If SEO is baking a cake, my head has been making cookies for a couple of months now.
A few months ago a colleague of mine said he was sitting with his mother while she was using Google and realised that when Google returned the search results, instead of clicking on one of the results, she would click on an Ad on the right. She did this time after time. It turns out that she didn’t know the difference between advertising and search results.
That was something good to know if you’re into the whole AdSense thing… The cookie had been put in the oven.
2 weeks ago, Google added cream to my cookie. They started ranking me really well on my one sites for 2 different terms. The first term tended to bring a lot of users who appeared to be non-internet users, whereas the other visitors were people who seemed to be searching for something more specific, and seemed to know what they were looking for. I would say that 30% of the non-internet users were leaving my site via an AdSense ad, whereas only 5% of the other visitors used an Ad as an exit point.
For me this was a type of confirmation on the whole “who to target” idea, and helps me know what type of topics to talk about if I want more AdSense exiters.
Rand’s article “Online Advertising Needs to Evolve” put the cherry on the top of my cookie. He says it best in his article:
- The more you use the web, the more immune you are to advertising
- AdSense (and YPN) prey on the naivete of users – savvy visitors don’t click these
My final thoughts: I’m starting to realise that South African traffic is ideal for AdSense as most visitors have not grown Ad-Blind yet, and I don’t have as much competition JUST yet, especially in my niche which is targeting moms and dads who still need help programming VCRs. Well, Tivo’s and PVRs at least. 
Advertising between two different colddrink companies like coke and pepsi or cellphones like nokia and samsung