because of their willingness to place high bids, which means if our site visitors do click on the ads, we adsense publishers get a higher cost per click (CPC) as well.

But because these ads show up most of the time and isn’t really related to what the site visitor is interested in, the chances for visitors to click on ads drops.

Imagine if a visitor wants to know more about SEO but sees and ad related to Forex, what are the chances that he would click on the ad? I would say probably not.

After a month of enabling placement targeting on my channels, I have disabled it because:

• CTR was lower
• CPM was lower
• Revenue was lower

As of right now, I believe that allowing placement targeting gives me less earnings. What about you? Have you tried enabling placement targeting and see positive results?

Let’s discuss in the comment box below.

If you need more info about what placement targeting is all about, check out Adsense Channel Placement Targeting (YouTube), an informative video created by the Adsense team.

If yes, then you should try to install this really neat plugin called After the Deadline

After the Deadline helps us check our spelling, style and grammar, thus helping us to write better. With the plugin, we also spend less time editing and re-reading our writing, giving us more time to spend for other work.

Getting the plugin to work is really simple. After you download and install the plugin, you will need to get yourself a free API key from AfterTheDeadline.com website which you would then insert in the settings page.

Once done, you should now see a new icon on your editor when you’re authoring a new post.

So now for the test. Let me create a screenshot of how this works.

As you can see in the screenshot, typos will be underlined in Red while grammar or style errors will be underlined in Green. Just like the Word spell check function, right clicking on the errors will offer a fix suggestion.

So there you go, a cool plugin which help you proofread your WordPress blog post.

In case you’re wondering why is it important to know, well it’s really simple. Imagine if you’re an owner of a music CD store. Would you be interested to find out what sort of music your customers are most interested in? There’s no harm in knowing a little more about the people who walk into your store.

Same goes for your website. What are your web visitors looking for when they reach your site. Do your website have the information that they are looking for? Maybe yes, maybe no. But in order to find out, you firstly need to be able to track where your site visitors are coming from. These are some common questions:

• Which country do they come from?
• What did they search for in order to reach your site?
• How many visitors are currently surfing your site?
• How long did the spend surfing the pages on your site?
• How did they reach the site? Via search engine or email recommendations?

These are some common questions that a website stats tracker can help to answer.

But you may ask, even with answer to the above, what can I do with it?

I will provide one example – from my own experience.

One of my sites was getting some traffic from the search term “Brazilian Wax” and most of the traffic comes from images.google.com. Occasionally the site gets some searches for Brazilian Wax DIY, but my post doesn’t have any steps and info for a DIY.

So what the website stats tracker is telling me is that people are searching for Brazilian Wax DIY but my site does not have that piece of information. The smart thing to do next is to write something related to how people can do their very own brazilian wax.

See how the stats just helped me figure out what sort of information I should provide for my site visitors.

There are many more ways to use the information provided by the site stats tracker, but I’ll leave it to you to explore.

So your next question is, what site stats tracker software should you use?

There are many out there. Some require you to pay up while some is free. For me, I always use this free one called Site Meter.

SiteMeter Basic offers a FREE, easy to install tool for sites to better understand who’s visiting their site, where they are coming from and where they go to leaving your site.

I use SiteMeter for all of my sites, whether it’s a plain html file, on a WordPress site or even a Joomla enabled website.

The information it provides is a sort of business intelligence which helps me make decisions related to the sort of content I should put into my site.

Are you tracking your site today? If yes, what tool do you use?

If you aren’t try to check out SiteMeter! Any questions or comments, feel free to ask me. I use Site Meter on all of my sites

Check out more of these HD ads at Petronas Greetings

Selamat Hari Raya!

If you’re a WordPress fan too, then you should really check out this presentation by Matt Cutts, Head of Google’s Web Spam Team.

In his Wordcamp presentation, Matt mentioned and provided many good pointers, examples and tips for WordPress users.

These are some that I really liked:

• In order to do well with your blog, you need to write about stuffs that you love – DAILY. This is really true because it’s really difficult to write about something we are unfamiliar with. It feels like forcing myself to drink Dr. Pepper.
• Changing the URL to rank for more keywords. See an example on this post.The title is Some really good WordPress + SEO tips by Matt Cutts while the URL is some-really-good-wordpress-seo-tips-by-a-google-engineer. See how I changed Matt Cutts to Google Engineer on my URL. Before this presentation, I have never changed my urls coz I thought Google wouldn’t like it. But after the presentation, I actually tested it on a few of my other blogs and it did work. I got ranked for both keywords in the title and in the URL.
• Plugins Matt Cutts use. I learned about Cookies for Comments.

You can view the presentation on WordCampTV or even visit Matt Cutts post at Straight from Google: What You Need to Know

(Not my actual apartment )

Within 2 months of moving into the nice new apartment, I realized that I have overspent on many things. Instead of trying to save some money moving to a new place to cut on traveling expenses, I have instead spent more overall.

Anyway, I can’t go returning the new furnitures or get the contractor to undo the renovations. Instead, I need to find ways to pay off my credit card bills.

Since I owe the credit card company some amount in credit card debt, I did a balance transfer credit card and immediately I could save some money. In laymen terms, this translates to owing less money to credit card companies. If you’re wondering the sort of savings we’re talking about, it’s equivalent to about $100 or more in one year for every $1000 in credit card debt assuming 10% interest on the existing credit card.

One of the danger with credit card companies are unfair hikes and hidden fees. It’s like you automatically owe the credit card companies more without knowing about it. This is now a case of the past as recently, there is a new credit card protections : reforms to protect american credit card holders. So with this new reform, we as consumers are more protected from the dangers of credit card hikes and hidden fees. But if you are having some credit card debts now, it is advisable to perform a balance transfer now as the credit card ACT aimed to help consumers won’t be in effect for at least a few months. So, this means that your credit card company might have raised interest rates causing you to owe more.

If you’re interested to transfer some credit card balances, do check out this low apr balance transfer list. From this list, you should be able to select one which best suites your need. Also one important thing to note is that the length of 0% rates is declining from 1 year to 6 months. Hope it helps!

I told him that there are many web hosting out there in the market today. It all depends on one’s needs and requirements. For some, they would go for lower cost while some would go for one which provides unlimited bandwith.

So his next question to me, where is a good place to start looking for web hosting plans? And if possible, it should show him a list of top web hosting plans so that he could easily compare them side by side.

Without hesitating, I recommended to him a site that’s at the back of my head called FindMyHosting.com

FindMyHosting.com allows one to easily search and compare web hosting plans.

On the home page, you can view the top ten web hosting plan which is updated on a daily basis.

The comprehensive search feature also allows one to search for plans based on:

• Country
• Monthly price
• Platform – Linux or Windows
• Disk space
• Bandwidth per month

Another good feature of FindMyHosting.com is the directory of hostings. These directories are simply a group of similar featured web hosting plans. Say you’re only interested to look for plans which supports PHP and MySql capabilities, then clicking on the PHP/MySQL Web Hosting Plans shows you exactly those that are capable of doing so. Some of the directories includes

• PHP / MySQL Web Hosting Plans
• JSP Web Hosting Plans
• Adult Web Hosting Plans

For a complete list do check out  FindMyHosting.com!

As for my friend, he ended up going for JustHost.com simply because it was ranked #1 on the top 10 list. Fast, simple and easy. Sometimes people just need some simple recommendations to make some decisions.

Have you ever wondered how some organizations managed to print their logos onto a thumbdrive or even shape it to look as if the usb disk was manufactured by them?

These flash drives look really nice and neat and are great gifts.

If your organization is also considering to create a custom flash drive of your own, FlashDealer.com will be able to help you with it.

FlashDealer.com is able to create any custom usb drive in any material and colors that you can think off. If you’re creating one just to specifically give out to potential clients, you could include key information in the disk such as:

• Company profile
• Products and services
• Promotions
• Key contact information

With these information already embedded in the drive, your customers definitely won’t forget you. It’s definitely a good promotional method. And imagine if your customer passes the drive around to his / her friends and family members, they too will be able to view your organization’s information. How nice

Another of my favorite which I’ve never seen before in my country is a USB wristband. These wristbands are getting common especially among the younger generation. Having a usb storage in it would be really handy. But I wonder if it’s water proof!

If you’re in the US, you should really look into creating a Custom flash drive since the cost to create some of these are really affordable.

I’m thinking of creating a custom Micheal Jackson USB drive with year 2009 printed on it and add some songs on it just to remember MJ. What do you think? If you wana do the same then head on over to FlashDealer.com today