AdMoolah News and Views

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.

It’s obvious that Google appreciates AdWords users more than AdSense users. And why wouldn’t they, they’re the ones paying the bills. The AdWords team just announced that there is an AdWords forum available.

AdSense got a blog first and now they get a forum. I hope the AdSense team follows quickly and gets an AdSense forum going. I’ll be looking for a adsense-help Google group soon.

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.

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?

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.