Click Fraud

Click fraud is a new type of Internet scam that targets advertising companies rather than consumers. On pay-per-click advertising, a company publishes a small ad in front pages such as Google or Yahoo, which offer an ad service. The ad is displayed for everybody to see, but the company only pays for advertising if a prospective client clicks on the ad. When that happens, the company is billed and Google or Yahoo get a profit. The price is small, sometimes even one penny per click, but when millions of consumers click on the ad every month, the numbers add up.

Click fraud has taken advantage of the pay-per-click advertising programs by republishing the ads in other web pages. While this in itself is not illegal, the problem is that it becomes quite easy for anybody to set up a fake website and publish a list of links or ads; these ads contribute directly to click fraud by allowing publishers, acting as middlemen, to share revenues directly with Google's AdWords/AdSense programs. Most people committing click fraud are operating such a small con that it goes undetected by companies. Those who are truly trying to profit from click fraud may have complex software programs that trick the company into believing the clicks come from different computers or even different countries.

Other forms of click fraud are not directly related to profits. Individuals may use click fraud to cause monetary loses to a competing company or to help a friend who is operating as a middleman to obtain more profits. While there is no direct connection to money in these cases, the person clicking on the ads can be accused of click fraud. Most companies, however, will not go to the trouble of persecuting this, as the court expenses will not justify the nuisance. Class action lawsuits for major loses do happen, however. In 2005, a middle-man company called Auction Experts lost a $50,000 US Dollar lawsuit brought in by Google because of click fraud. Yahoo started a similar lawsuit in 2006 related to its Yahoo! Search Marketing pay-per-click program.

Fail in Adsense?

Not every Adsense publisher make success with Adsense. There are number of reasons that can drive you to failure in Adsense:

1. Is Your website content not good enough to satisfy your site visitors? If you have a website with few pages you can't hope to make success in Adsense. One of the important factor to make success in Adsense is to have lot of good and unique content. The main point is unique content. It's too hard to provide unique content every time. The information available to your site may also be available to others site. So what can you do? You have to provide the information in such a way that everybody loves to read it from your site. You have to try to make your site best on that topic.

2. Have you discussed multiple topics in your website? One website should concentrate in only one topic. If you have a sports site you cannot discuss about banking there. This will drive away your visitors who were interested in your sports site.

3. Have you chosen a topic that you have no actual interest in that? Choosing that type of topic will not help to update your content regularly. Your site visitors will lost their interest on your page when you can't provide any update.

4. You have chosen such a background and text color for your website that are not suitable for your visitors eyes. Though if your content is good your visitors will be wanting to quit your page as soon as they can for bad color combination of your website.

5. Do you fear to test with ad units? Don't fear to loose.Make test with different ad positions, ad formats and ad colors until you have found a good combination that satisfy you. When you make a change in ad combination observe it minimum 2-3 weeks. Sometimes a small change can change the whole thing a lot.
Read from Adsense blog how a small change can change a lot.

6. Are you getting a good number of visitors? Every one should try to get more traffic.

An Overview of Adsense

So the primary tasks to earn through Google Adsense are

1. To make a website if you don't have any. If you already have a website then to
justify is it ready to apply Adsense.

2. Sign up for Adsense

3. Placing Google ads on your website.

4. Driving traffic( bringing visitors) to your site and earn through it.

The primary tasks seem pretty easy. But earning through Adsense will not be as easy as it seems if you not follow the basic rules. The most important point is Adsense is no quick way to be rich. So if you make a hurry without a proper plan you can not make a success. Success to me means earning a minimum of 1000$ per month.
You can bring success to you by cost of your time. It will not come overnight. It can take few months or more. First few months you have to work on an average of 2/3 hrs a day. After that 2/3 hrs a week is sufficient.
So what you have to do first??
You have to make a website.
Before making a website you have to choose a topic on what your website will be.

Optimization Tips adn Tricks

Before going to a discussion about optimization on ads let me ask you a question. Do you know what is first ad unit in Adsense ads? First ad unit is the most important feature in optimization. This important feature is generally overlooked by new Adsense publishers.

The first ad unit shows the most paying ads for your site. First ad unit means which ad code you have placed first in your html code. Be careful!! First ad unit doesn't mean that ad unit which ad unit appears in top of your page.

By using channels you can easily track which ad unit is getting maximum no of clicks. If that ad unit which you have entered first has maximum CTR you need not to change it.

But if other ad unit gets maximum CTR then remove all the ad code. Then enter ad code for that unit first in your html code. Suppose your ads below content gets maximum CTR. But when you entered your ad code you placed ad code for ads on top first. In that case enter the code first for below content ads and then others.
Fore more clarification see what Adsense team member said:

This types of tips and tricks you can found in Adsense Blog written by Adsense Team members. So must make a practice to read Adsense blog when you have got time.
You will also find latest features and many other helps of Adsense there.

I don't want to say much about optimization on ad placements, ad formats and ad colors. Adsense help center has excellent tips on it. So one should must read their optimization tips for a greater clarification.Optimization tips can be found on Resource tab in your Adsense account.

Main points from their tips are:

1.Choose a wider ad format(380x280 large rectangle),(360x250 medium rectangle),(160x600 wide skyscraper)

2.Choose ad colors relating to your website color

3.Place ads where your visitors can easily see it

First Impression

As you might already know, a great way to increase your AdSense earnings is to place multiple ad units on webpages that are rich with content. Here's a way to maximize your revenue with multiple ad units: Make sure the ad unit with the highest CTR is the first ad unit in the HTML code of your page. We've heard that there may be some confusion on this, so here's some clarification on how we serve ads to a page once we know which ads win the auction.

Currently, the first ad unit on a page always shows the top ads that win the ad auction. Also, if there aren't enough ads in our ad inventory to fill all of the ad units on a page, the first ad unit on the page will display ads first. This is why I recommend using custom channels to determine which of your ad units has the highest CTR, and then placing that ad unit first in the HTML code.

For the purposes of this post, the first ad unit on the page is defined as the first instance of the ad code within the HTML of the page. Keep in mind that the first ad unit in the source code is not always the first ad unit that your users will see when the page finishes loading in their browser. For example, if you use DIV tags, our system may recognize an ad unit which users see at the bottom of the page as the first ad unit.

Now that you know how to make the most out of multiple ad units, try this tip and watch your earnings grow.

Adsense Tips

1. AdSense Earning = Impression-count x Click-though-rate x Cost-per-click x smart-pricing-factor.

2. Impression count is basically referring to your traffic. It means the number of times AdSense block is displayed.

3. Click-through-rate (CTR) is ratio of clicks per impressions. It can range from 0.1% to 30%, but most commonly around 1% to 10%.

4. Cost-per-click (CPC) is the earning you get per click. While traditionally it refers to the amount advertisers pay for each click, it can also mean the amount publishers get for each click.

5. Smart-pricing is AdSense method to determine how valuable clicks from your site is worth. If clicks on your site doesn’t provide good value to advertisers, e.g. from visitors’ geo-location that seldom translate to sales, you will only get a fraction of the supposed CPC.

6. Apply for AdSense account via blogger.com for faster approval.

7. Once you get your AdSense publisher code, you can put it any of your websites without requiring further approval.

8. Read and reread Google AdSense Program Policies and Terms and Conditions.

9. Don’t click on your own ads, or ask people to click, even if you are using proxies.

10. Don’t use click-bots.

11. Don’t encourage your visitors to click on ads. The only acceptable text is “Sponsored Links” and “Advertisements”.

12. Don’t put competitor contextual ads on the same page as your AdSense, for example: Yahoo Publisher Network, Clicksor. Non-contextual ads are ok.

13. Don’t put your ads on objectionable material, e.g. adult sites, gambling sites, mp3, etc.

14. Basically, don’t cheat AdSense. Google will catch you, sooner or later.

15. Viewing your on website will not get you banned. Just make sure you don’t click on the ads.

16. However, repeatedly reload your page to jack up page impressions can get you banned.

17. When in doubt don’t hesitate to contact the AdSense team. They are very helpful.

18. Choose a high paying niche without too much competition.

19. You can try highest paying keywords from adsense1020.blogspot.com, but know before-hand that you’ll face very fierce competitions.

20. Use Overture Bid Tool and Search Engine Keyword Tool to find suitable keyword.

Key Features & Benefits

Oh, the possibilites...

What can you do with the AdSense API? This all depends on your programming genius and your users' needs as AdSense publishers. Here are some possibilities:

* Let users sign up for AdSense through your site or program

* Help users generate revenue on their pages by automatically:

o Showing contextual ads targeted to your users' content.

o Placing customized AdSense for Search boxes on your users' pages.

o Implementing AdSense Referrals alongside users' content.

* Generate detailed performance reports for your users.

Remember that while the AdSense API lets you create and manage your users' AdSense accounts and tune ad settings to any of the ad formats currently supported by AdSense, it doesn't enable modifying ad sizes or format of the text.

Provide a better user experience.

Sharing revenue with your users, or allowing them to keep all of the revenue generated on their content pages, will both encourage more people to join your site and encourage your current users to generate more pages of content. Happy users are frequent users, and everyone loves to be compensated for their efforts.

The AdSense API makes it easy for your users to monetize their content with relevant advertisements without having to leave your site. This results in a simple user interface, extra revenue for users, and ultimately a better user experience.

Earn Revenue.

While helping your users to monetize their content, you can better monetize your site:

* Through the Revenue Sharing program, earn revenue when visitors click on your users' ads.

* Plus, earn Referral Bonuses when your users reach certain thresholds.

All you have to do is place the ad units and manage your pages; Google tracks performance and makes all payments to both you and your users.

Stay ahead of the competition.

Attract more customers by being one of the first companies to offer your users an integrated monetization solution for their content. You can differentiate yourself from the competition by allowing your users to show ads from the largest network of Advertisers on the internet today. The AdSense API gives users a way to make money while helping you to maintain a consistent rand experience.

Promote your reference

Some of our publishers have asked us about the policies surrounding promotion for referral units, and so we'd like to address two of the most frequent areas of confusion. While the policies are generally the same for referrals as for standard AdSense for content ad units, there are a few minor differences.

Recommending products vs. encouraging clicks

We previously addressed this topic, but we'd like to remind you of the policy and provide some additional clarification. You can endorse or recommend products you've chosen to refer on your sites, but we ask that you only make recommendations when you're familiar with the specific product and you've decided not to use the 'Pick best performing ads' feature for that ad unit. For example, if you're familiar with a specific travel agency you're referring, you may use language such as "I use this agency and recommend it to book your next vacation." By being honest with product recommendations, you can help build user loyalty and trust, which will benefit your site in the long run.

You may be wondering why we allow publishers to call attention to referral units but not standard ad units. This is because there are significant differences between these two types of ads, the most important being that advertisers only pay for traffic from referral units if the user performs a specific action the advertiser has designated (such as making a purchase from the site or signing up for a newsletter). Please keep in mind that there is a fine line between recommending a product and encouraging your users to click on a referral button for personal profit. Publishers may not ask users to click on the referrals to help them earn money, and may not refer themselves to their own referral products. In addition, publishers may not draw unnatural attention to their referral units with arrows pointing to the units or other similar methods.

Using online advertising

As is true for all sites displaying AdSense ad units, referral units, or search boxes, your site must comply with Google's Landing Page Quality Guidelines (LPQ) if you'd like to use online advertising of any kind as a traffic source. The term 'online advertising' refers to a range of methods, from advertising programs such as AdWords to posting your site within a link exchange or in a forum. However, if the primary purpose of your site is to generate conversions from referral ads, you'll need to go one step further before advertising your site. You'll need to first receive permission from the advertisers whose products you're referring before advertising your site or their products. Please note that Google has made the decision to not allow publishers to use online advertising for any of the Google products or those of our Google Pack partners.

Adsense Keywords: Optimization

Different keywords pay different amounts. Other things being equal a website based around debt consolidation will generate more revenue per Adsense click than a website based around football cards. This is why an industry built around selling high paying keyword lists to Adsense publishers has become so profitable.

But it’s more complicated than this as different keywords in different niche markets also pay different amounts. If your website is not targeting the “right” (as in profitable) keywords you will probably be earning less money per Adsense click than you should be.

For example – if you increase your average CPC (cost per click) from $0.20 to $0.30 you will increase your revenue by 33%. There are two ways of doing this on your already existing website and the best tool for doing the research is adsense1020.blogspot.com

1. Better target your existing webpages:

Which words are you using in your Title Tag, Meta Tags, H1 - H3 Header Tags and inside the body of your content? Google's content matching technology generates ads related to the meaning of the words on your page. If the high paying keywords for that page topic aren't in those 4 hotspots I just listed the quality (relevancy) and CPC of your ads will be lower than if they were. Google wants to match their advertiser ads to the pages which are going to offer the greatest return otherwise their whole system collapses.

This means that you want to make sure the high paying keywords are included in your hot spots. If I use UnderstandingAdsense.com as an example I logged into Keyword Country with the intention of finding the highest paying keywords for the Adsense market. I typed in Adsense and was presented with a list. "Making Money With Adsense" has the highest average CPC of $0.73 so when I've finished building the site I will optimize the home page and several other pages for that keyword so as to generate the most relevant and high paying ads possible. I will do this by including that keyword phrase (and related ones like "make money with Adsense") into the four places listed above.

2. Add additional content to your website which targets related high paying keywords:

The most important word here is related. Don’t add content pages about Viagra to your website which is themed around motorcycles just because the average CPC for Viagra is very high. Instead do one of these two things:

1. Type your primary keyword, in this example, "motorcycle" into Keyword Country, wait for the results to appear and then click on CPC. This will arrange all the related keywords by their CPC value bringing the most profitable to the top. I did this and found that -

“Motorcycle Insurance In Michigan” has an average CPC of $10.25
“Motorcycle Insurance” has an average CPC of $4.28
“Motorcycle Loan” has an average CPC of $3.34

These are very high average CPCs for which you could develop new content. These content pages would generate higher cost per click Adsense ads from your visitors.

2. Your second option is to type in keywords which are related to your principal topic. Continuing with the motorcycle theme you could type in Harley-Davidson a popular manufacturer of motorcycles. The results show that “Harley Davidson Boots” has an average CPC of $0.84. You could build a page today pre-selling Harley Davidson Boots and generate a nice Adsense stream from that page. Another extension would be the keyword “chopper”, a popular type of motorcycle enhanced by the big shows of the last few years. On Keyword Country a search for chopper brings up related keywords like West Coast Choppers, a famous chopper builder which has an average CPC of $0.95 – again a page or several pages around this topic would be a nice addition to a motorcycle based website.

Whatever your topic, virtually every website can incorporate new high paying content. So before you try and build a website in a new niche check that the website(s) that you’ve already put the groundwork into (link building and seo) can’t be better optimized for higher paying keywords and / or have additional high adsense paying content added to it. There will be at least five new pages of content that you could add to your existing website today that would create higher paying average clicks than what you are already generating.

The large majority of Adsense Publishers are still not taking advantage of these tools and are still working in the dark so to speak - unsystematically adding content, optimizing their pages and building new niche websites with no fore-knowledge of the value of a particular topic nor its potential profitability. I guarantee that if you test Keyword County for just a day you won’t want to unsubscribe - it makes our job of making money with Adsense that much easier.

They also have a free “sneak peak” tool whereby you enter your target keywords and it will give you the most high paying keywords related to that phrase. If you follow this link and click on the “try now” button in the top right you can test the three different parts of the application yourself.

An experimental approach

One of our responsibilities on the AdSense engineering team is to ensure that you always receive the most relevant and valuable ads on your site. It's exciting because we deal with the entire ad targeting process from analyzing your site's content to selecting ads and determining how to best display the ads on your page. I just celebrated my 2-year AdSense anniversary last week, and it's never ceased to be a fascinating and challenging project.

Prior to launch, any innovation in AdSense goes through three phases: analysis, implementation, and experimentation. When evaluating a new idea that might improve ad targeting, we first analyze all of our existing data. AdSense generates an amazing amount of data every day -- a record of every ad impression and click occurring on every web publisher in our network -- so identifying interesting trends is a never-ending challenge, from determining what ads perform best to identifying the most common causes of public service ads in German.

Once we believe a new idea is ready for testing, we have to implement the idea in our ad serving code using the very powerful development tools Google has provided for us. Naturally, all code designed to serve ads to our customers must pass a rigorous review and testing process before release to ensure that we continue to offer uninterrupted service. During the testing process, we typically run an experiment on a small percentage of traffic for anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. We select the experiment traffic randomly so it is as representative as possible of overall traffic; no individual site should ever see more than a small percentage of its traffic involved in an experiment. Because most targeting experiments involve adjustments to the ad-selection algorithms, they are rarely noticed by anyone outside Google. However, we occasionally run experiments that affect the format or display of ads as this is the only way we can verify whether a potential change will provide an overall benefit to publishers, advertisers, and users.

Throughout an experiment, we track a large number of metrics including clickthrough rate and cost per click, and compare this data to regular traffic collected during the same time period. This prevents external factors unrelated to the experiment -- for instance, a large new advertiser or publisher entering the system, or time considerations such as holidays, weekends, and seasons -- from significantly skewing the results.

After an experiment is complete, we consider the effects on publishers, advertisers and end users; we only release new features we believe will provide an overall benefit. Of course, once a feature is launched, we continue tracking the same metrics to make sure everything is behaving as expected, while starting to work on the next innovations in AdSense targeting.

Forget about Adsense

If you want to significantly increase your current Adsense earnings the first thing you need to do is forget about Adsense. Sounds strange doesn’t it, but if there is such a thing as a secret to making money with Adsense, it is that it has nothing to do with Adsense.

All Adsense is is a way of monetizing your website traffic. Therefore to make more money from Adsense you need a website and you need more traffic. No traffic, no Adsense clicks. Lots of traffic, lots of Adsense clicks. That’s the bottom line. You can get more traffic in two ways:

1. By bringing more to your existing website(s), or
2. By building a new website and bringing traffic to that.

Almost every forum post, blog entry and article that discusses Adsense and how to make money with it wrongly focuses on optimizing your website for your Adsense ads. Where should I place them, what colours should I use, how many units should I include on a page, should I use Adlinks, what format produces the highest click through rate – all of these questions belong to trying to increase responsiveness from your traffic to your Adsense ads. The prerequisite is traffic - if you’ve only got a few visitors coming to your website a day, even a 100% click through rate will only generate a dollar.

Now at this point I’d like to defend myself - the point of this lesson is not to devalue the importance of optimization. I’ve taken sites in the past from $5 to $50 a day without increasing their traffic, through things like re-structuring and correct format and color choices, but the trick with optimization is to know its place and to focus on it at the right time. Don’t get caught optimizing a website that has not been fully developed. The forums are full of these people puzzling over how they can reach $100 a day with Adsense when they’ve not broken down what is actually necessary to generate that amount of money.

From my experiences with Adsense, you’ll make good money with it by integrating it into “successful websites”. My example above was already receiving close to 1,000 visitors every day. A couple of weeks spent optimizing and monitoring resulted in a 10 fold increase in income but that site was already “successful” so to speak. It had good placements in the search engines, a strong supporting link structure and a growing repeat user rate – it was the right time to optimize.

But a successful website isn’t necessarily one that gets thousands of visitors a day, it’s one that fulfils the purpose it was originally established for. For example, if you’ve built a website about choosing a baby stroller you want people who are coming online to find out about baby strollers to find it and use it, if you’ve built one about making money with Adsense you’re looking for those people who want to make more money with Adsense ;)

A site is successful when it’s connecting with a significant proportion of its’ intended market or users. Once you’ve made this connection, monetizing your traffic with Adsense is very easy and improving your visitors interactivity with your ads (which is the same as saying your click through rate) becomes a legitimate focus. There are hundreds of different things you can do to increase your CTR and I’ll cover many of them in future lessons. Just make sure you’ve done the groundwork and have got targeted traffic coming to your website first.

How to Find a Profitable Adsense

The profitability of an Adsense niche is primarily based on the amount that Adwords advertisers are spending to compete in that niche.

Remember that an Adsense ad is only an Adwords ad that is appearing on your site and not Google. The amount that an ad generates per click is therefore directly related to the amount that Adwords advertisers are paying per click. Bottom line - if they are paying more we earn more.

So how can you find out which niches (and which keywords inside those niches) advertisers are spending more money on?

I use two different methods:

Keyword Research With Keyword Country

As you will have probably have started to gather I cannot lay enough praise on this tool. In fact I struggle to understand how I researched, chose and targeted niche sites before I got hold of it...it's that good. Aswell as being able to search by category or keyword you can also search by price range. For example, you can decide to find keywords that have an average cpc of say between $18 and $20. If you enter this price range it will return a list of keywords which fall inside that parameter - in this case - 3957 different keyword phrases.

The top 5 rated keywords in this cpc range were: "credit card", "free credit report", "mortgage rates", "consolidate debt" and "website hosting". All you need to do is go down the list work out which ones would be suitable for an Adsense monetized information site, extend your keyword research by taking your chosen phrase and entering it into the search box, build the content, integrate the Adsense and promote your new website.

Make ad changes without replacing code

We're very excited to let you know about an upcoming feature that lets you easily manage your ad units from within your AdSense account. It isn't live yet, but here's a sneak peek so you'll know what to expect in the coming weeks. (We know many of you have been eagerly anticipating its arrival.)

This new ad management feature means that your ad unit settings (such as colors and channels) for new AdSense for content ad units will be saved in your AdSense account every time you generate ad code. Then, if you'd like to change any of these settings in the future, all you do is make the update within your account -- you'll no longer need to manually replace the ad code on all of your pages. For instance, you can quickly change the borders of all your 300x250 medium rectangles from red to blue with just a few mouse clicks. Fancy! We hope that this new feature will help you save time and will simplify the process of optimizing your ad units.

As we noted above, please keep in mind that the ad management feature isn't yet available in any publisher accounts. We'll be rolling it out in phases in the next few weeks, and we'll follow up with another post at that time to help you better understand how to use the feature. When you see the "Manage Ads" page appear under your AdSense Setup tab, you'll know the feature is available for you to use. Here's what it will look like:





Stay tuned to read more about this new feature!