All AdSense publishers have to deal with Google’s latest change to the TOS. We now have to have a privacy policy on all websites with AdSense. JenSense, as always, has a good review of the requirements. She’s also going to post a privacy policy that meets the new requirements as soon as she can.
Fortunately for me, most of my sites already have privacy policies. It’s pretty easy to include one as one of many default pages when creating a site. But I am having to go through and drop in my usual policy on those sites I hadn’t bothered with.

And of course I will have to check and see if it meets the basic terms. In my basic policy (the one used on this exact site, in fact), I do mention Google as a possible source for ads, although I’ve been using Yahoo here. It also talks a little bit about cookies. I’m just not sure it’s enough, since Google wants something said about web beacons, which is a factor I’d never considered before.

Of course, if you haven’t used a privacy policy on your sites before, and you have a number of them, this could be a real headache. It’s not just adding it, it’s linking it to the rest of the site. If you use includes or a CMS, this can be pretty easy… but a bit of a pain if you don’t.

I have things most of the way taken care of already, since only some of my sites need this. Once I know exactly how I ought to be phrasing things, no doubt I’ll change it a little to be more precisely matched to the new policy.

The absolute fastest way to get traffic has to be pay per click. It’s also one of the financially riskiest. You can learn a lot about your website’s ability to convert customers from using pay per click.

At least, if you do it right.

Mistakes Are Easy to Make

Just going through Google’s pay per click ads you will often seen mistakes being made. Some people worry too little about relevance. Google’s Quality Score does help to limit that these days. Others don’t know how to use negative keywords to their advantage.

But one of the worst mistakes you can make is to have a product, bid on the relevant terms, with a well-written ad, and not send visitors straight to that page. Sure your home page may be relevant enough, but when someone is searching for a particular item on a search engine, they don’t want to have to search all over again on your site.

Google’s blog can be very helpful when it comes to determining why a page gets a low quality score. While some of what Google wants can make it harder to design your landing pages, doing your best to adhere to their guidelines helps you to pay less for the traffic they do send.

But the absolute worst mistake you can make is to fail to test.

You should be testing your landing page. Your ads. The keywords and phrases you’re bidding on. Everything.

Sometimes a very small change makes a big difference. Even singular vs. plural in your ad text can make a difference.

Once you get your ads optimized, you still can’t relax. You should still test things regularly. Ads can suffer from lower conversions completely out of the blue.

What About My Site?

Your site should be tested for ease of use and good copywriting. An easy to use shopping cart won’t get you much of anywhere if your copy doesn’t encourage people to buy. But a difficult shopping cart means people will abandon their carts out of sheer frustration, despite otherwise being sold on the product.

A lot of sites make the mistake of requiring visitors to make an account in order to place an order. This is a big mistake. You’ll annoy people who don’t want to make an account right away, especially if you require it to even put something in the cart. When an order is placed you”ll be getting enough information that an account can be set up just in the process of ordering, not as a separate step. That’s the right time for it.

Some sites even make it hard to figure out how to order. Add to carts or buy now links can be hard to see sometimes. This is really poor planning on the webmaster’s part.

If you want to read some great tips on testing your site for conversions, including things like the placement of the add to cart button, head over to Grokdotcom. Some of it will be very difficult for beginning webmasters, but it’s great food for thought.

Who to Use and What to Pay?

There are plenty of pay per click options out there. Google’s AdWords is of course the best known, and Yahoo! Sponsored Search is also well known, but there are less known companies too.

It’s best to start simple. You don’t want to be managing several different accounts until you know what you’re doing and have an idea as to what works. However, sometimes slightly different landing pages work better for different pay per click engines, and you may have to take that into consideration.

AdWords has the advantage of being well known, but that also means it can get more expensive more quickly. But the traffic is excellent. I would strongly recommend opting out of the content network at the start, however. Some people do very well with it, but until you know how well you’re converting, the content network is best left alone. It can get expensive fast.

There can be good and bad about the less known engines, such as Enhance Interactive or MIVA. The cost per click is generally lower, but some feel that the quality of traffic is much less. These are things you need to test carefully, no matter which pay per click engine you use.

How much to pay will depend on two factors: what it takes to get your ad seen, and what you can afford to pay.

Some areas are very competitive, and if you aren’t bidding on obscure keywords (a good practice in just about any case!), you may have to pay a lot for traffic. If you aren’t making enough money from the traffic you’re buying from pay per click, you need to cut your price or improve the sales you’re getting from the ad.

If you’re earning $10 per sale, for example, you need to do better than 1 sale per 100 clicks if you’re paying a mere $0.10 per click. That’s not a lot for many keywords.

The beauty of pay per click is that if you’re good at it you can get an exceptional return on your investment. Only trouble is that you can just as easily wipe out your budget.

Starting a Home Business Series:

Get Your Home Business Going in the New Year
Brainstorming Your Home Business Ideas
How I Research a Market for a Niche
How Do You Get a Website Going?
How Much Does an Online Business Really Cost?
How Complex Does a Website Need to Be?
How to Set Up a Wordpress Blog
These Are a Few of My Favorite Themes
Can Article Marketing Work for You?
It Sounds Like a Lot of Work - Is It Really That Hard?
Building Your List
Getting Social with Your Blog
Is Your Site Ready for Pay Per Click? (current page)
Article Marketing Statistics
Putting the Pieces Together

There’s a change being made to AdSense units, dealing with an issue I hadn’t ever considered. They’ve shrunk the clickable area to just the link text and domain name, rather than the entire ad block. I hadn’t particularly noticed that the entire block could be clicked, but I can see wher that would be a problem.

I first read about this in a post over at Problogger, but it’s also up at Marketing Pilgrim, JenSense and many other websites.

Many people are concerned about the decrease in income for the publishers, but I think it is more important to consider that this move may well make advertisers more satisfied with AdSense, since accidental clicks will be less likely.

I do pretty well with AdSense on some of my sites, and so I will be watching this with quite a bit of interest. My AdSense numbers today look normal. The clickthrough rate is no lower than usual, so I don’t know if this hasn’t been rolled out on my sites or just is not having an impact.

In terms of quality, I have to call this a good move. It means ad units will be clickable where people expect them to be clickable; that is, at the actual links.

Technorati Tags: adsense

If you read a lot on webmaster forums you will probably regularly see people asking which PPC program is the best to use as either an advertiser or a publisher. There are a lot of possible answers, depending on the niche.

Bidvertiser is one that I’ve seen come up pretty regularly. Right now they even have a pretty good deal where you can put a button on your site offering $20 in free clicks. If people sign up, you get a referral fee.

They pay through PayPal and I’ve seen a good number of positive things written about them. While they aren’t one of the top companies, they don’t appear to be a bad option at all. Click Here to Signup as a BidVertiser Referral!

Here’s a bit more information:

BidVertiser is used by tens of thousands of bloggers to make money from their blogs by showing the BidVertiser ppc ads. Anyone can join BidVertiser either as a publisher or an advertiser, but we would like to share a new opportunity that not everyone is aware of:

BidVertiser now opens the the opportunity for bloggers to join as a referral, and as a unique benefit - a $20 coupon of free clicks is included with every referral account! This coupon can be shared and passed on to anyone - by placing a referral button on the blog, by adding the coupon link to a newsletter or even to an RSS feed

Once you signup as a referral, you get your unique referral link which will give $20 in free clicks to anyone that clicks it, adding great value to your blog as well as being a great benefit to your readers. Referral earnings are tracked online in the referral control panel and payments are made monthly, via PayPal or check, with a minimum of only $10.

If you choose to also activate your publisher account, you will also be able to get access to a new set of referral links that will both give your readers $20 in free clicks and will enable them to advertise directly on your blog via BidVertiser, increasing your earnings even more!

I read on the pepperjam blog that Google now has a Bid Management Technology available in beta for selected publishers. I have an AdWords account which I use rather lightly, so of course I went to take a look, just on the off chance I, a very minor advertiser, would be included.

I do see Campaign Optimization, listed under Tools. No sign of the Conversion Optimizer so far. I go to the New Features section. I can see it there, and the Help explains that in order to be eligible for Conversion Optimizer, you need to have AdWords conversion tracking enabled and have at least 300 conversions in the past 30 days. This is by campaign, not by account.

And of course, that explains it. I’ve never used their conversion tracking.

This is a pretty interesting feature, however, for those who want to use it. You do have to be aware that Google says it is incompatible with the following:

• Position preference
• Budget Optimizer
• Site targeting
• Advanced ad scheduling
• Preferred cost bidding

Which of course you may or may not already be using. But it seems to me that if you wanted to do some of these things it wouldn’t be too hard to create separate campaigns for those ads which must have those features, while you test out the conversion optimizer.

There are of course very interesting forum discussions on this already.

Technorati Tags: bid management, google, conversion optimizer, conversion optimization

Google’s Landing Page Quality Score has a huge impact on PPC costs. If you don’t have a good quality score, you pay more per click. It can be pretty painful.

But today the Google AdWords blog has a post on the topic. It goes into the types of landing pages that will tend to get low quality scores. They can even refuse to run ads for some sites. The pages that will generally get low scores include (from the blog):

• Data collection sites that offer free gifts, subscription services etc., in order to collect private information
• Arbitrage sites that are designed for the sole purpose of showing ads
• Malware sites that knowingly or unknowingly install software on a visitor’s computer

Seems pretty reasonable to me. They also include”get rich quick” and similar sites. Seems to me I still see plenty.

I know a lot of people find Google’s standards pretty tough. It’s not always the easiest advertising to do, especially if Google declares that your page that was converting well for you “low quality”. But that’s all a part of the game.

Technorati Tags: adwords, ppc, quality score, landing page

I read this over on the JenSense blog. This just sounds really great for better blending when a border makes sense.

You can now select the old squared corners, slightly rounded or very rounded corners. It looks great for being able to really coordinate your AdSense with the overall appearance of your website.

I can’t help but wish they’d come up with this sooner. Yes, it’s a minor change in a lot of ways, but it’s also a flat out really great change. Now you don’t have to just blend the entire unit when you use rounded corners on your site.

Technorati Tags: adsense rounded corners

Oh, those silly, silly people at Google! Updating their policies on a Wednesday rather than a Thursday! What is this world coming to?

Hey, they started it.

The policy changes are pretty simple, although it sounds like bad news for poor quality MFA sites. Google now requires AdSense pages to conform to the same quality guidelines as AdWords landing pages do. They pretty much want substantial and relevant content, things that will improve the user experience.

But they’ve also now decided that you can place up to 3 link units on a page. Honestly, I’ve never been sure why they limited those to 1 before. The link units are great when you need something smaller than any of the ad blocks.

Technorati Tags: google adsense policy changes