How to increase each click' value?

Are you getting traffic and clicks but not making much money with your AdSense site? Here's one explanation:

Let's say your friend has a site about dealing with insurance companies during the claims process. He's worked hard on the site over the past year and is making several thousand dollars per month; his average click is worth about $0.75. You have some ideas for a site of your own in the same niche (you don't tell him of course). You buy a domain and get busy creating content which you think is even BETTER than your friends. Your site is about the same size as your
friends and you feel the content is much better. However, your site is only making $0.19 per click!

HOW FRUSTRATING!
Google has a filter they run every AdSense site through they call "Smart Pricing". Smart pricing is designed to give the Advertisers (the ones paying Google each time there is a click) the most value for their advertising money. Anyone can throw up a site about insurance and place AdSense on it. If the site is awful, and you were an advertiser, would you want your ads to show up on the site? Of course not! This is where Smart Pricing comes in. Plain and simple, Google uses their Smart Pricing filter to put the BEST (higher paying) ads on the BEST sites. Google has to keep its advertisers HAPPY! Smart Pricing may use the following criteria (and others) to decide how valuable the ads will be which they place on your site.

- How old is your site? Older sites have more relevance in Google's eyes...all things being equal.
- What is your site's page rank? The higher the better.
- How much traffic does your site get? More traffic usually indicates a better site.
- How long do people stay on your site? (Yes, Google knows this if someone visits your site via a Google search.) Google feels that the longer someone is on your site, the better it must be.
- How good is your CTR (click thru rate) compared to other sites of the same niche? (The higher the better of course!)
- No doubt, there are other criteria being used also. (Google is very secretive in these things).

There are no tricks available for dealing with Smart Pricing. Basically, if humans feel your site has value, Google will know it and reward your site with higher paying ads! Therefore, it is possible that 1 or 2 high quality sites could earn you as much as 10 quickly whipped together ones. Think about it and decide which direction you will go. Remember that quality sites also offer other opportunities. For example, the same high quality site earning a Google check
each month can also be used to build a targeted list and for selling affiliate products.

Adsense Alternative : Adbrite

Google’s big thing is serving contextual ads. Their program checks the content of your site and delivers ads that they think your users will like.

AdBrite is much simpler. The idea behind AdBrite is that people tend to ask popular sites to advertise their links. You’ve probably had that happen to you. Instead of asking for a link in return though, you could ask for money. AdBrite is a clearing house for sites that want to sell advertising space on their pages and for advertisers who want to choose where they want to place their ads. For advertisers, the advantage over Google is that they know exactly where their ads are appearing and for exactly how much money each time. Publishers — like you — get to set your own ad rates, and you have the right to approve or reject every ad before it’s placed on your site.

That gives you the power to choose your ads and your price instead of relying on whatever Google gives you. Those are the advantages. The disadvantages are that it’s just not in the same league as AdSense... or YPN.

http://www.Adbrite.com

Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN)

Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) is probably the number one competitor to Google. In fact they pretty much copied what AdSense had done... but didn’t do it quite as well. On the plus-side, their ad formats are largely the same. So if you need to switch from AdSense to YPN, you should be able to keep the exact same optimization, at least as regards how the ads look (although YPN doesn’t have Ad Links or Search, so you’d lose those.)

They also have ads in RSS which could bring in some extra revenues if you’re using that on your site. As to which ads you get served though, that’s a whole other ball game. One of the biggest problems with YPN is that the first ads they serve are often Run-Of-The-Network (RON) ads, Yahoo!’s answer to public service ads. These are just ads for companies that seem to have struck a special deal with YPN. They pay well, when you get a click out of them, but they’re not contextualized so you don’t get many clicks. They occur much more frequently than public service ads and they’re much harder to get rid of. And there are no CPM ads on Yahoo!, which can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on the size of your site and your experience.

Most publishers find that they get better results with AdSense than they do with YPN... although we all keep a close eye on YPN to see if they improve enough to attract us.

http://publisher.yahoo.com