Tag Archive for 'adsense'

Bing traffic converts well

We’re always told (I’ve said it myself) that when optimising your site for search engines that Google is king and you may as well forget the rest. Now it’s certainly true that Google commands the lion’s share of the search market, but in my opinion it’s also a lot harder to rank well in Google. It’s kind of like choosing a super-competitive keyword versus a long-tail one: you know it’s better to own the competitive keyword, but it’s a lot easier to achieve a good ranking with the long-tail one.

The reason I mention this is I’ve noticed something surprising happening with one of my sites. It’s a niche site, optimised for a handful of related keywords (and when optimising I had Google in mind), and monetised with AdSense. It’s not getting a lot of traffic yet as it’s still quite new and ranked quite low for my target keywords (at the moment the best-ranked is on page 8 in Google), so what Google is sending me is long-tail traffic. The surprising thing is that I’m on page 1 in Bing for most of my keywords, and while the volume of traffic Bing is sending is still only about 25% of what Google is sending, here’s the thing: it’s targetted traffic matching my keywords!

The result is that I’m getting an AdSense CTR of about four times higher on the Bing traffic than the Google traffic and the 25% (targetted) Bing traffic has made me twice as much as the (semi-targetted) Google traffic!

Of course, all this was unintentional. I didn’t set out to rank well in Bing; it just happened as a side-effect of optimising with Google in mind. Just goes to show that after all is said and done the search engines aren’t really that different! But perhaps Bing finds my particular blend of SEO especially tasty? I don’t really know at this stage, but you can bet I’ll be keeping a close eye on my stats!

Would you care to share your own experiences of Bing optimisation? Feel free to leave a comment below…

Adsense Smart Pricing

The last few weeks I’ve been coming across this “Smart Pricing” term quite a lot – people tend to casually toss it into conversations without seeming to feel the need for any further explanation, other than that it’s a Very Bad Thing. I’m not sure if this is:

  • to give the impression they know more than they actually do, or
  • because it’s so obvious that everyone knows exactly what it’s all about!

Well, I don’t mind admitting that I don’t (or didn’t) have a clue what they were talking about, so I decided to find out.

Is Smart Pricing still relevent?

The first thing that struck me when I did a search for adsense smart pricing is that a lot of the top results seem to date back to 2005, which led me to wonder if this is even relevent anymore! After all, three to four years is a long time in cyberspace.

However, there are plenty of references to it in Google’s AdWords documentation, so one must assume it’s alive and well.
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10 Essential resources for Blogging

Every day I use several tools and services for creating, maintaining and promoting my blog, tools that are absolutely fundamental to various aspects of the blogging process. Sure, I probably could get by without some of them…but I sure wouldn’t like to try! And I’m not referring to electricity or the World Wide Web – obviously blogging would be impossible without those!

The common denominator in this list is that they are all free, which probably has something to do with their market penetration. But their value is definitely far higher! Without further ado, here they are, roughly ranked according to how indispensable they are – although as I’ve already pointed out, I couldn’t really do without any of them:
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