I signed up with AdSense in June 2003, as soon as it became available,
serving AdSense off just a few of the pages on my early websites.
By the end of my first day with AdSense, I'd delivered several thousand
AdSense impressions and earned the massive sum of… $3.00. I didn’t
exactly burn down the house.
I didn’t see a great deal of potential based on that figure, but I figured it
couldn’t hurt to place the AdSense code on more pages. Over the next couple
of months, I increased my impressions 25-fold.
But my earnings didn’t go up 25-fold. The ads were on my site and people
were seeing them, but no one was clicking them. And because of the way
that Google was paying for the ads — on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis rather
than the old cost-per-mille basis that paid a set amount for every thousand
impressions whether users clicked them or not — those ads weren’t making
money. My click-through ratios were so bad I needed thousands of visitors to
net just $30 per day.
So I took the code off.
That was a big mistake.
In April 2004, ten months after signing up for AdSense, I attended an
Internet conference. There were about two dozen entrepreneurs there, all
looking for ways to make money online. As I was sitting in the conferenceroom, the person next to me had his laptop open and was looking at his
AdSense report.
I could see he was making between $200 and $300 a day — more than ten
times what I’d made on one of my best days!
It was one of those eureka moments, one of those times when you wonder
how you could have missed something so obvious and so good.
I pulled out my own laptop and right there in that conference room I did
what I should have done at the beginning. I started playing with my AdSense
code.
I looked again at the different ad unit sizes. I tried out different color
schemes. And I adjusted where the ads appeared on the page. That day, my
AdSense income rocketed to $80, about four times a typical day’s earnings
that I had been making from AdSense. All of those impressions I’d been
generating were starting to convert into clicks — and those clicks were
bringing me real money.
That was when I realized that there really was something to AdSense, that
this system really did have the ability to change the Internet.
It could let publishers write about whatever they want, give their content
away for free, and still make enough money from advertising to make a very
good living.
The critics were wrong. I’d been wrong. AdSense could work.
So far though, I’d just made a few quick changes to my AdSense units,
based on instinct and curiosity. If I was going to maximize my earnings, I
needed to know which were the best places on the page for which ad
formats, in which colors and on what content. I wanted to understand exactly
how AdSense worked so that I could be sure that my Web pages were always
making all the money they could.
Guesswork is fine when you want to play, but I was trying to build an
Internet business and that meant taking measurements, keeping records and
coming up with strategies that had predictable, repeatable results. I needed
to take an industrial approach to my revenues in the same way that a retail
store tracks sales to know which products are the most popular and which
shelves they need to put them on.
So I kept testing. I kept trying new strategies and I kept notes of everything
that happened. When an idea succeeded, I extended it to all of my other ads.
When it failed, I made a note, and dropped it.
After a few months I was making at least $500 a day from AdSense and
sometimes even $1,000.
And I found that once the ads were optimized, I didn't have to do another
thing. As long as I continued to put up content, the ads — and the revenues
— would take care of themselves.
I wasn’t the only one doing this though. Internet forums at the time were
filled with people swapping ideas about what they had found worked for them
while using AdSense. Whenever someone came up with an optimization
technique that worked, they’d put it on a forum. Whenever someone asked
how they could increase their earnings, their question would pick up a long
list of answers.
I was sharing my findings too but the forums weren’t particularly userfriendly.
If you were already using AdSense, the Internet marketing forums
could help with troubleshooting and provide ideas to squeeze more money
out of a site. But for people starting up, it was a horrible experience. The
forums weren’t guides, and they weren’t meant to be.
A lot of the people I knew, though, needed information that was easier to
use. They wanted to know what AdSense was and how it worked.
That was why the first edition of this book was such a success. Publishers
were beginning to realize that AdSense could bring their sites money. It
could do everything that the Web had promised in terms of freedom,
independence, enjoyment and revenues, too.
In fact, the traditionally published edition of AdSense Secrets was a book
titled The AdSense Code. The book went on to become a New York Times
Best-Seller in the business category. That shows that hunger to learn hasn’t
changed.
If anything, it’s grown as increasing numbers of people have come to
understand what AdSense is, what it can do and what it can do for them.
