Alex Schultz

Category: adsense

  • This disgusts me or maybe it just makes me sad

    I am always looking for new ways to monetize my sites. I have 0.5MM users visiting monthly (give or take) but only make $10k’s a year. Not really a great ratio (according to my friends). As such I was interested to see what the following company was doing by buying adsense on my site.

    For those of you who can’t see the text says “I accept the Terms & Conditions for $9.99/mo billed to my cell until I cancel for Access to How To Guides” and is clearly placed in a very hard to read font over an orange background. This sucks. They also do a really good job of retargeting you back to the article you were interested in if you close the browser and navigate to their homepage. The form too is super well optimized (in my opinion). Whoever does this is very good at what they do. Interestingly it seems the Google search index considers them spam, they are barely in it at all:

    I can totally see how (were I to do this on paper airplanes and cocktail recipes how I could get rich quick. There is no question I could game this to get a few % conversion and even if everyone cancelled after one month I’d make 10ks a month. I just feel it’s pretty immoral and now I am making money off this and my users are getting deceived through adsense. This isn’t adsense’s fault, how are they supposed to police this and even then it’s borderline whether this is illegal/in violation of their terms or not.

    Last year I deselected all deceptive ads from adsense and I recently ran the numbers on those. I think I cost myself $20k in the last 12months . That being said even with the following settings I couldn’t block the above ad:

    I have now made “howtotutorials.net” a blocked site for my ads and I don’t blame adsense at all. To be clear it’s the recurring billing and minimized terms I dislike. I think it’s ok to say “pay me XX through your cell to view your content”, that’s a pay wall and raising one of those is your decision as a webmaster. I just feel sad that so much of advertising on the internet is like this. We should be better. I need a new business model.

  • Google: we’ll serve scam ads but won’t put our logo on them

    Here are two ads served consecutively on my site by Google adsense both are graphical ads. Google branding is very clear on the second ad but not the first.

    Google scam ads comparison

  • Upshot of blocking weight loss ads: 50% of revenue

    Well the results are in from blocking weight loss ads from adsense and it’s pretty brutal. I’ve lost approximately 50% of my adsense revenue. That’s a significant hit but I still think it was the right thing to do. Those ads were misleading and I don’t want to make money from deceiving my users. I’ll need to find other ways to make up the revenue shortfall.

  • Revenue drivers (or not) in last two years

    Looking back at the revenue data for my sites over the past two years has been really interesting. I can see clear patterns in what drives revenue and what doesn’t. Seasonal trends are huge – cocktail searches spike in summer and around the holidays. Paper airplanes peak during school holidays. Understanding these patterns helps me plan content and optimization work more effectively.

  • I just cost myself $1000s blocking weight loss ads from adsense

    I got annoyed at some of the ads on my site for a long time ago. They were mainly weight loss ads and they just seemed to be everywhere on the internet. I’ve now blocked them across adsense and I think it’s going to cost me a fair amount of money. I’ll report back on the financial implications but for me I just think these ads are misleading and I don’t want them on my sites any more.

  • I Got Hacked

    So probably one of the worst things that has happened to me online ever happened 2 weeks ago… my site was hacked. I hadn’t upgraded the version of adlogger I was using on the site and someone inserted some malicious code which then took over my site redirecting any visitor to a pure adsense page.

    Google spotted this and took action which utterly decimated my website traffic but I wholeheartedly applaud Google for doing… 100% the right thing to do and interestingly they spotted the issue at essentially the same time as I did and removed it from the site so great job by them!

    The one thing that does frustrate me about this is that Google funded the hacker. It’s obviously terrible I got hacked and I have revised my processes to hopefully make things better but it’s doubly terrible that hackers are now funding themselves via Google AdSense… Given the experience I have in this marketplace through my affiliate work over the years it is also clear that people don’t do this unless they are getting away with it, so Google can’t be taking the money from them fast enough to dissuade them from doing this… that’s the only way it works.

  • Google Analytics Regular Expressions

    I was using Google analytics regular expressions on Saturday to try and understand how my cocktail making relationship engine had worked out. As I was using the regular expressions I noticed that there were very few resources to help you get them right for Google Analytics so in case you are interested here are my tips.

    First the regular expression variables supported by google analytics:

    . match any single character
    * match zero or more of the previous items
    + match one or more of the previous items
    ? match zero or one of the previous items
    () remember contents of parenthesis as item
    [] match one item in this list
    – create a range in a list
    | or ^ match to the beginning of the field
    $ match to the end of the field
    \ escape any of the above

    Some real examples:

    If you are looking for the page index2.php then your regular expression should be “index2\.php” you want to escape the “.” with the / since that will make the regular expression run faster as Google will now only look for the “.” character and not “any character” which is the special meaning of “.”.

    I have a regular expression “displaycocktail.php” within all my cocktail recipe pages. For the test group I was passing ?test=test on the end of that URL to google analytics and for the control group ?test=control.

    If I wanted to see just the control group I would use the reg exp “displaycocktail\.php/.*test=control” where the “.*” means match any number of characters at this point in the regexp.

    Hopefully this (esp. the working examples) are useful for you to get started.

  • Tickle.com – impressive revenue generator

    I am a little bit of a sucker for anything that makes me feel clever and so for the first time in a very long while I clicked on a banner ad yesterday. The advert took me to tickle.com and an IQ test.

    This IQ test was pretty cool and took 12 pages to complete. Once I had completed the test it through me into a string of 6 co-brand sign ups before I got the results of my test. Each page carried 3 cpm banners from rotating sources. I can get a $1cpm so I expect they should be able to get the same or better. Just the banner ads earned them $0.036 from me doing the test. Each of the 6 cobrands make >$1 per sign up so again low balling it let’s say 1 in 10 signs up to only 1 that’s another $0.1 a visitor from one test their earning is at least $0.14 and they claim almost 0.5billion tests served, that’s $70MM in revenue with the conservative estimates above.

    This however isn’t the end of the game. Today I received the following email:

    Another smart move, I clicked and visited their site, being pushed through multiple pages of co-brand sign ups again, returning to the site and being merchandized a bunch of other pretty cool looking tests, which the internet marketer side of my brain stopped me from taking but I strongly considered.

    Tickle.com is owned by Monster.com so it isn’t that surprising that they are really professional and good at what they do but it’s pretty cool to see such a smoothly operating affiliate/cpm business model out there where arbitrage traffic purchasing is a real opportunity. Great job Tickle.com and keep it up.

  • Google Adsense Defaults

    Recently I noticed that only about 56% of my page views are having adsense ads served on them and I am serving a lot of Google Adsense Defaults. Looking at the distribution of page views on my site and where the Google Defaults were being shown was very telling.

    The above graph shows the % of times google shows an adsense ad when I serve the google adsense skyscraper code on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc… page a user views on my site. It also shows the % of my page views that fall against each of those buckets. ~25% of my page views come on the first page viewed by a user on my site and 50% of page views come on the 6th and greater pages viewed by my users on my site but on that crucial bucket Google is serving AdSense ads <20% of the time.

    It seems Google Adsense simply is uninterested in users who have seen an adsense placement 4 times in a row on my site and not clicked. In this case they roll in your Google Adsense Default selection. That seems pretty fair to me and tallies up with what I have seen in past analysis. What I don’t like is that Google only lets me have a static A HREF and IMG banner as my default… that is pants. I would like to fill in with CPM ads from a mix of Burstmedia and Valueclickmedia (my two favourite CPM networks). So what I am going to do now is to swap out the majority of Google impressions for users seeing their 5th page or better but keep a small Google rotation in there so I can monitor if things change. I am going to do that when I get home from my holidays 🙂

    The one thing I would like to change in this market today is for CPM and CPC networks to have API’s via which I can reliably pull my earnings and optimize what I am doing. That would revolutionize how I make revenue off my site and I estimate increase my earnings by c. 85% through serving the right ad to the right person at the right time. If anyone knows how I could get this set up I would be really stoked so let me know 🙂

  • Revver Blows Me Away Again

    I want revver to win in online video… badly. These guys do a really fantastic job on quite a few fronts. #1 they pay you a revenue share of the money they make with your content. #2 their product just works… no fuss no faff, upload your video and go. #3 they don’t shy away from user forums so I am confident can give my input and will be heard.

    They even have a developer program which I hadn’t even looked at man I have ideas how I can make money with that. Today’s post is however all about their analytics.

    They now offer me reports by video for the revenue I am making

    They also graphically displaying completion rates for videos.

    Using this data I can do a lot of optimization for my site of which videos to display and where. Ideally I would like to be able to do some more granular tracking by inserting my own tracking ID by which I can report as well. Perhaps some classes of user do not convert well into advertising dollars and so I shouldn’t show them a video. Perhaps some users only ever view videos and so I should put the video above the fold for that class of user. Who knows? I would love to track it.

    The future is bright for people exploring online videos to help improve user experience AND make money. Long live revver and their undeniable talent…