AdSense

Seems like I allowed my AdSense account to grow into a mess over the last year. After experimenting with banner placement and different ad units, click tracking became nearly impossible. So, time to clean it up a bit.

I think, I have a major face palm coming my way. For the last couple of weeks I have been wondering why ads for browser games are becoming rampant on my website, severely cutting into my bottom line. I have tried banning them, I have tried rephrasing pages. No luck. The situation just got worse. Even after practically stripping the pages in question naked, they kept coming.

Ok, I admit it, I googled for top paying AdSense keywords. What did I get? Well, I suppose, pretty much the same, everyone else also gets, when looking for this. A long list of phrases containing all kinds of combinations of financial keywords like "debt consolidation", "credit card report", "mortgage refinance rate" and so on, all garnished with an unrealistically high dollar price tag.

Did you ever wonder, how often Google slips you public service ads instead of something that actually pays money? The problem with AdWords is, that advertisers can target countries and regions, meaning, that you might see real banners, while visitors from abroad might just get PSA. Of course, it's possible to use proxies to check, but thats neither reliable, nor convenient and most certainly not safe.

I recently had the epiphany, that Drupal's Blog module is not that great for blogging after all, at least not if you are using your website mainly as a single user blog, like I do.

Over the last few months, I noticed a steady decline in AdSense earnings. Checking the statistics revealed, that this was neither due to decreasing traffic nor a lower clickrate. Both, traffic and clickrate, have been fairly stable. What went down instead, was the earnings per click.

After looking through my website, I came across a couple of well-visited pages, featuring ads for free smiley downloads. Ok, culprit found. Someone, who offers things for free cannot afford to pay a lot per click.

Ok, you have a shiny new website, you have Drupal as a CMS and you have an AdSense account. The only thing you don't have is a clue about why banners are not showing up on your website, even though you copied the AdSense code verbatim into your nodes/blocks.

Does it take time for AdSense to show relevant ads? This is a question, which turns up over and over again in AdSense related web forums and since it popped up verbatim today under "search engine queries" in my webservers statistics, I might as well write a quick article about it.

There are these things, that just make you want to facepalm and today was ripe for that experience. What happened? Well, I was reviewing the ad targeting of several pages on this websites, which were not performing too well CTR wise. By doing so, I came across one, which has computer games as topic, but strangely only showed programming related banners. I checked the text several times.

The most common mistake, people make, when it comes to advertisement is to think, that they are getting paid for making visitors watch ads. This is completely wrong. You are not paid for pestering people with eye blinding and distracting banners and especially not for them merely being clicked. You are paid to help sell products.

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Whenever you write a webpage, you are investing hours of work and hence produce value.