Do You Need More than Adsense to Make Money Online?

First of all, I want to make one thing clear. This post is about making money through your blog or website.  Most of us use Adsense to make money online. There are many reasons for this. You don’t have to pay anything upfront to join Google Adsense. It’s very simple to use – you have to simply copy a piece of code and paste it in your blog or site. The advertisements are managed by intelligent software which serves contextual ads, which means you have a better chance to earn money. So, do you need anything more than Adsense? I will say yes, and the reasons are many.

Google DoubleClick

What’s this new animal, you may ask. It’s not new and has been there for donkey’s years. Google purchased DoubleClick and populated it with their magic code ensuring that it becomes more effective and popular ad serving engine in the universe – I mean the internet. DFP small Business is free for those publishers, which means blog site owners, who serve less than 90 million impressions in a month. This is a huge figure by any standard. Let’s for a moment imagine that your blog reaches this magical figure of 90 million impressions. At a conservative earning of $1 for every 10,000 impressions, you will earn $9000 per month. This means, till you reach $9000 in earnings per month you don’t have to pay Google for using DoubleClick. If I ever reach this figure, I won’t mind paying Google anyway. Coming back to DoubleClick, you get a host of tools to manage your advertisements. You can have private arrangements with other advertisers and manage them through DoubleClick. The best part is that you won’t have any advertisement slot vacant at any moment. If no ads are reserved for a slot, Google will automatically fill in with AdSense ads. This works out great for blog owners.

Managing advertisers is easy with DoubleClick

Those running their own blogs would understand when I say that managing advertisers is a huge headache. You have to keep track of when each one has paid and for how long the ads are to run, whether the payment has been received or not, calculate number of impressions and the list goes on. Of course you can use Google Analytics to calculate the number of clicks and impressions. But with Analytics, you can only manage part of the transaction. With DoubleClick you have control over the entire ad serving process. You can serve contextual ads or fixed ads; collect payment monthly or for the number of impressions and clicks. You can do a whole lot more with it than Analytics.

Why people don’t go for DoubleClick then?

The only reason is that you need to put in a bit more effort. I have seen blog owners intimidated by the complexity of DoubleClick. Obviously it’s more complex compared to AdSense, simply because you can do much more with it. But it’s not as difficult to crack as it looks at first instance. I agree that you may take some time learning about it. But once you get a grasp of the system, things become simpler. Every blog owner must give it a try, at least once.

What about other ad serving engines?

The online advertising market is immense. No doubt everyone wants to cash in. There are hundreds of ads serving engines going around. Some are excellent, some are rank bad. Buysellads.com is popular and used by many blog owners but I can’t vouch for it. Google on the other hand is a known brand and no one have to vouch for it. Another advantage of going with DoubleClick is that you can use other Google tools almost seamlessly. I use Google webmaster tools and can’t live without it.  I can use a combination of Google tools along with DoubleClick. Moreover there are no limitations in using this tool. Some ad serving service providers put restrictions on the use of other similar tools. DoubleClick couldn’t care less. But is there a need to use anything else?

Reporting tools with DoubleClick

This is the best part about it. You can generate a number of reports with DoubleClick. You can provide information to your advertisers on a day to day basis which can be very handy when you are running a limited time campaign for a client. It also helps in AB testing, by which your clients can test various ad positions and combinations. Reporting makes the task of managing ads fun. Your clients will be more than happy working with you when using DoubleClick. Of course, Google puts in its own ads when any of your slots is empty. This is what you call having the cake and eating it too.

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