There has been lots of talk around the web about the likes of Google trying to increase their advertising revenues with larger and more vulgar ad units such as the expandable units that seem to be growing in popularity, video based ad units and behaviourally targeted ads but where is the line going to be drawn and are such ads really increasing revenues?

As Aaron Wall rightly points out, Google has been the most successful at monetising traffic and they have done so with the most unobtrusive, simple text ads but they work so well because they are 100% targeted. Traditional banner advertising has yet to come up with a way of producing such contextually relevant adverts that change depending on what page you are on.

I have several websites of my own and have experimented with Google Adsense and various other types of display advertising and the Google solution came out on top by quite some margin. Now I appreciate that certain niche markets will be able to make greater revenue using flash or video advertising but in the majority of cases simple text ads provide a far easier and more lucrative monetisation stream. I for one also try to interact with my users and get them signed up to my newsletter where I can then build relationships and cross-sell other types of products that they are looking for.

The key here, and everywhere it seems, is to test what works best for your website. Don’t just take my word for it because there are a million niches out there that I am not involved in and for any one of them the best solution may or may not be Google Adsense.

Ok so I often have people asking me what keywords or keyphrases they should build a site around and one of the points they always make is that they want a target phrase with low competition. I ask them what they actually mean by competition and they start to spout varios measures they have come across such as using intitle:keyword, inurl:keyword and inanchor:keyword in a search engine such as Google.

I tell you now that this is a waste of time.

Why? Well I really don’t care if there are 10 million other sites using my exact target phrase in their page title and url and it doesn’t even bother if there are just as many building links for it too. All I care about is can I beat them?

Let’s face it, if your site is not on page 1 of Google for your target keyphrase then you are nowhere. So surely the only sites we should be judging for competition are the current top 10, no? Asking yourself whether you can displace one of these sites is the only question you need to answer.

What I really keep my eye on is if there are any results which are homepage links and that have the target keyphrase in the domain and page title? These are like goldust when it comes to judging competition especially if you are considering a similar domain and page title because then it really comes down to backlinks and possibly site age. A quick check of these will tell you how much effort it might be to beat this site.

The keyphrase “blue widgets” for example might show the site http://www.bluewidgetshop.com in position one. It has the term “blue widgets” first in it’s page title, 2,000 backlinks and is 18 months old. Unless some of those backlinks are of very high quality I would consider this a manageable target site to beat.

Of course it all comes down to commercial gain and effort. I would weigh up whether or not I think that I could make a return on my link buying outgoings based on the estimated search traffic for that term. I would also consider the opportunity cost on my time should I go ahead and build and market a site.

So please just remember that you don’t need to beat 100 million sites to rank #1, you only need to beat one site and that’s the one that is already in first position.

If you want to build a website and have a rough idea of the theme the first thing to do is decide upon the domain name. This could very well be the most important decision you will make for your website so here are some things to consider when choosing a domain.

Your domain name choice really boils down to two main options:

1. A domain rich in the keywords you wish to target - those that best describe your product and that are searched upon in the search engines.
2. A domain that is memorable, if not specific to your chosen topic,

The main advantage to using a keyword rich domain name is that it will unquestionably help you rank well in all the major search engines. My experience of this is that a domain containing your targeted phrase will massively aid your ranking for that phrase in far less time and with far fewer links pointing towards your website.

The advantages of a brandable domain name can be just as big. If the building of a brand is a success you will undoubtedly achieve a higher percentage of return visitors and are likely to receive backlinks from other websites as your company is quoted as a source of trust in the industry.

You must also pay attention to the limitations of a keyword domain in terms of the markets you will be able to expand into. Take a look at the following comparison that illustrates this point:

• Insurancewide have focused on a stringently defined niche (insurance) and have thus chosen a domain name which indicates this point. With this domain they have an advantage when ranking for any keyphrase that contains the word “insurance”. They may find it hard to expand into other markets.
• Moneysupermarket decided that they were going to offer a broad range of comparison services in fields stretching from loans to credit cards to banking. Their domain name does little in the way of aiding natural rankings for any of their targeted keyphrases. They have, however, built a very strong brand and using this they have expanded into other fields (all still focussed on saving money) such as broadband, utilities and mobile phones. They receive thousands of visitors through type in traffic and from people searching for their brand in search engines.

Should I Go For Keyword Or Brand?

Choosing between the branded and unbranded options for your domain name should be a carefully made decision and one that will require some time but here are some things you may want to consider:

1. Building a recognisable and trustworthy brand can involve huge costs - dependant on your target market, the number of competitors you will face (and the strength of their brands) and the forms of advertising you use.
2. The greater the range of products and services you wish to offer, the harder it becomes to find a keyword domain capable of encompassing the entire range.
3. Unless you are very lucky, all of the good generic domain names have been taken in almost every market and purchasing one of these can prove expensive. For example CreditCheck.com recently sold for $3 million.
4. Having a targeted keyword or keyphrase in your domain name may aid search engine positioning now but this advantage is not guaranteed to last.
5. When someone links to your website they will usually do so with your company or domain name as the anchor so a keyword rich domain will infer keyword rich backlinks.

So there you have it; a brief guide to choosing a domain name. I am not going to tell you to use a branded or a keyword-based domain name as it is totally up to you. There are many successful websites and businesses out there on both sides of the fence so don’t loose sleep over this decision.

Keyword insertion may always seem like the best option for increasing the CTR of Google ads but have you stopped to think about your conversion rates when using these sometimes desceptive techniques?

One of the easiest ways to improve the CTR (click-through rate) of your ad variations in Google Adwords and other PPC platforms is to use the keyword insertion wildcard. When a search is performed and one of your ads shows, if you use keyword insertion then, wherever specified, that keyword will show and will be in bold.

NB. Google will insert the keyword matched to the query and NOT the query itself. So for instance if someone searches for “flights to Spain” and this broad matches with your keyword “spain flights” then it is this second phrase that gets dynamically inserted into your ads.

The Basics of Keyword Insertion in Google

To use the keyword insertion parameters in Google all you need do is input {keyword:Alternative Text} wherever you want your keyword to appear. When a keyword is too long for the alloted space your alternative text will be used. There are however different ways of writing this keyword tag:

• {keyword} will input the phrase exactly as it is in your campaigns.
• {Keyword} will capitalise the first letter of the first word in the keyphrase.
• {KeyWord} will capitalise the first letter of every word in the keyphrase.
• {KEYWORD} will capitalise every letter of every word in the keyphrase. Google rarely allows this.
• {KEYWord} will supposedly capitalise every letter of the first word in the keyphrase while capitalising the first letter of every other word in the keyphrase.

One of the main reasons keyword insertion generates such excellent CTRs is the fact that a user’s search terms will appear in bold wherever they appear in the advert. This leads the eye towards your ad over competing offerings. There is, however, a potential downside if your keywords, ad and landing page do not relate closely; your conversion rate can suffer if searchers do not find what they were looking for AND thus what appeared in your advert.

Take the following example based around my true life experience:

• I was directing traffic towards a flight search tool and a conversion was counted once a search had been successfully completed and the user clicked out to one of our clients/results.
• Some of the keywords I was targeting in Google Adwords included branded airline terms which did NOT appear on our tool.
• I had two ads running simultaneously; one had the {KeyWord} parameter in both title and description, the other did not contain the {KeyWord} parameter.

After running this AdGroup for several weeks it had received many hundreds of clicks and on CTR grounds, the text ad with keyword insertion wiped the floor with the competing ad. When I looked more closely at the conversion data I found, to my initial surprise, that this ad had a poorer conversion rate and that my CPA was higher than it was for the second ad.

After this I reverted to experimentation with further ad variations and eventually found a winning combination of both keyword insertion AND an ad that described my the flight tool to the user before they clicked. This led to lower CPAs and so I could increase bid prices to drive volume.

The moral of the story is: monitor the conversion rates for your adverts and not just the conversion rates of your keywords. More often than not you will be able to tweak your own use of the {KeyWord} parameter to best suit the audience and produce ads with high CTRs and even better conversion rates.

As a keen member of Digital Point Forums I see countless threads asking how to make more money with Google Adsense and the advice given varies from a simple “get more traffic” to “review your ad placements” but I think there is one real key to making the most of Adsense - commercial intention.

Now I don’t claim to make a living from my sites and the income they generate but my Adsense revenue is now pushing $2500 a month and the majority of that comes from a site with just 60,000 impressions each month. That works out at just under $42 eCPM and I have come to realise that my visitors are not browsers, they are doers; they are searching the web for a purpose and will click on ads if it helps them reach their goal.

If you can find and attract these people to your website you will stand a good chance of making decent Adsense returns.

To further explain commercial intention take a look at the following comparison:

Website 1

• a blog about popular TV show Lost
• high percentage of return visitors
• new visitors find the blog via search engines on terms such as “Lost news” and “Lost episode guide”

Website 2

• a DVD review site - let’s take the page about the Lost DVD
• even split of new and returning visitors
• new visitors to the Lost page find the site via search engines on terms such as “Lost DVD” and “buy Lost DVD”

Now for each website just think about why the visitors are on there. The blog attracts people seeking information and news about the show; they are not specifically looking to purchase anything. The review site has visitors who want more specific guidance on the DVD; they are showing a willingness to buy something.

Now both sites use Google Adsense and both pages will show similar ads about Lost products and boxsets. Which do you think will have the higher CTR?

It will, unquestionably, be the second website.

Here are some audiences/niches that I have already identified as having commerical intent:

1. Job Seekers
2. Lonely Hearts - think dating keywords!!
3. Insurance
4. Travel - someone looking for travel information is highly likely to journey someplace soon
5. Product Codes/Numbers - search queries that contain product numbers (e.g. Panasonic TX32LXD600) indicate a user who is extremely close to making a purchase

But remember that there are thousands more to find and experiment with. Before you start a new site, imagine yourself as a potential visitor and think to yourself “am I a browser or a doer?”, then you willl know if the site has a future with Google Adsense.

All of the major search engines have at some point claimed good user experience is at the forefront of their efforts and Google are no different; in fact they are probably the engine to crack down the hardest on black hat SEO techniques to this end where natural rankings are concerned.

But there is a second battle against poor quality, spam-ridden sites that Google has yet to win. Right now on Google Adwords anyone can reach the top of the listings, albeit the sponsored listings, by simply creating a great ad, bidding high enough and building a page that Google considers to be of significance with regards to the search query and ad.

It happens to be that third step in the process that is leading to what is, in my opinion, a poor experience for their search users. I myself often take advantage of the sponsored listings on Google thanks to their normally pinpoint targeting of my needs, but there are times when I find myself on a page full of regurgitated ads from other networks such as Yahoo or Infospace (the company behind Dogpile) and this is happening on an increasingly regular basis.

These sites avoid Google Quality Score penalties because the landing pages they build have good keyword density, partly down to the adverts they list but also because of the common practice of writing keyword rich content and making Google’s bot see it first in the page code thanks to some handy CSS tricks.

I, like many others I can only assume, swiftly hit the back button on my browser but since many internet users are not quite as savvy, these advert covered sites duly sit back and reap the financial rewards of click arbitrage. But Google, and other search engines, can fight back.

If my suspicion is true, and a good proportion of searchers bounce swiftly from the sites in question then it should not be too hard to send these listings right down to page 10 obscurity. If Google could factor in the time spent on a page into their Adwords Quality Score then targeted and genuinely useful sites would see their ads leapfrog the offending spam and Google would have their user experience boosted considerably.

Clearly their should be a threshold time limit, beyond which a page is considered relevant, because different sites will, by nature, lead to variations in the time a user spends on a page. But what I can safely say is that if a person spends less than 10 seconds on a page it is not what they were looking for.

Google almost definitely have the ability to clock these Adwords visits and thus the implementation of this idea is within their abilities, while preventing abuse of this factor should be possible. Plus, as an added benefit companies will be forced into thinking more about user experience and design to prevent bounces from their site.

All in all something as simple as time could be responsible for a better search experience for everybody.