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Adsense: Contextual Advertising Advice And Tips
Adsense Is One Of The Critical Reasons To Improve SEO On Any Income Producing Web Site.

Referral Buttons

Google is big on these. However since I have been using them, I have had 209,477 impressions of referral buttons and haven't earned a penny! Referrals do differ from other ads in that you are allowed to endorse the products and draw attention to the buttons. From an article on the Google Adsense web site:

Actively endorse the products you refer. Unlike with AdSense for content ads, we encourage you to endorse referral products by calling attention to the button or text link. If you believe in the quality of the product that you're referring, feel free to let your users know! Of course, in line with our policies, you may not click your own ads nor encourage conversions for deceitful reasons.

I have clients who are naturals for using Adwords, so I asked ADSENSE support if it was OK to refer the client to the Adwords referral button. The answer was basically "no, sort of". Here is what they said:

Thanks for writing in. While publishers are permitted to endorse or recommend the products they refer, they are not permitted to encourage clicks on or draw unnatural attention to the referral buttons on their site.

However, when I asked ADWORDS support about the best way to get credit for signing up an Adwords user, without even mentioning Adsense, they said go ahead, we see you are an Adense publisher, use your referral buttons!

This seems the right approach, and Google Adsense should loosen up a bit over this, because with some of these referrals, we don't see a cent until the customer has actually spent a certain amount. So we will only profit if there is a genuine click with genuine interest.

I'd contact Google Adsense support directly and ask them, maybe they will give a more definitive answer.

On an Adsense Google Group, AdsensePro said:

"Yes, publishers are now welcome to encourage their users to click on their referral ads in order to download that product, like you suggest. You can't ask people to click on them for any other reason."

I was excited about the new opportunity that Google has given us to show more than 2 referral buttons per product on my site, so I copied the referral code to another part of the page. Previously the buttons were just at the bottom of the page, four in a row. I copied the code to the left hand margin of my page as well, spreading the buttons over two rows so that they fit in the margin.

However, now I only see six buttons, not the expected eight. Two of the ones in my original row down at the bottom don't show. On my other sites, which have this same code, but only four buttons in total, they do show.

Is this a bug in implementing multiple referral buttons?

Smart Pricing

http://adsense.hkessay.com/2006/11/explaining-adsense-smart-pricing.html says:

SmartPricing involves an algorithm that determines if the visitor who clicked on an ad is a good prospect for the advertiser. The "clicker" should be interested in the product advertised. Geographic location is one factor.

Others have said that: the main factor is "the likelihood that the ads on your site will lead to a conversion for the advertiser."

The following from http://brokencodes.blogspot.com/2006/09/how-does-google-smart-pricing-affect.html

They normally have low eCPM ranging from $1.50 to $5. However, low CPM does not necessary imply that your account has been smart priced. AdSense sites in lower earning niche generally have lower eCPM.

Google smart pricing is partially based on the content of a page that the click comes from and gives greater monetary value to the publisher to a click on a camera ad from a camera review page than from a photo page according to Kim Malone - Director of Online Sales & Operations for Google AdSense.

Adsense Incentives