Angry in the Great White North

Regular visitors know that for the last 18 months, I've been running with Pajamas Media ads down the right rail. For various reasons, none of them related to any sort of disappointment with Pajamas Media, because there was no such disappointment, I've decided not to renew my contract and take a new path with regards to monetization.

The most important factor was a desire to move to a model that better rewarded the spikes in traffic I would see once or twice a month. For that I needed a click sensitive ad scheme that did not average click traffic rates over entire quarters.

First, for banners, I've resurrected my BlogAds account. Because ads can run for as short as a week, I can adjust the prices for ads very quickly after a sustained change in traffic rates, if one occurs. BlogAds is a great scheme, but part of its success comes from the exclusivity of membership. For most bloggers, it simply is not an option.

The other part of my plan is deploying Google AdSense. Google AdSense is open to everybody, and the difference between BlogAds and Google AdSense is interesting.

BlogAds focuses on the bigger blogs, few in number but high in traffic.

Google AdSense can be deployed on blogs with tiny traffic. But the aggregate accumulation of traffic spread over all those small blogs is called "the long tail", and adds up to a lot of traffic. Google AdSense is the means by which Google picks up all the money left on the table by the other players.

That is not a criticism of BlogAds, by the way, but a recognition of the different business models.

More importantly, Google AdSense rewards discreet clicks. If you average 200 clicks a day, you will earn in a certain range. But if one day your traffic spikes by a factor of 10, your Google AdSense revenue for the day ought to increase just about the same way. If your traffic drops back down entirely to the old rate the next day, your previous earnings are not affected.

You might be wondering if I've got any initial results. I do, but first some advice on how to do AdSense right.

Recognize that Google AdSense puts ads on your page based on the search engine's understanding of what your page is about. So make sure you are following good search engine optimization principles. Good SEO is an important part of the following list of good AdSense practices:

1. Each page ought to focus on one topic.
2. Imagine what keywords are likely to map to paying ads, and make sure those keywords appear in your title (especially the title tag of the page, and not just the title of the post), in the meta tag description, in the meta tag keywords list, and, of course, in the post itself. Remember, too, that keywords inside of anchor text are given special attention by the Google algorithm.
3. Use text ads in favour of image ads.
4. Take time to format the ads. In particular, make the ads flow with the rest of the page in terms of colour schemes and font choices.
5. If possible, insert the ads into the flow of the text, maybe just below the first paragraph. The next best spot is above the article. Skyscraper ads are not generally as successful.
6. Whatever else you do, don't click on the ads yourself. Remember that you get paid for each click, so clicking on the ad could be construed as an attempt to put a few pennies in your account without any intention of interacting with the advertiser.
7. Remember too that Google has pretty advanced schemes for filtering out click fraud. Quality traffic will earn you quality clicks. Crappy traffic (momentary visits driven by poor quality link exchanges, for example) will result in few clicks, and few of those might actually count.

How is it going? I don't want to divulge numbers, but suffice it to say that the results over the last four hours already reached 33% of the total click and dollar earnings for all of February (those came from Google search and referral clicks from a different site not running Google AdSense). It will be interesting to see if the results remain consistent over time.

Are you running Google AdSense on your site? If not, considering registering and employing some of my ideas on your site. Click the link below: