Sounds of success for Buenamusica

In just three years, Manuel Treto's Buenamusica.com has become quite a successful enterprise. A U.S. based Spanish-language site dedicated to everything associated with music, Buenamusica.com now receives around 100,000 unique visitors per day from users around the world.

When Manuel first started, he knew he needed an ad network that would deliver both English and Spanish ads relevant to his U.S. Hispanic and Latin American visitors -- a one-stop shop with domestic and international inventory. "This was one of our biggest hurdles for monetizing the website," Manuel says. "Several of the networks I tried billed themselves as 'Hispanic networks', but after testing fifteen different ad networks on our site, we were happiest with AdSense. AdSense is better for Hispanic publishers because it usually outperforms all other ad networks by at least 50 percent in earnings, even those ad networks that are specifically targeted toward Hispanic sites."

With a staff of only five people, Manuel and his colleagues wanted a product that could adapt to their needs without requiring significant development resources. "The product's flexibility in terms of customization options is its most impressive feature," says Manuel. "What has worked the best for me is incorporating colors that are already associated with the site. We try to customize everything so that it matches the look and feel of the site, and users have commented on how nicely the ads fit into the page."

Manuel now employs AdSense ads on 100 percent of his pages. He also offers his users the ability to navigate through his site with the Google Custom Search Engine, which he has linked to his AdSense account. This has allowed him to monetize his search results and to generate additional revenue for the site. "The more exposure you give to Google the more money you are going to make, and every little bit adds up. I strongly recommend using other Google products. Using the Custom Search Engine feature is bringing a little bit of Google technology to your website, and you can't beat that."

If you'd like to share your own success story with us, please fill out our questionnaire. If you're not yet an AdSense publisher and would like to get started with Manuel's suggestions, you can submit an application today.

New and improved referrals resources

If you've been looking for ways to improve your referral earnings, we're excited to introduce you to a few new resources. First is our updated referrals optimization tips page, where you can find our top suggestions for selecting referral products and how to best promote them on your site. We've added new, detailed tips as well as example implementations to help you get the most from your referrals.

Next is our very first referrals-themed case study. Learn how Randy Brown, site owner of GrownUpGeek.com, has used referrals to double his earnings while endorsing a product that he really supports.



Do you have a referrals success story that you'd like to share? Send us a note and maybe you'll be featured soon.

An effective pairing of AdSense and e-commerce

Imineo.com is a French video-on-demand site offering a wide variety of videos in different formats. In 2005, the site's owners decided to use Google AdWords to drive qualified traffic to their site. After setting up their first campaigns, they implemented conversion tracking to evaluate their overall return on investment. More recently, the company added AdSense to their site. As co-owner Jean-Baptiste Sers told us, "Our business model is not based on advertising revenue -- but in order to increase our AdWords spend, we wanted to use AdSense."

For an e-commerce advertiser, this might seem risky. Some might think that integrating AdSense could have resulted in a sales drop because of users clicking on the ads instead of buying one of the videos. But as Imineo team implemented AdSense, they noticed that qualified visitors came to the site with the intention to buy the videos and did not click on the sponsored links, while other visitors usually clicked on one of the relevant ads.

Imineo's strategy highlights how e-commerce sites can use AdSense to monetize traffic that usually exits the site using the URL address bar. Overall, the use of AdSense can help sites like these increase overall revenue without changing their current business model. As Jean-Baptiste put it, "AdSense has helped us monetize the visits of these other visitors and therefore increase the overall revenue/client ratio."

If you own an e-commerce site, here are a couple of suggestions.

• Try testing AdSense first on your exit pages, and then evaluate the effect it has on your sales.
  
  
• If, like Imineo, you find that adding relevant ads on your site does not affect your conversions, we encourage you to increase the coverage of AdSense on your site. The additional revenue coming from AdSense can help you generate more qualified traffic and therefore increase your overall sales.