AdMoolah News and Views

Many people are asking whether they should switch to YPN from AdSense or stick to AdSense. My answer: use both.

I plan to slowly introduce YPN to all of my AdSense sites, and display both AdSense and YPN 50-50 on every site. Once I figure out which one does best on each particular site, I will drop the loser to show only 10% of the time. I will keep it at 10% so I can keep my eye on how things are performing. If the one at 10% seems to take off, I can increase it back to 50% or 90%.

I guess I need to automate some of this. Some spreadsheet work is in order, I guess.

One of the most popular frequent postings on AdSense forums seems to be something along the line of “My AdSense earnings have plummeted since yesterday. What has changed?” The AdMoolah forum got one of these postings the other day. I though my answer would make a worthy blog post.

AdSense earnings are never very predictable. They jump up and down all the time. Since the system has so many variables, it is almost impossible to tell what is effecting the earnings.

• It could be the keyword your site is relates to was going through a bidding war that has stopped,
• It could be that smart pricing has influenced things,
• It could be Google re-crawled your site, decided it was about something else, so it changed the ads,
• It could be your traffic has slowed down,
• It could be that whatever was being advertised on your site was seasonal and no one is interested any more
• It could be that a major advertiser ran out of budget for the month so prices plummeted.

I’m sure I missed some? What other reasons are there?

I run a site, XMLPatterns.com, that I have had AdSense on since February 2004. I put up some ads on it that had a similar color palette to the site, but they did not blend in. It never made a lot of money and I never expected it too. I have other sites that make much more than this one does, so I had always ignored the AdSense ads on it.

I recently decided to optimize the ads on the site to see what would happen. Before the change I had a single skyscraper (120×600) that did not blend in. I changed this to a wide skyscraper (160×600) that did blend in. I also added a 728×15 link unit to the very top of the page. The results were very good. Comparing the one month period before the changes (July 8th – Aug 7th) to the one month period following the changes (Aug 8th – Sept 7th), the earnings were 362% higher. Although this site is still not a huge earner, increasing every trickle helps. On top of the earnings increase, I think the site looks better because the ads now blend in.

If you have any case studies to report, the AdMoolah AdSense Tips and Tricks Forum is a great place to do it.

JenSense is reporting her results of using YPN for almost a month by comparing them to her previous month’s AdSense revenue. Her results seem to be that the total earnings are very similar.

I am slightly disappointed because we saw some early results from WorkBoxer that indicated that YPN might be outperforming AdSense. I’ll have to keep my eyes peeled for more comparisons.

There is a program called AlternateURL that puts replacement ads on you site when Google would put a PSA on your site. I joined this program and tried it out on several sites. They also have a referral program which allows you to get 10% of your referrers earnings.

I am now removing the AlternateURL ads from my site and taking the referral ads off of my site. The CTR and CPC rates for this program were horrible. In case you want to try it for yourself my affiliate link is: AlternateURL.

I apologize to anyone who signed up for this program based on my ad and was disappointed with the results.

Here is the note I sent to AlternateURL today:

Update: I received a response from AlternateURL which I have copied at the bottom of this post.

---

Your program sounds like a great idea but I am getting terrible results. My referral network is seeing about a 0.0025% CTR with less less than $0.02 CPC.

I would suggest 2 enhancements:
1) Allow custom color palettes for the ads. Right now the ads look ugly because they don’t blend in with sites. Having ugly ads also reduces CTR.
2) Better targeting of ads. You should allow at least a general category of ads to display. Your off-target ads are not doing well.

I’ll be removing AlternateURL from my site until I hear that you’ve made these improvements, then I’ll consider putting them back on.

---

Response From AlternateURL
The rates are improving. We share 1/2 of revenue with our members, and the
average CPC is now at 9.5 cents. We are confident this will continue to
rise.

You are right. CTR can be improved with color customization. We are working
on this now.

The categorization is another area that can be improved. Additional
back-end sponsors will ensure that the relevancy improves over time.

I appreciate you taking the time and for your honest evaluation. I hope you
will come back when the next ad code customization has been completed.

Google has introduced 3 major improvements to the AdSense system:

1. AdSense for Search Keyword Reporting
   You can now get keyword reports on what people were search for when the use AdSense for search on your site.
2. 200 Channel
   AdSense now offer 200 custom channels instead of 100 like they used to
3. Section Targeting
   The new section targeting feature on AdSense lets publishers let the mediapartners bot know which sections of the page should be used for determining which ads to show. This is the update I am most excited about. This will allow publishers to control which types of ads are shown by AdSense, hopefully improving relevancy

Its good to see Google adding more features. Pressure from YPN perhaps?

Found via JenSense: Keyword Reporting, 200 channels and Section Targeting

Google just released a new version of their Desktop. This release adds a sidebar that goes on the desktop. For AdSense publishers, there is a plugin available that will show AdSense earnings.

I personally won’t be using the plugin since I use the Firefox AdSense Notifier Plugin.

Found via: JenSense

This will be of interest to those of you who run AdSense on a WordPress blog (like I do).
Plant OZH has a post about creating a new WordPress Theme that includes “Adsense optimization”. I’m not sure what that means exactly, but it sounds interesting. Currently setting up AdSense on a WordPress blog usually takes a little bit of tweaking PHP code, so this might be a good option for people who aren’t comfortable with PHP.

I’d love to hear more details about the AdSense piece of this theme.

Workboxers is reporting that the new Yahoo Publisher Network is outperforming Google’s AdSense by a large margin. This is just a small sample but the result is promising!

Lets hope this starts up a war between Google and Yahoo that gives the publishers a larger percentage of the CPC!

There have been several reports (see AdRants and David Naylor) of Engadget having 5 or 6 AdSense ads per page. Engadget is a part of Weblogs, Inc. Network.

This is against the AdSense Policies, so there are three possibilities here.

1. Weblogs is blatantly violating the policy
2. Weblogs is a premium publisher and has negotiated the right to put more than 3 ads per page, or
3. Weblogs is participating in some kind of beta test for Google

Jason Calacanis, who runs Weblogs Inc, has this to say:

I can not comment on this beyond on the statement below, but I can assure you that we are not breaking any rules with Google and we are in constant contact with the fine folks over at Google.

Very official statement from Jason: If you would like information on Google Adsense running on our sites please contact Google’s press or Adsense departments. I can assure you we are not violating any terms with them. I can not discuss the issue beyond on that.

Given this statement and the fact that Weblogs, Inc. is making around 1 million dollars a year from AdSense and has a lot to use, I highly doubt that they are violating their terms of agreement. It remains to be seen if this is something available only to premium publishers or a beta test. I hope its the latter.

Also see: ProBlogger