A Good Time is Blog Time

The first thing you need to know is that Google will charge you more for non-relevant ads than they will for relevant ads, and clearly if you have decided to use Google ads then you will be looking for the most traffic at the least expense. That statement is all about click through rate and click through rate is when people see your ad and decide to click on it taking them to the target URL. The higher the click through rate the more traffic you get and the more chance of making a sale. If your ads have a low click through rate, you get less traffic and less chance of a sale, plus Google are likely to charge you more because the ad is not being effective and they are not earning enough due to the low level of clicks. In a nutshell if you write a non-relevant ad (versus your chosen keywords), you are likely to get very little traffic and you pay more for the privilege.

This along with the next paragraph really is the crux of using Adwords, the ads you produce must be absolutely laser focussed both in terms of selecting the keywords relevant to the ad you create and then delivering on the promise the ad offers.

So what does that mean exactly, it means there is no use choosing a keyword that is focussed on a B&B when you offer self catering for example, or an iPad when you are selling digital cameras. This is the second part of the equation i.e. if you marry up your selected keywords brilliantly with your chosen ad format and lots of people click on your ad, at a cheaper rate reference the first paragraph but remembering you have to pay for each click all the same, then they arrive at the URL you have promoted and what happens. Doh!!! wrong product and off they go on the search for the right product. So who is the winner? actually no-one because you didn’t get the sale and the prospective customer didn’t get the product they were looking for.

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So is getting traffic to your blog a black art or is there a secret formula that guarantees you success. Perhaps just paying Google for position is the answer. I attended an advanced tips and techniques webinar with Google the other day discussing lots of different ways for getting a better click through rate on your Adsense ads. There were some really good techniques shared but not much said about getting traffic to your blog, a little bit to be fair but really not that much.

Now for me the biggest influence on Adsense income is getting traffic to your blog in enough quantities that you get a reasonable number of clicks. So when they opened the webinar up to a questions and answers session, I asked one simple question. I basically put up the question what is the most important feature of a blog that will result in Google placing it high up on the search engine results page, the consequence of which is getting traffic to your blog.

I was playing devils advocate a bit, because I pretty much knew what the response to that question would be…..

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