Apr 19

How Google Analytics can make you more money

Hello all again. I thought today I would write about how one can use Google Analytics to make more money with your advertising.

If you don,t know by now, Analytics is a free traffic tracking service from Google. It gives you loads of information on where you traffic is coming from, and where it is going. But, it is the best tool for increasing advertising revenue I have ever seen.

But, before we get into that you must learn two terms. The first being bounce rate. The Bounce Rate for a single page is the number of visitors who enter the site at a page and leave within the specified timeout period without viewing another page, divided by the total number of visitors who entered the site at that page. In contrast, the Bounce Rate for a website is the number of web site visitors who visit only a single page of a website per session divided by the total number of website visits. Basically it tells you which pages on your site keep your traffic flowing. The lower the bounce rate, the better the page is at keeping people’s interest in your site.

The second term which I am sure everyone knows is Unique Visits. A Unique Visit presents a single, unique viewer who has visited a web site within a specified time period. Now that you know what they are, lets explain how they can help you make more money.

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Posted by:Blake2181 in google, webmaster tips | 4 Comments » | Read More

Apr 15

How much money is Apple earning from Google?

John Gruber points out something that I must have seen a zillion times and never noticed: The deep integration of Google Search with the Mac OS X. He adds that this contextual menu command and ?the search is performed in Safari, regardless whether it?s your preferred browser or not.? Who knew? I wonder how big that ?referral revenue? check for Apple is every month?

To put it unscientifically: Apple gets a big fat whopper of a check. Back in June 2007, Gruber had estimated that Apple was bringing in $25 million a year mostly from the search box in the Safari browser. Nine months later, Apple has been on a tear, selling more computers than ever before and has seen an uptick in its market share. In addition, many millions of iPhones have been sold. Mobile Safari Browser generates ton of search traffic, not to mention boosting the map usage. This tight integration between Apple and Google must result in a big exchange of dollars.

What is your best guess? Scientific answers are preferred but I will settle for unscientific best guesse.

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Posted by:David in google | No Comments » | Read More

Apr 06

Is Google the Internet? A Lesson In User Experience & SEO

Many people beleive that Google is the only thing that matters on the internet. They design their sites with only Google in mind and obtaining that top position for a highly searched keyword/phrase. While these nut jobs are running around spending countless hours doing this, they’re over looking a very important part of any community or website for that matter. User Experience.

Google is NOT the internet, it isn’t your websites success or failure it isn’t even a measure of your success or failure. Google is a tool, one that you should use, but use in moderation and wisely. Do not make your site for Google, make your site for Users! And I’ll even tell you why!

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Mar 30

Get targeted advertisements delivered to your forum

When any forum launches and they have a goal to use advertising programs to generate some revenue to either, A. Cover the server costs, or B. Make them rich. The problem most forums have is that the content is all user generated, this is bad because users aren’t aware of how to optimize their posts to make you money and when they create their posts your adsense targeting starts to become diluted and you’ll notice sometimes you won’t have ads that represent what the thread is about. Which will lead to less visitors clicking thru the ads and adsense delivering some weird advertisements.

The first tip we bring you is section targeting, this only applies to adsense but since its one of the main programs forum webmasters use we’ll be using it for our examples. Section targeting allows you to suggest sections of your text and HTML content that you’d like us to emphasize or downplay when matching ads to your site’s content. By providing us with your suggestions, you can assist us in improving your ad targeting. To implement section targeting, you’ll need to add a set of special HTML comment tags to your code. These tags will mark the beginning and end of whichever section(s) you’d like to emphasize or de-emphasize for ad targeting. Since most forums content is user generated posts we’ll be making a template modification to either postbit or postbit_legacy template depending on which you use. We assume you know how to edit a template, so find these templates in your style manager under ‘Postbit Templates’.

<!-- message --><div id="post_message_$post[postid]“>$post[message]</div>
<!? / message ?>

Now why do we want to add this line: This tells the adsense spider, Hey here comes some important content, target my advertisement to this stuff please! Then after the we want to tell the spider, We’re all out of important content here, you don’t have to go home, but you’ll have to find some more else where! Your final product should look something similar to this.

<!-- google_ad_section_start --><!-- message -->

<div id="post_message_$post[postid]“>$post[message]</div>

<!– / message –>
<!? google_ad_section_end ?>

You should now receive slightly more targeted advertisements when viewing threads. If you are using software such as vBSEO there is an option to automatically have these comments inserted to your page. If you are using their relevant replacement feature, we also recommend adding the targeted section code around that as well. To take full advantage of this method, you’ll need to include a lot of information inside these tags on each page. Any place that you’ve got good content you should target with this method, not simply the post information for the pages.

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Apr 08

What would Google do if they were evil

What could Google do if they were evil? Note that the following is only hypothetical:

Google could favor its own products and websites

Google could prefer websites from its own services in the search results: websites that run Google ads, websites that use Google’s payment service, Blogger sites, Google Base, etc.

All websites that pay Google in some way could be preferred in the search results while others are downranked.

Google could punish websites at discretion

If Google doesn’t like your website or if someone tells Google that you’re a bad boy then Google can ban your website from the search results without any reason given.

You can find a lot of articles on the web that discuss the problem that Google removed web sites from the index. The main problem with these removals is that Google usually doesn’t explain why a web site has been removed so that webmasters often are complete and utterly at Google’s mercy.

Google could use your data against you

Most Google products now use a single account. That means that Google knows a lot about you if you use their services: your address, your credit card number, the web pages that you visit, the web sites that you own, how much you earn with your web site (if you use Google’s analytics product), etc.

Google could sell this information to other companies, the government or any other person that pays for it. If one of your web sites causes a problem with Google, they could ban all of your sites. There’s a lot that Google could do with the information they have about you.

Google could force webmasters to advertise

Google could decide that web sites that advertise on Google get better rankings in the search results. They could also decide that companies with big wallets don’t get high rankings so that they have to advertise more.

Companies that use Google’s analytics software to track their sales tell Google how much they earn. That allows Google to raise the advertising costs based on the revenue of the company.

Discuss this further @ vBulletinSetup Forums

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Posted by:Brandon in google | No Comments » | Read More

Apr 01

Just read about Google’s new PPA advertising product

Google is testing a new advertising system that allows businesses to advertise on a cost per action basis. You can find Google’s own announcement here.

How does Google’s new product work?

Until now, Google has primarily sold pay-per-click (PPC) ads, so-called AdWords ads: advertisers pay when someone on Google or a Google partner site clicks on the ad.
Google AdWords has one big advantage and one big disadvantage: You only pay for clicks of potential customers, but you risk paying a lot of money for nothing because of click fraud.
There has been a lot of debate around click fraud because Google has a short term financial incentive to promote it. Google’s new advertising product is “pay per action” (PPA). You don’t pay per click anymore but you pay when a customer takes further action, such as requesting a catalog, signing up for a newsletter or buying a product.
PPA advertising is meant to mitigate the risks of click fraud.

Read more about it in the forums

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Posted by:Brandon in google | No Comments » | Read More