AdSense is a complex animal. And publishers should know this. Because of the contextual nature of the ads being delivered to your site, blog or portal, you are sure that the ads generated by AdSense are relevant. But they don’t always pay out the same in terms of per-click earnings.

Google AdSense is perhaps the most popular contextual advertising program, and is used by publishers who want to make the most out of their websites’ or blogs’ traffic, in terms of monetization. It wouldn’t be a surprise that many developers have also created their own add-on tools and trackers to help AdSense users maximize their revenues, or at least make it easier to track earnings.

This is an example of what your competitive ad filter might look like if you run a blogging service. You’d want to block out the competitors like Blogger, WordPress, and the like, lest your users click on them and discover there are other products or services they can try.

A caveat

When you’re monetizing your websites using AdSense, it pays to experiment. This is because many readers will already be AdSense-blind, especially if they are tech-savvy, or if they are already repeat readers. Still, it’s good to target your ads at people who are not likely to click on bland, plain AdSense links.

Sometimes you can change the positioning. You can shift the ads from the top of your post to the bottom, or from bottom to top so people will start noticing them. Sometimes you can rotate colors. Or, you can switch between image ads and text-ads.

At first this might strike as a no-brainer. But using AdSense channels might not be the first thing you might think of when you start monetizing your website or blog using AdSense. After all, probloggers’ and webmasters’ first concerns would be content and design. AdSense organization would take a backseat. And there’s the issue of earning itself. You might not find the need to break down your AdSense earnings if it’s still a paltry amount.

Who would’ve thought that Google AdSense could be used to track down the owner of a website?

Anonymous and spam blogs are quite numerous these days. And one would wonder who actually own these. If the sites have Google AdSense, then it’s easy! It’s as easy as viewing the page source on the site, and looking for an AdSense publisher ID.

When you use your browser’s view-source feature, just use the Find command (usually invoked with Ctrl-F) to look for that line of code, which comes with the string “google_ad_client”.

All I can say is wow! I had no idea the school loan business was so lucrative.

According to this article some Google AdWords advertisers are paying almost $70 per click for student loan related terms. I knew the financial sector paid well, but $70 seems ridiculous. Look at the top five:

school loan consolidation $69.16 (cpc)
college loan consolidation $68.35 (cpc)
car insurance quotes $66.88 (cpc)
school consolidation $66.29 (cpc)
auto insurance quotes $65.90 (cpc)

I signed up for the conversion of my feed to Adsense for Feeds a little while back and finally got my notice yesterday that it was ready to go -

Success!

As you requested, we have moved your feeds from your FeedBurner account to your —-@gmail.com Google Account.

Nice! I thought…

Until I noticed a RSS subscriber drop of around 6-700 today!

Last week, Google announced that they were going to roll out AdSense for Domains to all publishers. It’s really easy to get started and serve ads on your parked domains.

Google has created a number of tutorials to help you migrate your parked domains over to Google’s recently relaunched AdSense for Domains platform.

Before this, you had to apply individually and have well over 700,000 impressions per month in your account (to prove that you know how to generate traffic.)

Now, it’s available for everyone, easily, and free (GoDaddy charges you a fee to park your domains to earn cash.)

Recently, Google announced a new ad-targeting system that tracks where you go on the web, and tailors future ads to your interests. According to the announcement:

These ads will associate categories of interest — say sports, gardening, cars, pets — with your browser, based on the types of sites you visit and the pages you view. We may then use those interest categories to show you more relevant text and display ads.