AdMoolah News and Views

I blogged about a new AdSense Sites feature yesterday, but after i posted, they yenaked the new feature off of the control panel. I wasn’t sure what was going on, but now it seems like they were probably having problems with it, and decided to roll the new feature back. They will be pushing the new feature out as soon as they have things fixed again. Here is what AdSenseAdvisor (the official AdSense spokesperson on forums) had to say about it:

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the delayed update – I’ve been trying to find out as much as I could about this situation in order to make sure I passed along accurate information to all of you.

We’re very happy you’re all so excited about the new Allowed Sites feature. Unfortunately, we had to temporarily roll back its release, but expect to see it in your accounts again soon. We hope that it helps alleviate many of the concerns publishers have had about code theft and click sabotage.

In the meantime, our engineers have confirmed that we deactivated any settings you made yesterday, so your ads will continue to monetize as normal on all sites.

Again, we’re sorry for the inconvenience and confusion, and appreciate your patience.

-ASA

I’ll be sure to update things as more information becomes available.

Here is another update from AdSenseAdvisor

ann, if you (or anyone else) are seeing strange AdSense performance that seems to correlate with this Allowed Sites release and withdrawl, you’re welcome to PM me your pub ID or account login and a description of the behavior, and I’ll be more than happy to escalate it to our engineers for investigation.

We want to make sure this temporary release didn’t leave any weird loose ends…

-ASA

AdSense has introduced “Allowed Sites” a new feature that allows publishers to specify which sites they are running AdSense on. Users can leave things the way they always have been, that is, allowing any site to run ads with their publisher ID, or publishers can specify a list of sites that their AdSense ads will appear on. If any ads with the publisher’s ID appear on any site not in that list, the impressions and click will not be counted for that site.

The new feature can be accessed by going to the “AdSense Setup” tab on the control panel and selecting “Allowed Sites”.

This is something that many publishers have been asking for for quite a while. One addition I’d like to see to this is a report that would list all the sites that have displayed ads with your AdSense ID that are not on the list. This would be good for two reasons, It might show some sites that are up to no good, and it would reassure publisher that all their sites have been listed properly.

Update: The Allowed Sites feature seems to be gone from my AdSense control panel. And my Firefox AdSense Notifier that was broken all day seems to be working again. It looks to me like Google rolled back some changes.

Another Update:There is now an AdSense help page for Allowed sites.

Darren at ProBlogger has posted about a new AdSense Online Advisory Council that some AdSense publisher have been asked to join. This council will be made up of publishers who will be able to provide feedback to Google and help test out new products. Of course, everything that the members of this council get to know about will be confidential.

It would be interesting to know what the qualifications for membership are. The invitation email starts out with “Congratulations on your success with the AdSense program. Given your extensive experience with AdSense, I’m happy to invite you to join AdSense’s Online Advisory Council”. I wonder what kind of figures Google sees as a “success” and what it considers “extensive experience”. I would guess that Google wouldn’t simply say “anyone who earns more than $x per month and has been in the program for y months gets an invite”. I would think that they would look at other factors such as quality of traffic, and then pick a nice cross section of publishers of different sizes from different niches.

Overall I think it’s a good thing for Google to do. The more feedback they get from publishers the better. I just hope that they kep listen to all of the publishers out there.

It seems that Yahoo Publisher Network is having some major problems. The following message was presented to YPN publishers today:

You may have noticed a decrease in impressions in your Yahoo! Publisher Network account recently. This is due to a partial outage that occurred during routine maintenance. We are actively addressing the issue and expect improvements by next week. Thanks for your patience.

I know YPN is in Beta, but it’s going to take until next week? That’s a major issue. YPN seems to be loosing publisher anyway because they are not paying out as well as AdSense. These problems are only going to make things worse.

I have been running some YPN ads this week, but I have been changing things around quite a bit, so I’m not sure how many impressions I have been loosing.

Considering they are almost two years into the beta, things are not looking good for YPN. I would have thought they were passed problems like this by now.

The Yahoo! Publisher Network has been in beta for almost 2 years now – the initial announcement was made on August 2th, 2005. I thought this would be a good time to reflect on my experiences with the program so far.

I have been with YPN since the start and have had my ups and downs with them. When I first started using them the revenues were not as good as they were with AdSense. Then in spring of 2006, I noticed that the income started getting a lot better – YPN was actually paying out better then AdSense. I’m not sure what changed, but things were great for a while. I was getting checks bigger than I ever was with AdSense. For a few months it was really good and I had most of my contextual ads with Yahoo. But then it started trailing off, and AdSense once again took over as my main contextual ad source. I try Yahoo again every now and then, but it has been worse than AdSense for over a year now.

The one consistent problem seems to be with targeting. Yahoo ads have never seemed as relevant as AdSense ads. Yahoo does have an ad Targeting feature. This lets you target your ads to 20 categories with 109 subcategories, but these categories seem way too broad. For example, they have an “Automotive” category with subcategories of “Aircraft”, “Automotive Resources”, “Automotive Services”, “Boats”, “Commercial Vehicles”, “Military Vehicles”, “Motorcycles”, “Parts and Accessories”, “Passenger Vehicles”, “Powersport Vehicles”, “RVs” and “Trailers”. Now, if you run a Ferrari enthusiasts site, these general categories are useless. You want only ads about Ferraris but these broad categories will give me ads about all types of cars.

Contextual ads work best when they are laser targeted. If I write a page about blue widgets in Toledo, I want to see ads about blue widgets in Toledo. I don’t want ads about credit cards in Toledo, or purple widgets. The great thing about contextual ads is that they can target exactly what the visitor is interested in at the time, and that causes them to click. Yahoo’s ads seem to miss the mark in this area. I’m not sure if there problems are technological, in that they just don’t do a good job matching, or if they just don’t have enough ad inventory to make good matches. Either way, they need to get this fixed.

Reading through the Digital Point YPN forum, it seems like I am not alone in this assessment of Yahoo. Almost all publishers seem to be saying they now earn more with AdSense than YPN.The common complaint is that YPN’s CTR is horrible compared to AdSense. When clicks do come, they seem to pay more than an average AdSense click, but there just aren’t enough clicks to make it worthwhile. This is due to the poor targeting.

I’m still hoping that things will improve with Yahoo and that they will once again start to have income levels similar to or better than AdSense. I think Google needs some serious competitors in this space to keep them in check.

I finally got around to updating my AdSense Revenue Sharing list. It’s been about 9 months since I updated it, so there were quite a few changes. Many sites were added and removed.

As usual, if you find any problems, or you know of any additional revenue sharing sites, let me know. You can leave a comment in this post or email me. I’ll try not to wait 9 months to do my next update.

AdSense is a great way for beginning Webmasters to make some revenue. There is a lot to like about AdSense – it’s easy to set up, it can display ads in almost any niche, once you have it set you can just forget about it and watch the money build up in your account. A lot of publishers seem to get overly focused on AdSense, and forget that there might be other options out there. But that’s a mistake.

It seems like most people I know who make good money from Websites tend to use more than just AdSense. AdSense may be a good default, but there are so many different ways to make money, people usually diversify and find a lot of different programs that bring in some good income. I do pretty well with AdSense, but a few months ago I tried an affiliate program on my top AdSense site. It ended up paying out more than AdSense does, and my AdSense income hasn’t dropped at all. I’ve also gotten checks from Amazon, Text Link Ads, direct sales, ReviewMe, affiliate programs, and other sources. And I still experiment with different programs all the time.

Look at Darren Rowse, his number one money maker is Chitika, AdSense is #2 on the list. And he lists six other revenue streams.

Look at John Chow, he makes more money from various affiliates, ReviewMe, Direct Sales and Text-Link-Ads than he does with AdSense.

Every webmaster should experiment with different programs for two reasons:

1. It’s good to have diversified income streams – never put all your eggs in one basket.
2. You never know which program or combination of programs will make you the most money. Try lots and lots of affiliate and advertising programs. Some will make you nothing, some will do OK, and then you might hit on one that will make more for you than AdSense ever did. You never know until you try what will make you the most money.

Don’t get me wrong, AdSense is a great advertising network, and should be in the mix of every publisher’s revenue stream, but don’t limit yourself. If AdSense is the only thing you’ve ever tried, go ahead and do yourself a favor and try something new. Here are a few (affiliate) links to try out:

Chitika
AuctionAds
BidVertiser
Text Link Ads
ReviewMe

Google announced today that the new referrals program is out of beta and will soon be available to all publishers.

AdSense referrals is a program that lets you put ads on your site, but instead of being payed per view or per click, you get payed per action. That means in order to get paid the user has to click on the ad and then complete some action such as joining a newsletter or making a purchase. This means that you don’t get paid as often, but when you do get paid its usually a much higher payout then you would for a click. These pay-per-action models are usually associated with affiliate programs.

I’m lucky enough to have been in the initial beta and I have experimented with the referral program. I have had some success, but nothing very dramatic. I think it is worth a try, but I think there are some disadvantages with it compared to some other CPC programs. The two main ones are:

1. You cannot choose the text you want to link with. One great thing about most affiliate programs is that you get to choose what text you want to link with. This makes it easy to slip the link into your normal content with it sounding awkward. This can help raise conversion rates significantly.
2. You cannot choose which page to link to. With most affiliate programs, you can link to any page on a site you want. For example if you are an Amazon.com affiliate and you write a review of a book, you can link directly to the book’s page on Amazon. With AdSense referral you are stuck linking to the page the advertiser chooses, usually the home page.

One advantage of AdSense referral programs is that you can chose the keywords you want to use to display ads. If you have ever had trouble targeting AdSense for Content ads, this could be a great option for you. You can even choose individual ads that you want to display on your site. Again, if you are in a small niche, this could be a great way to get some very targeted ads.

Again, even though there are disadvantages to it, I would advise most publishers to give it a try. You never know which advertising option is going to work best for you.

Advertisers in Google AdWords program now have the ability to get data on the individual sites where their ads are being run. For each domain or URL, advertisers will now be able to see impressions, clicks, and conversion data. This means that advertisers will have good information to decide exactly which sites they want to advertise on.

This should be good news for sites which perform well for advertisers. Sites with data that the advertisers don’t like will see less competition for their ad space, resulting in lower bids.

Found via Search Engine Land

AdSense has updated their program policies with two significant changes:

1) A new paragraph has been added to the Site and Ad Behavior section

Publishers using online advertising to drive traffic to pages showing Google ads must comply with the spirit of Google’s Landing Page Quality Guidelines. For instance, if you advertise for sites participating in the AdSense program, the advertising should not be deceptive to users.

This sounds like it is simply enforcing what Google did when they sent out their emails cracking down on low quality sites. This won’t effect most publishers and will probably only worry those doing arbitrage with MFA sites.

2) AdSense now allows three link units on a page. Previously they only allowed a single link unit. Link ads are fairly small and unobtrusive, so I think this will be a good way for some publishers to increase the number of ads on a page in a way that is not too annoying for users.