AdWords for keywords

Hopefully you've been following my ongoing series of Google AdSense Tips in your quest for better earnings with AdSense. This tip is for those who followed my advice in AdSense Tip #10: Join the AdWords program.

If you're not an AdWords customer, you can't do this.
AdWords customers have access to a number of useful tools, including the following:

Keyword Tool to build keyword lists and do keyword comparisons
Traffic Estimator to see how well certain keywords perform
Now while these tools are designed for advertisers to use, they're also extremely useful for us publishers. Particularly in finding the right keyword combinations for attracting more visitors (and ideally more clicks) to our site.

Here's what you do, it's all very simple. First, log in to your AdWords account. Then click on the Tools link in the Campaign Management tag:
Next, click on Keyword Tool:

Now type in the main keyword/keyphrase for your site and press the Get More Keywords button:

Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the Additional keywords to consider link:
Scroll back to the top and select Cost and ad position estimates in the Show columns drop-down list:

You won't see any estimates until you enter a value in the Calculate Estimates using Max CPC field. Use the maximum value for the currency you're working with, which in my case is CA$120 (approximately US$100), and press Recalculate:

Now you'll see estimated average cost-per-click values for each of the keywords in the list. Click twice on the Estimated Avg. CPC link to sort the list in descending order (highest to lowest value):

And presto!, you have a list of potential keywords showing what it would cost you on average to get top billing for your ad:

AdSense earnings are based on what the publisher pays per click, so this handy tool gives you a good idea of which specific phrases are good ones to target. That said, be aware that the price you see listed here is only the maximum bidding price and that most advertisers will in fact pay less. That and Google's smart pricing algorithms will all conspire to reduce the amount of money you actually earn on a per-click basis. So don't treat the values you see here as the Gospel truth — but they're good for judging the relative worth of different keyword combinations. See my high-paying keywords page for more information.

Once you've looked through your list and identified promising keywords, head back up to the Show columns drop-down and select Keyword popularity to see which keywords are the most searched for and which how popular they are with advertisers. If most of your traffic comes from search engine traffic, you'll use this information to further refine the list of keywords you should target.

As you can see, AdWords is a great way to plumb for keyword information! Now I need to revise myInvisible Fence Guide (or maybe I should be callingit the PetSafe Invisible Fence Guide) to takeadvantage of some of these keyphrases… Well, maybe after the AdSense case study is done…

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Google Adsense Tip

Google AdSense Tips
If you like these tips, be sure to check out my AdSense book, Make Easy Money with Google: Using the AdSense Advertising Program, from Peachpit Press. See memwg.com for details. The book was mentioned in an article about AdSense in USA Today.

As explained in Why are ads displayed on this site?, most of the pages on this site display text ads from Google's AdWords program. To display these ads, a site must join Google's AdSense program. Joining is free, but not all sites are eligible to join. Once you're accepted, however, it's very simple to place the ads on your pages and to start generating revenue for your site. AdSense will serve ads that are generally very relevant to the content of a particular page. Here are some tips based on my experiences so far with the AdSense program.

Tip #1: Don't put ads on empty pages.
When I reworked my site, I built a skeleton set of pages that had no content, just titles and some meta tags. I displayed ads on those pages, however. Although all you see are public service ads at first, the very act of displaying ads on a page causes the AdSense web crawler to quickly fetch that page for analysis. A page with good content will thus begin showing relevant paying ads fairly quickly.

If you don't have any content, then, Google will have to guess as what your page is about. It may guess wrong, and so the ads that it displays may not be relevant. You'll have to wait until Google re-crawls the site for the ads to correct themselves. Here is what Google had to say when I asked them about how often the AdSense crawler updates a site:

Thank you for taking the time to update your site. New ads will start appearing on your site the next time our crawler re-indexes your site. Unfortunately at this time, we are unable to control how often our crawlers index the content on your site.

Crawling is done automatically by our bots. When new pages are added to your website or introduced to the AdSense program, our crawlers will usually get to them within 30 minutes. If you make changes to a page, however, it may take up to 2 or 3 weeks before the changes are reflected in our index. Until we are able to crawl your web pages, you may notice public service ads, for which you will not receive any earnings.

It's better to flesh out the page before you start displaying ads on it.

Tip #2: Don't be afraid to ask questions
If you're wondering about something, don't be afraid to ask Google. So far, they've always responded to my questions within a working day. There are two email addresses to use, depending on the type of question:

Please feel free to email us at adsense-tech@google.com if you have additional technical questions or concerns. For general program or account questions, please email adsense-support@google.com.

Their responses are always very polite, and they appreciate getting problem reports and suggestions.

Tip #3: Avoid non-English characters on English pages
This one is a bug, to be honest. My surname is French, and I prefer to write it out correctly with the accent grave on the first "e". Every page on my site would then include at least two accented letters, because my name shows up twice in the footer. On some pages my name shows up two or three more times.

Normally, this wouldn't be an issue. But on some pages the presence of the accented characters is enough to cause AdSense to display non-relevant ads in French. This happens whether the browser indicates a preference for French or not. When I reported this to Google, this is the answer they gave me:

Hello Eric,
Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention.
We are currently working as quickly as we can to address this problem. As soon as we have more information for you, we will email you again.
We appreciate your patience.
Sincerely,
The Google Team

Until this is resolved, I've decided to strip out all accents except on the pages that are actually in French.

Tip #4: Check your keyword density
Although Google doesn't release exact details as to how they determine the ads to serve on a given page, they do tell us that it's the text content of the page that matters, not the meta tags. Before serving ads on a page, then, you might want to check its keyword density. A good, free tool for doing this is found here: http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html
This lets you fine-tune the page before exposing it to the AdSense crawler.

More AdSense Tips
You can find more AdSense tips in my Make Easy Money with Google blog. Here's the complete list so far:
AdSense Tip #5: Manage your own AdSense account
AdSense Tip #6: Carefully craft blog or forum pages
AdSense Tip #7: When NOT to use CSS
AdSense Tip #8: Access your console from alternate domains
AdSense Tip #9: Use section targeting to exclude stop/poison keywords from your content
AdSense Tip #10: Join the AdWords program
AdSense Tip #11: Plumb AdWords for keywords
Note that Tip #6 needs to be updated to refer to the new section targeting feature.