Firetop

It seems that Christmas comes twice a year with Google Adsense - for this blog at least; it’s been almost 4 months since the last $100 payout and now another little $100 of ad revenue coming my way. What a shame that the dollar gets weaker with each passing day, and that the income of $200 only just about covers the portion of server hosting fees. Thank goodness I didn’t start this website to get rich… I did at least manage to double the click through rates towards the end of the year, should make at least $300 in 2008, woohoo!

This evening I finally became an official ‘Google-approved qualified individual’… some 1,951 days after I created my first Google Adwords campaign for a client way back in 2002. 116 online multiple choice questions to get through, but it was easier that I anticipated and I completed it in half the alloted ninety minutes. It would have been pretty shocking for me to fail I suppose… having created over 100 campaigns in the past five years - but at least I finally forked out the £25 and got official recognition. Next up - adding the official logo to this blog I guess.

Technorati Tags: google accreditation, google adwords, google exam

Well it’s only taken six months… but finally my Google Adsense adverts have reached their $100 payout minimum, and in July I can expect to receive the first cheque for advert clicks from this blog. I have worked with many clients who have assumed that the payout from contextual advertising like Adsense must be very significant; taking the prevalence of units on websites as a sign of their profitability. However, despite the average click through rate being more than triple that of standard graphic banners, publisher earnings per CPM are quite low in comparison - it’s commission on clicks that we Adsense affiliates get (I estimate 10%), and not the entire advertiser click fee. (more…)

Whilst searching for an SVGA cable supplier today, I saw my first live ‘Google Checkout’ button below a Google Adwords advertiser message. This new service, launched in the UK in April, is Google’s attempt to rival Paypal as a common secure payment processing facility. Google Checkout is being given away free to web merchants until 2007, and then from January 1st 2008, for every £1 spent on AdWords, the merchant can process £10 in sales for free through Google Checkout. Google claim that the service improves conversions and generates more leads too. Even for merchants who are not regular Adwords spenders, it’s very tempting to switch e-commerce suppliers immediately; commission charges are by no means small for high volume sellers using Paypal or Worldpay etc. But why would Google be interested in taking on this new service offering? (more…)

I should have remembered how disappointing I found Internet World to be last year at Earls Court, but with free mini seminars on offer covering SEM, PPC and Web 2.0 it again seemed to be worth a visit. Unfortunately within minutes of arriving I was reminded of why the free seminars are NOT a good reason to attend the Internet World show; over subscribed presentations causing a massive shortage of seats and some very basic topics being presented. Quite why a packed crowd was sitting listening to one guy go over slides on SEO which I could well have written seven years ago I don’t know. (more…)

Today I came across two Google adverts offering ‘Free XBOX 360’s - a tempting offer which I’m sure gets many clicks, I for one was curious to see what it was all about. It turns out that a form of Pyramid Selling is doing the rounds online, instead of receiving commission on referrals however, electronic goods such as Xbox 360s and Apple iPods are sent to the successful originating participants ‘free of charge’. (more…)

Having just read an article in Advertising Age entitled ‘How Google Has Helped Build Brand Advertising Online‘ I think it’s worth pointing out that Google has also helped to do the exact opposite. I’m not disputing Tim Armstrong’s description of how ‘Saturn’ used Google Earth and Google Video to let people find dealerships and view product videos… but lets be realistic - how many cutting edge campaigns have we really seen like that recently? Instead what we have is a mass market of long tail niche advertisers, who have often been introduced to web advertising for the first time via Google Adwords… and now obsess over click rates and measurable RoI. It’s hitting everything from the Yellow Pages to standard banner advertising. (more…)

It’s easy to get carried away with all the social networking hype; one has only to spend a few minutes eavesdropping on the train to hear how successfully young people have latched onto the current tools for keeping in touch with their peers (think Bebo, MySpace and Facebook) as well as the proliferation of Instant Messaging. It’s fairly evident that as this young tech-savvy audience moves into the world of commerce, the networking tools they’ve grown to love will be put to new uses; job searching, candidate location, news & information gathering, even supplier research and contract negotiation will be second nature in the modern virtual world. This in addition to their existing love of all things Web 2.0 for the entertainment aspect of their lives - which already carries so much weight in setting modern music and film trends. (more…)

Some of my more regular readers will recall that in early November I looked into the popularity of ‘Celebrity Sex Tape’ downloads. This followed a Channel Four documentary detailing the history of the top 10 celebrity sex video downloads – a documentary which I felt compelled to correct on its statistical inaccuracies (I reordered the popularity chart based upon actual search volumes not just search results). As it turns out, that blog entry is now one of my most popular; bombarded with searches for ‘celebrity sex tapes’. However, we all know what these visitors are really searching for… and it’s not the correct video download chart. (more…)

One or two sites I’ve worked on of late have had problems with the relevance of Google Adsense adverts appearing on their website. Typically the problems have involved adverts being relevant to the website’s name (or domain), but not what the website is actually about. For example, this website ‘Firetop’ on initial installation of Adsense saw a huge amount of advertising for ‘fireplaces’ - relevant to the content? Nope! Whilst rooting around in the Adsense help pages I came across a couple of useful comment tags which enable a webmaster to emphasis key areas of content for the Google Adsense spiders to prioritise, with inverse tags to highlight areas to ignore. Within 48 hours these fixed 99% of the problem and increased relevance accordingly. (more…)