Google Ad Rank = Quality Score x Max CPM

From Inside Adsense, Google has explained how it determined the ranking of the ads in their adwords system. It is not only the bid price that matters. It also takes into account the CTR of the advertiser. They use "Quality Score" which decides the final position of the ads.



"While bid price (the price advertisers are willing to pay for each click per thousand impressions) is obviously an important factor, we also calculate advertiser Quality Score to make sure the best performing ads will always appear on your site. Quality Score takes into account factors such as an ad's relevancy and click-through rate (CTR) (i.e. how likely users are to click on a given ad) because a higher CTR sometimes outweighs the benefits of a higher bid price. This ensures that your site always displays the ads representing the highest revenue potential for you."

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Blogging with Adsense - Google teaches you what is the best approach

In the Inside Adsense blog, google suggested ways to maximize your revenue potential using adsense ad. Here is a short summary of their suggestions:

1) Choose the right ad formats - medium rectangle
2) Place ads where your readers will notice like below



Points to remember:
- An ad after each post can serve as a "commercial break" from reading or as an "action step" to take after reading.
- For long entries, try embedding a blended medium rectangle into your post and adding a banner at the end.
- For short entries, just place one medium rectangle or banner at the end.

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some improvements on search engine web traffic (google)

Finally I got some traffic from google.
My stock site showed up in google top 10 in one of my target keyword. Im not sure what have I done to make it work, but during the time I have written some new content, done some SEO, and build some more inbound links. All of them ends up with a little nice reward to my search engine ranking.

Though the traffic hit is too little to bring me significant changes in my page impression / revenue, I feel glad the effort is not wasted. And Im sure it will be better and better in the long run.

traffic from search engine

The best source of traffic is always from search engine. But it is very very hard to get a good position in popular keywords.
My daily earnings has dropped from my record top of $19. I checked the webmasterworld and saw a thread talking about it is most difficult to go from $1-$20. I totally agree with it and now Im seeking ways to improve.
One of my site has some constant traffic from yahoo, but very few if not none of the traffic comes from google. Now I have a ezine directory of about 12000 articles. I hope the pages will be well indexed by google and yahoo, and evently some of the pages can be found by users.
One point to mention. Site statistics is the key for optimization. My hosting is using AWStat in which the "Referer" and "Search" sections are most valuable. However, the stat is monthly based so the data is accumlated daily. I guess I should do some snapshot myself to capture the daily variations so I could do more accurate research.