Experimenting with Google AdSense
I’ve just installed the Advertising-Manager plug-in and set up a widget to display a small Google AdSense advertising unit (120×240) in the upper right margin of each page.
Since this blog draws very little traffic, I doubt I’ll see any meaningful revenue, but I decided it would be interesting to see what ads are displayed by Google on my pages.
Please let me know if you see any objectionable ads (either post a comment, or email to Mark Welch at Mark Welch dot com).
The idea of adding a Google AdSense unit came to me in a very roundabout way: I was restoring some very old articles (see the “Web Advertising in 1997” category), and I was amused to read the 1999 web page announcing the planned sale of the Adbility.com web site. Reading that page, I noticed that I actually owned and sold the domain AdCents.com in 1999 (before Google created the AdWords or AdSense programs). Somehow, thinking about that made me wonder which ads Google AdSense would display on my blog pages.
When I’d used AdSense in the past, I often found that it took a while to start inserting relevant ads onto content pages — and sometimes it would display ridiculous ad choices, even after many adviews for a particular content page. However, so far this afternoon, I am seeing highly relevant ads displayed adjacent to category and article pages.
FYI: I’ve just removed the AdSense ad unit from the site.
I was generally pleased at the ad “targeting”; most ads were reasonably relevant to the content pages where they appeared.
After 16 days, AdSense was generating an eCPM (effective cost-per-thousand pageviews) of $2.29. That’s probably “above average” for a general-interest blog site.
However, this blog currently has very little traffic, so I don’t think it’s worthwhile to continue displaying these ads here, at this time.
I’ve re-arranged the right-margin menu, replacing the full category list with a drop-down menu.
I’ve also placed a 250×250 AdSense block into the middle of the right-column menu — but only for pages in “non-business” categories.
No ads should appear on pages about internet marketing.
Today, I noticed that advertisements were not being displayed properly; specifically, ads are appearing on pages where the ads were turned off. I’ve disabled the advertising manager plug-in.
Just to let you know that I have placed a formal complaint with Google Blogger on the copyright issue of using my name on the offensive advertisers web site, and linking to my web page on the offending web site. This web site had several ads from Google so when I first looked at it I was so mad that all I could see were the Google ads and thought that Google had something to do with the web site using my name. I don’t think this is the case now. I have sent an email to the admin of the offending web site with the Yahoo email address that I found on Whois. I don’t really know if Google had anything to do with this. It could all be a Yahoo matter with my copyright being violated by my name being used on the advertisers web site and the link to my copyrighted blog page being on the offending advertisers web site. I hope that Google will be able to resolve this issue for me if it is with Google or if it is with Yahoo.
Thanks,
Carol