The Ad Budget that is Reborn on New Years Morning

We focus all of our attention on optimizing our sites, but sometimes it is not our sites performance that results in missing our Adsense earnings goals.  If you are looking at December results and thinking that you didn’t quite earn as much as you expected, don’t rush to change anything that you hadn’t already identified as broken.

Many advertisers have budgets that run out before the month of December ends.  Furthermore, those budgets are often not renewed until a few days into January.  To compound this type of thing, two other market activities kick in that can decrease your earnings.  Many advertisers simply stop spending ad money from about the 25th through about January 2nd.  If they have nothing to sell to holiday consumers, their money might get more bang for its buck when people that they are targeting come back online AFTER the holidays.

Plus, many companies and advertisers that do have consumers to target can move into the vacancies mentioned above and pay far less in Adsense money to run their own advertisements.  The supply of ads shrink and the bargain hunters move in.  Its classic economics, and it can account for decreases in Adsense earnings during December.

Google Crisis?

I found a very interesting article over on WebsiteMagazine.com today regarding Google's latest crisis. The new crisis involves Google Search users visiting parallel sites (non-Google affiliated ones at that). You see, it is great to have a search engine that delivers users to your own sites, but it can be worrisome if after they use your search engine they leave your sphere of influence and spend time and money on someone else's site. 

Apparently Google is having the most difficulty with price comparison and shopping sites. Sites like BizRate, Shopzilla and PriceGrabber make up the top three traffic and sales hacks that Google is concerned with at this point. 

It will be interesting to see what Google will do in response to this crisis. I feel like they have been kind of ignoring their search engine for the last few months and instead focusing on spamming the hell out of YouTube. Granted, I cold be wrong, but this just seems like something they should have been ready for. Oh well, I'm sure Google will figure this out in time for Valentines Day.

Source: WebsiteMagazine.com

Adsense Tips

There are a lot of folks out there who do their best to spread the word about Adsense optimization as well give tutorials in order to help users out. I recently surfed through YouTube to find some tips to share here and came across a great video made by the Australian Adsense team and posted on their YouTube channel "InsideAdsense".

In addition to offering great tips ranging from creating custom channels to tracking and measuring your results, the Adsense team delves into nearly every aspect in this video and others in their collection. I highly recommend checking out their channel over on YouTube to learn more tips and tricks in order to put an exclamation point on your earnings.

Keeping Tabs

I can't stress how important it is to keep tabs on your Adsense statistics, especially when you implement new SEO strategies, networks or anything for that matter. I recently began utilizing FeedBurners Buzzboost feature to better help publicize my blogs and have really enjoyed watching my traffic increase over the last couple of weeks. 

In addition to keeping tabs on your Adsense statistics, I highly recommend that when you implement a new strategy or tactic that you drop an email or comment to the Adsense tracking service to make them aware of any irregularities that might occur with clicks or page impressions. If you search the Blogosphere enough, you will find many horror stories about folks who have skipped that step and had accounts suspended for suspicious activity.

Personally, I suspect that Adsense tracking is tired of hearing from me, but I really don't want to risk my hard work earning clicks and impressions to go down the drain. In the end, it is up to you to keep track of your statistics (but that isn't going to keep me from lecturing you all to do so).

YouTube and Adsense

Whether you frequent YouTube or not, you may have noticed (heard) that Google now owns (actually since 2006) the popular user-upload site and has begun uploading their advertisements all over it. In addition to running a variety of Adsense advertisements, Google has offered users the ability to apply to become "partners". 

I am not terribly sure as to what becoming a YouTube "partner" entails, but I have seen that "partners" have videos ads placed on their videos as well as scattered across their channel and pages. 

Personally, I don't think that it is necessarily a bad thing. I think that it is a good opportunity for users and content producers to earn a bit of extra revenue for their hard work, but am curious as to how Google will view certain content on YouTube. I have heard that their will be a few search options for filtered and unfiltered content as well as some sort of re-rating for videos other than the 1-5 star format we are all so familiar with.

There are many popular YouTube channels that feature a variety of filterable material, but are quite popular and may suffer due to this new increase in homogeneity. Here is a quick video of a popular YouTube channel "thunderf00t". His channel deals in a variety of controversial issues and may be affected greatly by the new Google-run YouTube.

I don't know if I agree wholeheartedly with his "YouTube is dead" philosophy, but I think he makes a few good points about censorship and free speech. What are your opinions about this?