Make Money Using Google’s Webmaster Tools

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Trial and error is one of the best methods to verify how “things” work for each individual blogger when trying to make money online. You can use Google’s Affiliate Network, AdSense program, or just about any other online money making method and yet it seems that nothing significant is coming your way. One reason for this is that your regular readers do not care very much about your ads and prefer to go straight to the goods, your “killer” articles.

In general, the best source for generating income is from searchers or those that land on your pages via a search engines. These people are the ones that are “looking” for something specific and are most likely your next potential clients. Don’t get me wrong, your regular readers can be potential clients too, but plastering them with ads alone will not do the job for you. You will need a little more convincing for that to happen. Anyway, that is not the objective of this post today. Today we will be focusing on users that discover your website via search engines.

Analyze Your Traffic Stats

Seriously, how many of you do this on a regular basis? The tools are out there and all you need is to take a little more advantage of the information it gives you. Google’s Webmaster Tools having been revamped with some additional information is one of the tools that I have been using to leverage on my blogs traffic. Traffic that comes from search queries, that is.

Many people will say that no traffic equals no money and in part that is true. On the other hand, you might have many pages that rank high on search engines and still no traffic. How is that possible? Many reasons, but one of them can be because on the first pages of the SERPs there are more than one result and simply put no one clicks on your link. Don’t let this affect you as there are links that are clicked on and these are the ones that you should be focusing on.

Impressions With High CTR Search Queries

After logging in your Google’s webmaster account, go to “your site on the web” option and select “Search Queries” (see image below). Getting there you will (hopefully) see the number of queries, impressions and total clicks you got from searchers. Further down, each column will provide more detailed information broken down by the specific query, impressions and CTR. The later is what is of interest for us here and clicking on it will sort the column from the highest to the lowest CTR for each query. Clicking on a query will reveal the links of your pages where most CTRs are generated. BTW, CTR or click through rate is the result of the number of clicks divided by the number of times your pages (impressions) where shown on the search engine result pages (SERP).

Crunching The Numbers
As I said, not all of your pages that have good average positions are actually clicked on. These depends on a lot of factors and being on the SERP alone does not guarantee that users will click on your page’s links. If you look at the image above, during the period of this query, a toatl of 49.500 impressions where generated and only 7.700 of these had CTRs over 1%, although the overall CTR is 3%. If you notice, one article had 140 impressions with a 33% CTR and another with 6.600 impressions with a CTR of 1% (rounded). Both of the them had 46 clicks each, meaning higher impressions does not necessarily have to have high CTRs.

Relevant Ads On High CTR Search Queries

Finally, this is where we will take advantage of all this information and place relevant ads on each of the post that have high CTRs. Edit these posts and put anything you want to promote. Please note that these should be relevant to the article to spark the users interest on clicking that ad. An example would be that if you have an article that talks about web hosting, then you should at the end of the post (to avoid being intrusive) a banner or a link to your web hosting affiliate account. Obviously, you can use these artilces to link to other pages (inter linking) or just about anything else you think can be relevant for you.

That’s it. Similar to using Google’s Webmaster Tools to improve your ad placements, you can also read another version which is how to make money using Google’s Analytics Data.

Now is a good time to let us know if you have you tried these technique before? Did it work? Share your experience here with us.

DiTesco

DiTesco is a Business and Inbound Marketing Consultant, and founder of iBlogzone.com. iBlogzone's main objective is to help startups and small business owners achieve success in their online ventures. | More About Me and my Digital Marketing Services in SP Brazil.

18 thoughts on “Make Money Using Google’s Webmaster Tools”

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  • Hi DiTesco, I have to admit, I’ve been using Google Webmaster Tools and never occurred to me to utilize this area as a means to monetizing those pages that get the high CTR. Goes to show you, you can always learn something new. 🙂
    What would be really interesting to see and track is how these search queries and CTR’s change from month to month and see if you can tie it in to any changes you’ve made with your site in that time period (hopefully, I’m making sense to your here 🙂 ).
    Anyway, thanks for the great article!
    Oh and P.S. This may be true, “One reason for this is that your regular readers do not care very much about your ads and prefer to go straight to the goods, your “killer” articles.” HOWEVER, and I can only speak for myself, pretty much all products I’ve ordered online were from sites I’ve visited regularly. I think for most people, once the trust is there, then you can sell them just about anything…just my opinion. 😉
    Sorry for the long comment…yikes!!

    • Hi Michele. Yes, you are making sense about tracking your monthly changes to see how your performance is going. Plus, it is true that these stats could certainly vary from a specific period and adjusting for ads to “new” high CTR pages do definitely make sense 🙂

      As for “purchasing” stuff from blogs that you have visited, makes sense too, reason why I said that “it needs” a little more convincing, e.g., getting that trust in there.

      Thanks for dropping by.

      • Hey DiTesco, where’s your retweet button? Did you take it out…wanted to send it out to my tweetpeeps. Or did I just imagine you had one 😉

        • Hi Michele. Must have been a bug or some weird experiment I was doing, lol. I think its back, so if you are still up for it, RT pls 🙂

  • Sweet tip. I must admit that I do net check my webmaster tools very often. I will now though because I am always looking for new ways to make some money 🙂

    • Hi Dan. Thanks for dropping by. I myself do not check very often my webmaster tools but occasionally I’ll head over there just to see if there are no errors or malwares that have landed on my blog 🙂 When I saw this feature, it just struck me that it could be used for something, errr say, more profitable 🙂

  • I am still new to the Webmaster Tools and it never occurred to me I could use it to help make moe money from my blogs.

  • In the past I have experimented with placing ads in and around my articles but in all honesty, I didn’t use any webmaster tools or do any research. As you can imagine, the results were dismal so I removed them all.

    After reading your very informative post on how you are using Google’s Webmaster Tools to strategically place your ads, I think I just might try it again. This time I’ll do my homework and do it right. 🙂

    • Hi Robert. Yep, I did the same thing previously but I also abandoned the idea of putting in ads within the content. I think that it can be intrusive. The ads I am strategically placing now (as you point it out well), are normally write after the content and just yesterday I had another conversion, yay! This is working well for me and I hope that after you have done your homework it does the same for you. good luck!

  • I started using the another technique: I find the keyword for which certain pages are ranking very high and I started putting affiliate links at the bottom of the post and it worked out very well..
    Give it a shot and I’m sure this will give you another great article idea 🙂

    • The technique you mention here works very well too as a matter of fact. The problem is that there are sometimes pages that rank high and yet the content is sheer crap so it won’t do much good for anyone. If it is backed up with quality content, I would totally agree that this is another way to go. As I said, in the other comment you left. A great idea for a next blog post. Thanks!

  • Good tips DiTesco. You can grab the query stats and put them into Excel for analysis and calculations to find some good long tail keywords to target in future (or existing) posts. I love webmaster tools, especially the page speed info and it keeps getting better.

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