So my little experiment into putting ads on scottfeldstein.net has been fun. Here are a few things I learned:
- Google AdSense counts my traffic in a far more conservative way than my own (pretty stock) installation of webalizer. Webalizer says I’m getting over 3,000 page views per day; AdSense says I’m getting a five hundred “page impressions” on a good day. There are some reasonable explanations for the discrepancy, but it’s discouraging nonetheless.
- I only earn money when people click on ads; I get nothing “per thousand page impressions,” as I previously thought.
- On a positive note, it only takes a few clicks a day to be meaningful. Just three ad clicks can give me $0.50 revenue for the day.
- That’s not bad! At $0.50 per day, 27 days in a month… that’s $13.50 per month, which adds up to my first $100 check earned in about 8 months. That’s better than a kick in the teeth, I guess.
- I didn’t often get those 3 clicks. Many days I got none at all.
- I have had ads running for ten days. I have earned exactly $1.25. That’s a measly $0.12 a day.
- At that rate, putting aside increases in my traffic, I should collect my first $100 check in 2.5 years.
So I think I’ll take the ads down.
At least Tristan Lewis thinks my blog is worth something, though:
My blog is worth $19,194.36.
How much is your blog worth?
you’ll probably find that your performance would improve a little if:
1. you changed the ad design to blend withyour content (ie make the borders and background of the ads the same color as the background behind them and change the link colors of the ads to the same colors as your links)
2. had ads closer to your content. Having them in the sidebar and the banner position is found to be much worse than other positions. AdSense have come up with a heat map that has better positions in it (just search for AdSense heatmap and you’ll find it).
3. your blog’s topic was more focussed. Sites which are fairly general in topic tend to do worse than those that target specific niches. Looking over your content I suspect that this might be part of the issue.
There are loads of other little things I’d recommend – but these are three of the biggies I suspect.
Anyway – all the best with it!
Darren
Interesting ideas, Darren. I would think making the ads blend in might actually reduce clicks, but what do I know! I might be willing to place ads closer to the content, but the annoyance factor might prevent me from placing them too prominently. I’d have to really evaluate that carefully. Item number three is out of the question. I blog about a myriad of topics because the b log isn’t about any one of them: it’s about me. Still, I don’t know if I’ll give up entirely on this endeavor. Perhaps there are ways, as you say, to make this work out better.
hope you don’t mind but I just posted about this as a case study as I think it’s an issue that MANY bloggers have. I also added another quick tip and expanded a little on one of the points.
The blending principle is odd – I thought the more prominent they were the better they’d perform too – but in almost every case I’ve tried blending it increases performance.
In terms of placing them closer – I hear your concern over having them in annoying positions but again I find that if you blend them they can actually be quite subtle.
In terms of your topic – I’d recommend not changing your topic just to make the ads perform better. I only included that because I thought it might help explain whey they don’t perform brilliantly. Better to be true to yourself and make little (or nothing) than selling out
btw – the traffic discrepancy could be that Adsense only counts page impressions where ads are showing. I noticed when I viewed some of your pages that I couldnt see the ads as Adsense seemed to have trouble finding relevant ads for some reason (perhaps for the reason I mention in my post regarding title tags).
Anyway – hope some of this helps
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Hi Scott,
Another thing… although difficult if you have many people linking to your site, is that you might wanna update your permalink structure. Your ads will be better targeted when your post-slug refers to the post content/title.
You can some more information on that here.
You just convinced me not to even think about ads on my page.
Scott, One thing that might work with the design of your site is creating a little more space between the header and the posts and sidebar. Not a lot, just enough to make use to the link unit ads. You could have 4 or 5 links there that would like like navigation on your site. It is a change in the layout of the site, but a minor one.
I can’t speak from experience since I’m not exactly getting rich from my own ads, but most of the success stories seemed to have one thing in common. They all tried a large variety of ads and tracked them by setting up channels. Over time they started removing the ad types that weren’t working so well and replacing them with the ones that were doing better.
I do also think Darren’s suggestion of making the ads blend more into the site is a good one. We’ve all become immune to ads on any site so even though they may tend to stand out it’s easy for us to ignore them. If they blend in more I think they’re more likely to get clicked.
Scott,
My blog was suffering from monetization malaise too. However, once I started following Darren’s advice (and others in the blogosphere), adopting near-subliminal advertising, increased earnings have started to trickle through.
John
aah yesh – Steve’s advice is good as well. I didn’t even notice the URLs. Its fiddley to do but a good tip which would not only help with the ads but also with the SEO of your blog.
Of course there is only so much you’ll want to do to tweak things – but all of this stuff can have an impace.
Another one is to use meta tags that have the keywords you’d want to target in them. won’t work as well on a general topic blog though as your words will be hard to match with your wide variety of topics.
Or, you could just drop them.
Yes I could. But if I thought I could make a couple hundred dollars a year off this site by doing nothing different than I do now (except the careful placement of google ads) then I’d do it. As it stands now, that goal is not met. But perhaps it yet can be…
I have attempted to make a few of the changes suggested by Darren in his great blog article found here:
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/03/24/adsense-blog-case-study/
We’ll see if that doesn’t improve things a bit!
I’ve followed Darren’s advice every since I found his blog a month or so ago and while I’m not earning the 1000′s others are I have seen an increase in my traffic and earnings. Post a lot so the google bot comes around a lot and the earnings should follow.
The site is looking much better with the blending Scott.
Remember too that ads for Blogs are not going to make you rich- unless you are Darren, of course ; )
Posting semi-anon as I don’t want to attract attention, but I make $20 per day with AdSense on my blog. My blog is very unfocused and untargeted, so it is totally possible. That’s on about 1000 impressions a day. I also make about the same again from another text link service on top. All legit.
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Very good forum! Good info!
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Well, thanks!
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