AdMoolah News and Views

A while ago I talked about my disappointing results with the AlternateURL program.

They have recently made improvements that addressed a few of my concern. They now allow customized ad colors, and allow keyword based ads. But, I was very disappointed to see that they only have a single set of color and keyword options per account. That means if you have several websites you still cannot match colors and keywords for all of them. I also have different ad colors depending on the position on the page (header, sidebar, etc), so that won’t work out either.

This is a step in the right direction, but I think they still have some way to go. I may try the customization on one of my website and see how it goes.

Google recently announced the referral program for AdSense. This could be a great new opportunity for publishers, but I think there are some things that could be done better:

1. Allow Text Links – Currently only image ads are provided for referrals. Almost all other programs allow you to have text links for sending referrals. This allows for much more flexible and creative advertising.
2. Allow Customization of Ad Colors – The referral image ads all currently have a white background with white and green foreground. This does not match all sites, and does not allow the opportunity to blend the ads like is done with regular AdSense ads.
3. Allowing Users to Encourage Clicks – Not encouraging users to click ads makes sense in a pay-per-click program. When the ads are pay-per-action, you should be able to talk about the product and encourage people to try it out.

I’m sure I’m missing other things that would be nice to have in this referral program.

OK. After doing to posts on speculation, here is the real scoop. There is a new AdSense Referral program:

Spread the word while increasing your earnings through referrals

With our new referrals feature, you can increase your revenue while increasing your users’ awareness of useful products and services. By adding a referral button to your site, you can direct users to sign up for AdSense and monetize their web content, or to download Firefox with Google Toolbar and improve their web browsing experience.

While your users learn more, you can earn more — US $100 for every new AdSense publisher who earns $100 and up to $1 for every new Firefox user.

You can begin referring users immediately – just visit the Referrals tab within your account, choose the product and the referral button you like best, and add the associated snippet of code to your site. Specific instructions for adding a referral to your site can be found here.

When you log into your AdSense account you will see a new “Referrals” tab where you can get AdSense and Firefox referral buttons. I find it interesting that they only have buttons, and not plain text links as well.

This is a great new addition to the program. I’m sure the forums and blogs will be buzzing with this news for the next few days.

The Firefox referral piece of this is really surprising to me. I think it is great. I’ve been using Firefox for quite some time and I really like it. I’ve added one to the AdSense sidebar.So, here’s my first Firefox referral link:

Darren is pointing to the AdWords referral program today. This is a program that has been around for quite a while now – the earliest reference I could find to it was back in February. It’s an invitation only program that pays you $20.00 when a new AdWords customer signs up using a link from your website.

However, what seems to be new is that the page has a line at the bottom saying:

To learn about the Google AdSense Referral Program, click here.

This link currently takes you to the regular AdSense page at https://www.google.com/adsense/.

As I posted earlier, it seems Google is about to launch a new referral program.

JenSense has posted about changes to the AdSense Policies. The changes involve adding to a “referral button”.

This is very interesting. Google has not announced anything about a referral program, so it is fun to speculate. My guess is its an affiliate program for signing up other AdSense member, much like the recent Chitika affiliate program. I can’t wait to find out what it really is.

The official Google AdSense blog posted an entry about the AdSense experience a site called EngineringTalks has had.

Next, the team experimented with AdSense designs, focusing on optimization through typography and placement. They found the biggest influence on CTR was the similarity between the AdSense type (size and font), and the main body text of the page. The more similar the type, the higher the CTR.

This is an interesting tip, and not something that is mentioned often. I’m sure matching the fonts helps the ads blend in even more. I have tried this a little, but never have really done a full blown experiment with it.

For those who are curious, the EngineeringTalks site uses the following font style in their CSS stylesheet:

font: normal 13px/17px arial,helvetica,sans-serif;

The New York Time has an article which look at Google’s advertising system. Although the focus of the article leans more towards the advertisers side of things rather than publishers, it is still worth a read.

Here are some of the bits that I found interesting.

Because of this technology, users click ads 50 percent to 100 percent more often on Google than they do on Yahoo, Mr. Noto estimates, and that is a powerful driver of Google’s growth and profits. “Because the ads are more relevant,” he said, “they create a better return for advertisers, which causes them to spend more money, which gives Google better margins.” (Yahoo is working on its own technology to narrow that gap.)

This certainly seems to be true given what publishers are saying about YPN vs. AdSense. AdSense seems to have much better CTR than YPN, and relevancy seems to be a big part of it.

Here, as in other places, many advertisers criticize Google for being like a black box, because the company gives them less specific information and control than they would like.

Although I don’t follow the advertiser’s side of things as closely as I do the publishing side of things, this seems to reflect what publishers are feeling. The lack of information about what is happening in the advertising system can be frustrating. So far Google seems to take the approach that the system works, so there is no need to reveal any of the details.

Kevin Scaldeferri, who is a Developer at
Yahoo! Search Marketing has an interesting post.

He is theorizing that one thing that could be affecting the CTR of YPN vs. AdSense could be the length of the ads themselves. Since Yahoo ads allow for a longer descriptions than AdSense does, it is possible that people reading them get a better idea if they really are interested or not. This would lead to a lower CTR, but better conversions.

Google has posted an entry about smart pricing on the Inside AdSense blog.

A lot of it is in line with my last post about smart pricing.

Here are their main point along with some of my own commentary.

1. Many factors determine the price of an ad

This is one thing that makes it so hard to determine how much smart pricing is affecting your earnings. The algorithm for determining CPC is so cpmplex that it is almost impossible for a publisher to know that they have been “hit” by smart pricing. See my post on Why Do AdSense Earnings Vary for more details.

2. Click-through rate doesn’t affect advertiser return on investment (ROI)

This is a mistake that I have seen many people on the forums making. They think removing their low CTR ads will mean they will do better with smart pricing. It is impossible to determine conversion percentage based on CTR, there is no relation between the two numbers.

3. Google doesn’t make money from ‘smart pricing’

As I mentioned in my last post, Google doesn’t use smart pricing to pocket money on the transactions. It provides for better ROI for advertisers, making the system better. A better system for advertisers means they will spend more money, meaning there will be more money to be made for publishers.

4. Remember the old chestnut: “Content is King”

This is something I am constantly saying. Building good quality sites not only brings visitors back, but they will also be genuinely interested in the subject of your site, meaning they will be more likely to click on the ads, and also more likely to converted by advertisers.

One interesting omission from this list is the possibility that smart pricing performance on one site can affect all of the sites in an account. This leads me to think that this might be true. I think it is this fact that has most publishers upset. It doesn’t seem quite fair that they would penalize all sites across an account because of one bad apple. Since Google has all the data it is hard to tell what they are thinking. It could be that the statistics show that if one site in a publishers account does not convert clicks well that it is generally true that the other sites do not convert well either.

One possible solution to this is for publishers who are large enough to open multiple AdSense accounts under different company names. This will allow the to try to segregate poorly performing sites from better ones. The problem with this strategy is that it is still almost impossible to determine which sites convert well. Publishers just don’t have the data.

It’s good to see a little more information on this. I just wish we had some more specifics about what does go into the smart pricing algorithm. I realize this would make it easier to game the system, but it would also relieve some publisher frustration.

AdSense Smart Pricing has gotten a lot of buzz in the past few days. It all started when a thread on WebMasterworld was started by kurtpdx. In it he says Google called him and during that conversation it was revealed that:

1. Smart Pricing can affect multiple sites across an account. That is, if one site in your account get reduced payouts per click because of smart pricing, other sites in your account will also get reduced payouts.
2. Smart pricing is re-evaluated weekly
3. There is a 30-day cookie that Google uses to track conversions.

The reason I called this post Smart Pricing “Rumors” is that none of this has been confirmed. This is second hand information provided by an anonymous poster. And the information he gives is based on a phone call from a single customer service representative at AdSense. It is possible the rep got things wrong, that the poster misunderstood, or that its just a plain fabrication.

One thing that is true is that publishers know very little about smart pricing. This can lead to some wild speculation and lots of frustration. Google is very close lipped about exactly what goes into smart pricing, making it very difficult for publishers to know how to counteract the effects of smart pricing. One of the reasons I started AdMoolah was because Google supplied so little information to the publishers, and this is yet another example of that.

Many people are suggesting trying to remove AdSense ads from poorly performing pages to avoid the effects of smart pricing. I think this is a nearly impossible task for a few reasons:

1. It is impossible to know which pages on a site don’t perform well. Publishers have no visibilty into which clicks on their own sites actually convert to actions on the advertisers site.
2. If Google does use a 30 day cookie to track conversions and it takes up to 7 days to re-evaluate smart pricing on a site, it could take 37 days for any changes to take effect. Given this huge time lag it would be very difficult to ascertain if any changes are actually working. So many other things can happen in such a large time frame it would be nearly impossible to separate the signal from the noise.

Something to remember is that Google doesn’t do this simply to punish bad publishers while lining their own coffers. If smart pricing is applied to a site, Google also gets less money. Smart pricing is there to give the advertisers a better return on advertising dollars.

I think Google should try to do some damage control. The level of frustration from what people perceive to be smart pricing is getting dangerous. People are leaving AdSense to try Chitika and Yahoo Publisher Network, and many are finding success with these other programs.

Additional commentary about this can be found at JenSense and ProBlogger.