Make More Money with AdSense and Your Travel Site Through Filtering

Google’s AdSense is a great way to monetize a travel Web site, especially one that’s focused around information rather than selling a specific service.

As someone that’s operated many travel sites with AdSense on them, I’ve learned how to fine-tune a travel site for better performance.

One way to make more money with your travel site, if you’re using AdSense, is by filtering.

Ad Sense Primer

Let me back up for a moment. I’m assuming you know what AdSense is and that may not be the case.

In brief, AdSense is a revenue program that allows you to place targeted ads on your travel site. When your visitors click on the ads, you’re paid money. The amount of money paid depends on how much the advertiser was paying per click.

On the left is a small example of an AdSense ad block. As you can see, below the title of the article is the ad block, which is showing three ads from paying advertisers. This is just one example. With AdSense, you can create all sorts of ad styles (vertical, horizontal, just links, etc).

If you’re interested in learning more about AdSense, check out other items on Travel Site Owners.

AdSense Filtering for the Travel Site

I’ve run sites in various industries and I’d say travel is the industry that can benefit most through filtering.

Here are two reasons why I actively use AdSense’s competitive filter.

First, there are numerous travel sites out there that pay very little per click. They bid on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of search terms and “get in line” for cheap traffic. Okay, that’s fine on the surface.

However, many of these sites offer little value to visitors. When someone clicks their link, you’re paid pennies (as low as one cent) and the visitor is brought to a page that’s nothing but a bunch of links.

I filter these sites, because they offer my visitors no real value and I’m not being paid much for losing my visitor.

Second, there are sites that bid on every keyword known to man regardless of the relevance. For instance, one of the sites I filtered was AOL.com. At the time I filtered AOL, they were showing up in my AdSense blocks and I didn’t see any value there.

It’s not AOL’s fault, they are just marketing to everyone. But by allowing AOL to advertising on my site, I was losing valuable space and opportunity. For instance, let’s say my site is about Tokyo hotels. Would it be better to have an AOL ad (for anything) or an ad for a Tokyo tour provider? The latter of course.

Filtering in AdSense is very simple. Here’s what you do:

1. Login to your AdSense account.
2. Click on the “AdSense Setup” tab.
3. Click on “Competitive Ad Filter” in the sub-navigation bar.
4. Enter the URLs you wish to filter (ex: site.com).

Google allows you to filter very specifically. For instance, you can enter site.com/some-page.html, which would block all ads pointing back to that URL. If you want to ban ads pointing toward anything on a domain, you can just enter site.com.

If you operate many travel sites, remember that your competitive filter is account wide. I find it best to filter non-relevant ads, such as non-travel ads, and ads that go to Web sites that aren’t offering the visitor much of anything, because these sites probably pay the least per click.

By using the competitive ad filter smartly, I was able to increase my AdSense income. For instance, I increased the average payout per click on one site about 400%.

Remember, never click on your own AdSense ads. You’ll get your account banned.