My Experiences with AdSense

March 11, 2005 · by · in Search Engines

USA Today article discussing AdSense. I’ve been using AdSense on my blog and website for the past couple of weeks. In general, I’m pretty happy with it—the AdSense ads are usually fairly relevant to my audience. In some cases, where AdSense pulls out some narrow and high-value keywords from my site, the CPCs have been incredible (over $10 per click).

However, AdSense’s keyword selection can also be a little dumb, like when it picks the keyword “blog” to characterize my sites. “Blog” as a keyword does not have especially high CPCs, it’s not a particular good term for my site, and I’d like to think that Google is smart enough to know that its keyword filter is going to pick “blog” for many blogs even if there would be better/more descriptive turns. I have not yet figured out how to get AdSense to pick other higher-value keywords to describe my site. I’m hoping Google makes an adjustment for this.

AdSense also is a little opaque about the revenue splits. I have no idea what percent of their revenues I’m getting from them. This isn’t a big issue so long as I think the compensation is fair in aggregate, but it does make me wonder.