AdMoolah News and Views

I have been displaying YPN and AdSense ads on VegasFreebie.com for one full week. I have been randomly displaying either the AdSense or the YPN ads. When displaying AdSense I show one ad unit and one link unit. When showing YPN, only the single ad unit shows since link ads are not available on YPN. The overall winner so far is AdSense. Here is the bottom line: AdSense earnings were 27% better than YPN.

Comparing just the AdSense ad unit vs. the YPN ad unit (ignoring the AdSense link unit) the AdSense earnings are 7% better.

AdSense had better earnings because the CTR was just over double the YPN CTR. YPN does pay more per click than AdSense, but not enough to make up for the lower CTR. This corresponds to a lot of other reports I have heard about YPN, the click through rate isn’t very good, but each click pays better than AdSense.

I think the biggest problem with YPN at this point is that the ads are not targeted very well, and the same ads are displayed all the time. On the banner ad the same 4 ads are displayed all the time. Two of the ads are fairly well targeted: one for fishing trips around Las Vegas and one for a City Guide to Las Vegas. Two of the ads are not targeted at all: one is for Vonage and one is for 0% APR Credit Cards.

I tried the category based targeting that YPN offers, but this did not seem to help things. I chose up for the “Travel – Accommodations” category for the site and ended up getting ads for Hotels in Great Britain, Safaris in Botswana and Kayak Tours in British Columbia. Not exactly the types of things people would be interested in while at a site about Las Vegas. It seems like YPN needs to get a better inventory of ads to be able to show targeted ads.

I plan to keep experimenting with YPN on other sites to see if it may do better in different categories of sites.