AdMoolah News and Views

The YPN beta has gone fairly well so far. I’ve only had the ads on one site for 48 hours, so I do not have enough data to determine whether or not the revenues are better than AdSense, so for now I’ll just give you some of my initial impressions on using the system.

• Setting up YPN ad layouts is similar to setting up AdSense ad layouts. They provide a screen where you select the format and colors, and there is a text box where the JavaScript that is needed for you site is displayed. They have channels but call them “Tracking Categories”. Customized color palettes can also be set up.
• Statistics are not updated nearly as frequently as AdSense statistics are. This could be an issue for those of us who obsessively check statistics. The only statistic which is near “real time” is Daily Balance, which seems to be updated every few hours. Statistics for Impressions, CTR, and eCPM are only available the next day. One nice touch for the daily balance is they tell you the time that it was last updated, for example they will say “Daily Balance $XX.XX, * Estimated as of Sep 12, 2005 at 10:00 AM PST”.
• Support seems very responsive. I emailed two questions on Saturday night and received one response Sunday morning and the other on Monday morning. They also have telephone support available, which I have not tried yet.

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.

After reading YPN’s Terms and Conditions, It seemed like they did not allow publishers to reveal their monthly revenue amount. To be sure I emailed support and they responded by letting me know that revenue amount cannot be shared at this point.

So, for now, AdMoolah will be for sharing AdSense revenue only. Hopefully when YPN goes out of beta they will amend the Terms and Conditions to allow revenue to be made public, and I can ad YPN revenue sharing to the database.

I was recently approved for the YPN Beta. Right now it seems like you can only have one web site displaying YPN ads, so I will not be displaying them on AdMoolah. I’m very interested to see how YPN compares to AdSense. I plan to randomly display Google and AdSense ads and see which results in more earnings. I will let you know the results of my testing of the new program.

Update: I found out that I can display YPN ads on more than one site. Just like AdSense, now that I am approved, I can simply put ads on any site.

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.

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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.

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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!