Email Universe

Since 1999 Christopher Knight has been helping publishers succeed with newsletter marketing. Using AdSense referrals, he was able to recommend relevant products and services to his vistors while increasing his revenue over 140%.
Case study : EmailUniverse.com and EzineArticles.com
Ezine.com

Business

At Email Universe, marketers can find a wealth of information about how to publish successful email newsletters. At Ezine Articles they can find a rich source of content: e-newsletter articles covering 320 different industries, from arts and entertainment to home-based businesses. Publisher Christopher Knight runs both sites, and even he is sometimes surprised by how much traffic they generate: "a quarter of a million visitors every day to Ezine Articles, and more than 9 million page views each month."

Approach
"AdSense referrals gave us a 142 percent increase in revenues last month on emailuniverse, without a dip in income from AdSense."

Christopher Knight
Publisher

To capitalize on this traffic, Knight runs Google AdSense contextual ads across his site. He tried other advertising networks, but found that Google was able to deliver more advertisers and more variety. "Google AdSense gives me more unique ads per page than any other program," he explains. "Because of the rich inventory of ads it delivers, AdSense helps me earn income on my site better than I ever could by recruiting advertisers on my own."

Knight also runs AdSense referrals, a feature that enables site publishers to increase their revenue while expanding their visitors’ awareness of useful products and services. AdSense let Knight select ads that directly matched up with his ever-changing content; On a page that offered advice on starting email marketing campaigns, for example, he selected ads from Constant Contact, an industry leader in email marketing. AdSense referrals have allowed Knight to add his own insights about his users and his content to select useful advertisements.

Knight has also become expert at trying different ad placements and formats to optimize his success with AdSense and AdSense referrals, using channels in AdSense to track which ads get the most clicks. "On Ezine Articles, we found that ads perform best in the center of an article, just above the body copy," he observes, adding that since the ads are so relevant to his site’s content, "the majority of visitors don’t even realize it’s an ad."

Knight has also tested conversion rates in relation to placement, and has learned to position the best-converting ads above the fold.

Results

Initially, Knight was concerned that adding AdSense referrals to his site might diminish his returns from AdSense contextual ads, reasoning that people might exit the site without clicking on the ads. By putting this question to the test, he found that AdSense referrals added incremental revenue without detracting from AdSense. "AdSense referrals gave us a 142 percent increase in revenues last month on emailuniverse, without a dip in income from AdSense," he reports.

Given that kind of return, Knight is quite satisfied with the income he’s earning from both AdSense for Content and AdSense Referrals. And as a publisher who’s always eager to experiment and optimize his results, he believes he’ll continue to earn more over time. "AdSense lets our employees focus on editorial and making our sites better," he says. "We can obsess about the user experience because we don’t have to obsess about ad revenues."

About Google AdSense

Google AdSense is a program enabling online businesses to earn revenue from serving ads precisely targeted to specific web content and search pages. With service levels ranging from online sign-up to dedicated support management, a broad range of sites profit from AdSense. Thousands of Google advertisers also benefit from AdSense by gaining exposure on sites across the Google Network, which includes many of the Top 100 Media Metrix sites such as AOL, About.com, Amazon, Ask.com, and Lycos.