What is the Adsense Coverage Metric?

In October 2010, the adsense reporting tool was revamped to include at least one new metric---The "Coverage Metric". Unfortunately, as of this time, there is not much disclosed regarding how "coverage" is calculated.

However, the folks at Google have given us a brief description of what the adsense coverage metric mean?

Essentially, it relates to what percentage of ads shown on your website relate to the content of your site. I figure that if you're having coverage ratios of 80% or more, the content of your site is being well matched to Adwords purchasers. Consequently, I'd think that publishers who can maintain high coverage ratios (say 90%) should get more clicks than publishers with lower ratios (say 30%).

But seeing as how this metric is new; I'd like to know your experience with it? What have you learned? How are you using this to improve your site and your internet earnings?

How far away should Adsense Ads be from content?

Google doesn't want web-surfers to accidentally click on their ads. They recommend 150 pixels between flash game content and adsense icons.

While you may think that accidental clicks are good source of revenue... The truth is that advertisers don't like them, and Google will reimburse their adwords buyer for false click-throughs---that means they may also adjust your monthly earnings down to remove such fraudulent or accidental taps of the mouse button.

Here's a sample of Google's thoughts on the situation:

One type of site we wanted to talk about are Flash-based game sites. Playing games on these sites, you'll notice that ads are often placed very close to the Flash player where the game is played. Publishers may reason that they're providing maximum value to advertisers by placing their ads very close to the area where their users are focused. However, many of these Flash games are played with a mouse, and the action in the games can lead users to do a lot of rapid cursor movements and clicking. We've seen many cases where ads were placed too closely to where the action was taking place, generating many accidental clicks.

Since each game and site are unique, we can't advise publishers on an exact distance between ads and games, but we do recommend a minimum distance of 150 pixels between the Flash player and ads.

How much money can I earn with Adsense?

Lisa talks about how she made $6,000 in the month of July, 2009 through adsense tools.

Now I've never made 1/30th of that in any single month... But she does a good job of explaining how she optimizes her earnings and of course the youtube videos really help.

Lisa's custom search improvements really helped to increase her revenues and I suggest that you look at our tips here for improving your income via better usage of google adsense for search.

How to Stop Showing Irrelevent and PSA ads on Adsense

Sometimes websites & blogs will be serving up just public service ads or ads that have nothing to do with your content or your targeted readers.

The folks at Google Adsense have some advice to improve adsense relevance and targeting.

According to them the three things you need to be aware of are:

If you're seeing irrelevant ads or public service ads (PSAs) on your pages after you've pasted the ad code into your HTML source code and waited the recommended 48 hrs, here are a things to check:

• Have you placed the AdSense ad code in frames separate from the main content of your website? If so, you may experience ad targeting issues. In order for our crawlers to match the ads to the content of your website, it is important to place the ad code in the same frame as the main content of your webste. If you're familiar with HTML, and your website is talking about several different topics you could also consider implementing section targeting on your site to highlight relevant content.
  
  
• Do you have mostly dynamic content on your site? Our crawlers currently can't derive meaning from these types of files:
  - audio and video files (.wma, .mpeg, .mov)
  - mp3 files (.mp3)
  - images (.jpeg, .bmp)
  - Macromedia Flash movies
  - Java Applets
  
  To receive more relevant ads, we recommend including plenty of text-based content on your site, including complete sentences and paragraphs.
  
  
• Do your pages use session IDs? A session ID is a piece of data serves as a unique identifier for a session. If your pages use session IDs, you may not receive targeted ads on those pages. Since this session ID - and therefore the URL - changes every time a different user views a page, the URL will not be indexed and will need to be crawled from scratch. Once the URL is crawled, however, the session will most likely have expired. This means that pages seen by the users are rarely in the index. You'll need to remove the session IDs in order to show more targeted ads to your users.

Learn more tips by attending an Adsense Webinar

The Adsense team frequently puts together educational webinars to help content developers/publishers figure out how to increase/maximize their Adsense Revenues.



It makes sense that Google wants you to succeed and earn more revenue; after all, the more money that you make the more money that Google makes.

You can view past webinars or register for upcoming sessions at: google.com/ads/adsensewebinars