AdMoolah News and Views

AdSense announced that the Electronic Funds Transfer is now out of beta and available for publishers in 16 countries. I have been using EFT since they started the beta and really like the convenience of it.

Found via Digital Point Forums.

I came across a splog (spam blog) today that had what seemed like a dangerous element to it. This splog was simply copying entries from other RSS feeds and posting them to their own blog. (Of course, no credit was given to the original author.) However, I noticed one of the original entries had an AdSense for RSS ad on it, and this was also copied into the splog. I checked and the publisher ID in the splog matched the publisher ID on the original site. This means the ad is showing up on a site that the original publisher has no control over.

This seem particularly nasty because if the splog is violating AdSense Policy, the original publisher may be penalized for it. I’m sure Google is smart enough to know what is going on, but it certainly is something to watch out for.

You can get more information about fighting splog.

Dave Taylor has an article on his site about a new beta program from AdSense that ads an “Advertise on this site” link on ad units. When the link is clicked it takes the visitor to a page that talks about the referring site and has an invitation to sign up with AdWords.

I don’t agree with Dave who says: “This is very exciting news for those of us involved in the AdSense / AdWords world, and I’m looking forward to Google making it more pervasive”. I don’t want one of these links on my site. If an advertiser wants to put an ad on my site I want him to contact me directly. I don’t want to have to share the revenue with Google. I hope this will be an optional feature and not something that publishers have no control over.

Found via: ProBlogger

The New York Times has an article explaining how it is starting to sell its own ads instead of relying on Yahoo to sell ads. This is good news for publishers because it means we are one step closer to getting a third alternative to AdSense and YPN. They are starting to sell ads on some of their own web sites, but will expand to allow other publishers.

Here are some interesting bits from the article:

Microsoft also expects to use its new system to sell ads on other Web sites, just as Yahoo and Google do with their systems.

The MSN system, like other search-based ad systems, will let advertisers specify how much they will pay each time a user clicks on their ad. MSN will also let advertisers bid different amounts depending on the characteristics of the user who sees the ad.

He said that once Microsoft had a large number of advertisers and had refined its ad placement formulas, it would be able to compete with Google and Yahoo to sell ads on other Web sites because it would be able to offer higher ad revenue.

Update: Microsoft has an official press release.

I recently reported on my first week with YPN. Since then, YPN seems to be doing better on this Vegas-themed site.

For the last 8 days, YPN has actually been outperforming AdSense by 15%. If you don’t include the AdSense Link ads, the advantage jumps to 35%. This jump in earnings for YPN comes from both a boost in both CTR and CPC. This could be because there seems to be an additional targeted ad in YPN now, for the first week there only seemed to be 2 targeted ads, now there are 3 targeted ads.

Over the whole 15 days, things are pretty close. I’ll have to keep my eye on the results to see who the long term winner is.

Darren at ProBlogger has a great post about the factor that affect CTR. His list of reasons are:

- CTR varies between topics
- CTR relates to Ad relevancy
- CTR can vary seasonally
- CTR varies between reader types
- CTR varies between ad design and placement options
- CTR varies depending upon other site design factors
- CTR varies depending upon other options to ‘click’

I think this is a pretty thorough list. The post has a lot more details on each point and is worth a read.

If you use Firefox (and you should), there is a great little Greasemonkey script that prevents you from clicking on your own ads.

Once its installed, if you try to click on your own ad, nothing happens. It could save you from those oh-crap-I-just-clicked-my-own-ad panic moments.

I highly recommend it.

Trying to increase earning by using the AdSense Competitive Ad Filter to block low paying ads doesn’t make sense. Google’s algorithms automatically display the ads that will make you the most money. This is in Google’s best interest because the more money you make, the more money Google makes. Trying to outperform Google’s algorithm is next to impossible. Google has much more information on the ads themselves and what works and what doesn’t work.

Let’s say you do some research with a click tracking script and you manage to identify an ad with a low CPC and you block the URL of the ad from our site. What could be wrong with that? Lots:

• What if this ad has a fantastic CTR? If this ad pays half of the other ads on your site put has a 3x better CTR, it would have made you more money than other ads.
• What if other ads from the same URL have a better CPC? Advertisers often have several campaigns going, each with different ads and CPCs, but the same URL. You could risk blocking a higher paying ad without knowing it.
• What if the advertisers change the bid price of an ad? Advertisers often change the bid price of an ad. They may find an ad was more effective than they thought so they are willing to pay more for it.
• What if there is a drop in ad inventory? Having blocked URLs could cause you to start displaying PSAs.

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.

AdSense for Search has both pros and cons. A recent thread on Digital Point got me thinking about this.

Pros:

• Search can bring in extra revenue. On the other hand most people report that the revenue from this is a very small percentage of their overall AdSense revenue.
• It can provide a service for your visitors. Visitors may appreciate being able to search your site.
• It can increase your stickiness. If visitors use site search they may look at more pages, giving them more chances to click on the regular AdSense ads.

Cons:

• It can take users away from your site. If users use web search you can loose them.

On the surface it seems to me that the pros outweigh the cons. It comes down to if the extra revenue you get from the search outweighs the potential users you may lose from doing web searches.

I think the only way to know for sure is to try an experiment. I may try writing a little script that puts the AdSense for Search on the page on even days but not odd days. This way I can see how it affects the number of pages per visitor. If more users are leaving a site because they do web searches the average number of pageviews per user should decrease. If more users are using site search and finding useful information, the number of pageviews should increase.

The one thing that harder to measure is the fact that users may appreciate the usefulness of having a search available.

If anyone has any other pros or cons or has run this type of experiment before I’d love to hear about it.