What is a good CTR for Google Adsense?

I have been using Google Adsense for some time now and I find my CTR has improved these days. I have no much gain in traffic but the income from Google Adsense has gone up which means that the CTR or the click through rate of my Google Adsense has improved very much. I was googling around to find out what is a  good CTR for Google Adsense. Mine is around 5% and earlier it was just less than 1%.

I found a post at Darren’s Blog which says for blogs its around 2 to 5% which keeps me happy that my ads are well blended and placed well. I was just doing some calculations about my Adsense revenue and found that I can earn handsome if I have good traffic. If I have a traffic of about 1million pageviews a day, I can earn about 2,000 $ a day, which is a good revenue for a blog. I know that I cannot do this for 1 year atleast, but I find my traffic growing good and surely I can get to that spot.

All I need is to create good content and increase the number of posts on my blog.

If you do not use Google Adsense, just try it, its the best source of ads and revenue for your blog. Google adsense inventory never run outs of ads for any of your blog pages and it shows relevant ads which increases the CTR and finally your revenue from the ads.

Google Adsense Vs Private sales of Ads

Revenue generation from your blog will be your ultimate aim if you are running a blog for money. I have discussed about earning through blogging in my previous posts and different sources of revenue for your blog. How much can you earn from a blog is a question which had different answer for different bloggers depending upon the traffic of the blog and kind of traffic you have.

Google Adsense is the most widely source of advertising tool by most of blogger. But when they start getting sufficient revenue from private sales of ads, they avoid Google Adsense for many reasons. I have noticed that blogger like Darren Rowse, John Chow do not use Google Adsense these days. They started their earning from Google Adsense but now they get very high income from their private sales of Ads and almost all the ad slots are over booked.

Which one should you choose?

I got an invitation for Google Ad manager recently and was just trying to do the settings. I have not yet started using it as I really do not need it. It is has good features, but its not helping me much. I use Google Adsense more on this blog not because I earn more from Google Adsense, but I do not have any private advertiser yet who pays me more than Google Adsense.

Bloggers like Amit Agrawal earns more than US$ 1000 from Google Adsense, so why should we think that earning potential in Google Adsense is less, but Amit’s blog has millions of page views every month, so we cannot expect a big revenue from Google Adsense. Another problem that can happen to your advertising revenue is if your Google Adsense account is banned, what will be your source of revenue if you solely depend on Google Adsense.

My Strategy

I use Google Adsense, and I am trying to get some private advertisers, not looking into the rates much for now. I can offer good discounted price and I have good number or Feed readers now. As my blog statistics improves, I may get good advertisers and good revenue from private sales of Ads.

Other possible revenue is from Affiliate programs and other advertising sites like CJ, Amazon, etc, but all needs conversion and you may not earn anything in the beginning. I also offer paid reviews complying with the Google Webmaster guidelines

So to conclude, Google Adsense can play an important role in your blog’s revenue, stick to it and as your blog traffic grows, you can try for private sales of ads

Get some traffic from Entrecard

Sorry that I could not do any posts last three days as I got held up with my project work. I had signed up for an Entrecard account which is something interesting and a source of traffic.

Entrecard is getting popular and I find more and more bloggers having this on their blog.

Concept - The concept is interesting, just sign-up for a free account and upload your card, which is a simple 125 x 125 px image or you can create one from the website itself. Entrecard is something like your internet business card. You can place your card on other blogs using your Entrecard point.

This program seems to be interesting and there are options to encash your Entrecard points. I have just started using it so I am not in a position to tell more about it now. I will surely post my Entrecard experience soon

Tyroo, Indian Pay per click program

Just thought of writing a small post on Tyroo, which is another pay per click program. Its totally an Indian site and dedicated to Indian websites. I see most of the advertisers are Indian websites and companies. I used this program for few days and just removed it, but the earnings are good. I removed it only because, I was happy with working with Google Adsense. Tyroo shows ads for the category that you select. Its a good one as the earnings are good. Payments are done in Indian rupees and by cheque.

You can try this and check how it works for you.

Ad Review Feature in your Google Adsense

Google adsense has a new feature called the Ad Review Centre, where you can block or allow Placement targeted Ads. To access this feature, login to your Google adsense account and go to Adsense Set up Tab and then to the Ad Review Centre and enable this feature. When an advertiser goes for Placement targeted campaign then these ads will be shown on your web page and you can block these ads.

Its not advised to block these ads as it has negative impact on your earnings. If you block these ads then you need to provide the reason for that and this feedback will be provided to the advertiser by Google.

Blocking ad groups may have a negative revenue impact because ads that are blocked won’t compete in the auction on your site, and therefore won’t drive up potential earnings for that ad space. Also, advertisers whose ads you block may choose not to target your site again in the future.

In addition, waiting to review ads by choosing the “manually review” setting may decrease your revenue. This is because ads that are awaiting review won’t participate in the auction either. Please consider the potential revenue impact before choosing manual review instead of auto-allow.

Tools for managing Ads for your blog

Once you have your blog with decent traffic, its time for your start selling private ads. To manage and sell private ads, you need keep track of renewals, uploading the ad images, keeping track of the performance of the ads. Recently Google has launched Google Ad Manager by Invitation .

If you are spending time managing these advertising work and you do not have any sales or marketing department, then you will be losing our time and will not have sufficient time in writing posts for you blog. So sort out this issue you need to set up an automated procedure to manage your advertisements.

In fact I started of with Openads, now know as OpenX to manage my ads for all the websites and blogs (I have about 12). OpenX is good when you have good number of slots and publishers. You can create account for publishers and advertisers and manage things well. But in case you just have one or two blog, then there is no point in going for an Ad server like OpenX.

I came across an excellent tool for wordpress blog which can manage your advertising slots for your blog. You can define your ad slots, fix the prices, decide to opt for adding the rel=nofollow tag, or give the option for the advertiser to buy an advertisement without the rel=nofollow tag and charge the advertiser more if he opts for this option. You have the option for providing subscription for the sale. Paypal is used as the payment processor, which has the option of subscription and a single time payment. Other very useful option is you can use this for custom sales like digital download, Paid review, Links etc. You have everything that you need to monetize your blog. The tool is called Oiopublisher, which is costing just $37 and you can use it for any number of domains. Just grab this out and start monetizing your blog

Upload your videos and get paid at Revver

Revver is a video uploading site like youtube where you can upload video images and you get paid for the ads displayed on your video. Youtube does not share any earnings, that’s not fair when we look into it. I just started yesterday with two videos and my earning started off.

How does this work

When we upload a video, some Ads from Google Adsense is shown and we get 50% of the earnings from the ads. We do not need to bother about the page creation or anything, its all done by Revver. You can view your earnings and statistics of the videos that you have uploaded

Monthly payments are done through paypal and the minimum payout is $20. If you are using video posts, you can go for this. The maximum size of video that you can upload is 100mb. It takes some time for processing and the video is approved before it becomes online. You should not upload any copyrighted videos. I have many videos which I had taken during my travels. I am in a process of uploading it all.

Other feature includes, playlists, custom players and there are Revver plugins for Wordpress

Try it, just to Revver and sign-up for an account for free and start uploading your videos