Adsense and Internet Marketing

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Adsense has been making a comeback lately in many Internet Marketer’s minds, and I have to say I have a few sites where it contributes enough income to make me notice. But sadly, this site is not one of them.

In the past I had Adsense units here on Marketing No Brainers, but removed them because of dismal click through percentages. Last week I switched the theme to a clean three column theme, Prosense Gray, that was actually designed to display Adsense ads. I used it not because of the Adsense but because I liked the theme otherwise.

But I wasn’t aware of all the ways Adsense displays were built into the Prosense theme, and by the time I got around to making the theme play the way I wanted, I had a good week’s worth of Adsense data for this site. And the results were still dismal. So today I went through the theme and got rid of all the Adsense.

I’ll break down the reasons and compare it to sites I do well with Adsense. First, I think that Adsense is a lot like any other offer, a 1% clickthrough rate is about average. This is based on several years of tracking.

Second: at 1% you would have to have a lot of traffic or very high paying clicks. And my sites that do well with Adsense are tightly focused sites outside of the Internet Marketing area.

For example, looking in my Adsense account reports for this month I have a hobby site that does around 4%, and a personal finance site that does around 5%. There are some product oriented sites that average 1.5% or so, and I am not sure if Adsense is the best way to go with some or all of them, but I am still optimizing them. These sites do pretty well with Amazon as-is, so I may move more in that direction with them.

But this site, Marketing No Brainers, had a less than half percent click rate, which is as I said before, dismal. Internet marketing people know that those Adsense units are ads, and are probably the most conditioned of all people not to click on them.

So my conclusion remains that if you want to monetize an Internet Marketing site, don’t use Adsense. With Adsense, you are stuck with what Google considers relevant in their Ad inventory. I had everything from email marketing (ok) ads displaying to car dealer ads (not ok.)

On Marketing No Brainers , most outbound links have always been to my own products or to affiliate products that I’ve vetted and that I know deliver quality for my reader’s dollar. I’ve tried to avoid looking like all the blog banner farms out there with the themes that are designed to just show ads. I try to keep the content value high.

That has always worked well for my readers, and hence for me. With my short journey back into Adsense with this site last week, I’ve found that Adsense and Internet Marketing content still aren’t a good revenue mix. For whatever reason it seemed to cheapen the reader’s experience while at the same time just taking up space.

I know there is probably someone out there doing well with it, but for now I’ll stick to my guns: Adsense and Internet Marketing sites are not a good mix.

Adsense and Internet Marketing

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