Alex Schultz

Category: adsense

  • AdSense Dependant and Independant Variables

    Oh man this is a head screwer!

    For a while now I have been tracking two things which have a strong impact on my adsense earnings for any given adsense impression: How many pages a visitor has seen on my site and what site referred them to my site.

    Now I’ve been treating these variables as independant which means I have tracked them seperately assuming no interplay between the way these two variables impact my adsense clicks. This is moronic the variables couldn’t be more strongly tied together if the hypothesis I have for “why” google referred visitors have higher CTRs than non Google:

    If the first reason holds true then browsing through my site it is clear that the ads on the “paper blimp” page are v. different from the ads on the paper airplanes homepage. It would then also hold true that:

    If this holds true you would expect the drop off in the ctr for a google user to be far greater from the first page viewed to 4th page viewed than for a non google user. The good news is I can test this and see if these variables are independant and whether I should treat them as such but the bad news is I can’t kick this off until after eBay Live due to my commitments over the next month.

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  • Does mybloglog reduce adsense earnings?

    I have grown to really appreciate mybloglog, I think it’s a totally awesome tool. Also as an internet marketing professional I think that Yahoo! got mybloglog for a song. With the distribution this widget gets I am sure there are some quite incredible opportunities for mybloglog to earn millions a year in revenue. However 2wks ago I added mybloglog to my paper airplanes site to see if I could create a community around that site which would be totally awesome. With c. 150 000 unique visitors a month it seemed like a good idea.

    The above graph shows my daily CPM for my left hand adsense skyscraper since the start of 2007 (although I have removed the absolute amounts from the left axis). On adding the my blog log widget (directly below the adsense ad) the CPM dropped dramatically and interestingly as the below graph shows the CTR % stayed the same through that period so effectively for some reason my average CPC dropped.

    I don’t know if it is google detecting there are images close to the adsense ad, I don’t know if it’s mybloglog changing Google’s opinion of my page quality for the adsense crawl or what (it certainly isn’t people clicking on mybloglog and joining my community 🙁 – it didn’t work for paper airplanes, that’s why I took it off) but somehow there was a directly correlated change both when I added my blog log and when I removed it on my CPMs through adsense. I’d love to hear if anyone else has seen the same or if I am just a screw up 🙂

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  • Give up completely on CPM ad networks… NOW

    On my sites video advertising revenue is the big growth area. The following graph shows how my advertising revenue sources (% wise) have changed over the past two years (yellow – video, reddish purple – adsense, blue – cpm ads). I have made no changes to my use of “display” or CPM advertising (the blue area) but I have added adsense and video in completely new placements on my sites.

    You can see an almost perfect inverted ‘S’ curve as the revenue driven by display advertising has fallen as a proportion of my site revenue to only 20% from 100% in under a year. Video is now showing similar growth to Adsense and the overall pie is continuing to grow very nicely (up ~300% since Jan ’05). The question that comes to me now is… how worthwhile is it to show video ads, contextual ads AND banner ads?

    Digging a little deeper the average click on a CPM banner effectively earns me 1/3 of the average click on a contextual ad and something like 1/30 of a video ad plus I get approx 50% of the clicks I get on contextual ads on my CPM ads. So if these users were to click on adsense (at only the CPM click through rate) instead I could make 3x more revenue from those same impressions. It isn’t likely to be that great but even if they were 1/2 as likely to click on the adsense ads as the CPM ads the revenue would be 50% higher for those same visitors.

    A final point is this. Taxes are getting very important to my little business now that it’s getting to be a large chunk of my income and having a multitude of advertising partners is becoming painful on my tax returns so I want to consolidate my revenue streams and hence minimize my accounting costs. Things are looking bad for the lifespan of CPM ads on my site. With a bit of luck they will be gone completely by April and I will let you know the results of banishing them.

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  • YouTube vs Revver the fight is on

    I am very excited about this recent post on bbc news stating YouTube is intending to start sharing it’s revenue with it’s users!

    Since revver is now making a good 10-20% of the revenue I get on my paper airplanes website. I started off using YouTube for the videos on my site and now have c. 300k views on my YouTube videos but just a 3 short months later shifted to revver since they paid me for my videos and I have now earned just shy of $1000 from them and been paid $700 of that through paypal (quality service doubt youtube will do that 🙁 ).

    The questions I have outstanding are:

    1. Will YouTube allow you to earn money from embedded videos or just on YouTube?
    2. How will the ads work, are they inline or are they the ones surrounding the videos?
    3. Did the you tube founder just tread on his tongue by saying this in the quiet period pre earnings :s ?

    Overall this is a great shift and one I have been hoping for for a while. It opens up a whole new territory on the web for people like me who create how to sites and have skills to share (as well as kids who set themselves on fire and steal copyrighted material 😉 ) and with a big power in advertising behind it (Google) I am totally stoked.

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  • eBay Related Searches through Get Search Results

    Ok I am simply blown away by the latest offering from the eBay API as an awesome way to make a bunch of money. eBay is now revealing (without the data + formula behind it of course) the results of their related searches algorithm. When you search on eBay for “tmx” on eBay at the moment it will give you 937 items but just above that it will give you the following related searches: ps3, wii, tmx elmo, tickle me elmo, playstation 3

    This is really useful information you can use to determine (as a paid search advertiser for example) hey I don’t want to buy keyword “tmx” it’s too pricey but keyword “tickle me elmo” is closely related… I will buy that instead and send the clicks to the same page as TMX. This data is quite simply awesome and exposed world wide for free. Make use of it and you’ll do great, esp. as an ebay affiliate and you can access it via the REST API, I am playing with this and a little bit of MAA right now 🙂

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  • Using Revver For Videos Instead of YouTube

    A while back I wrote a post about paying for user generated content. As someone who generates a lot of content on the web and knows the value it can bring I believe very passionately in this topic.

    For almost two months now I have been recording videos of folding paper airplanes and posting them to my YouTube account but also linking them from my paper airplane website. The videos have been seen 150 000 times in under two months… pretty good going in my mind. Every time the video is shown YouTube gets free advertising and free promotion on my site. I help increase awareness and consideration of YouTube outside the usual web2.0 style audiences who already know about their product.

    In return the pay a lot of money for bandwidth which I couldn’t afford and that is cool. I still however feel they are earning more from me than I am from them. This is where revver comes in. Revver pays me to show people videos on my site in a revenue share stylee. When someone views a video on my site to the very end they see an advert. If they click on that advert I get a 50% revenue share.

    I am already earning $6 a day with less than 1/5 of the potential exposure I could give these videos and only 1/2 of the exposure YouTube is currently getting on my site. I will continue to add videos to revver and see what money I can make from improving my user experience.

    I am even on the verge of finally giving up the crack that is pop unders.

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  • Adsense Google referrer test – the results

    In my earlier post about using php setcookie() for an adsense test, I set up a test to see whether traffic sent to my site from Google behaves different to traffic sent to my site from non Google domains. The results confirm my thoughts that Google users are more likely to click on Google Ads.

    The Google user’s CTR is significantly higher than non Google users. However the CPC for non Google traffic tends to be equally or more valuable. So essentially clicks from traffic sent to my site by other search engines are equally or more valuable than those from Google, however Google-referred traffic is far more likely to click on Google ads.

    Above all this test has taught me one thing. I am massively frustrated with only 200 channels in Google Adsense for Content. This is far too low to do the testing I want to do.

    Come on Google, you guys know data, you guys are excited by the interplay of variables, why not let me get access to that data and really play with it?

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  • Geotargetting, IP sniffing and behavioral targeting has a bright future

    I saw some very interesting research from Forrester today about the growth of online advertising. They feel that the growth of direct response advertising like PPC will at some stage be outpaced by brand advertising, banners and so on, online.

    Look at it this way, of my sites my cocktail recipes site has a smaller level of traffic than my paper airplanes site but the cocktail recipes traffic is predominantly adults in the 18-35 bracket which is definitely of more value to banner advertisers.

    Users unknowingly tell webmasters and ad networks a lot about themselves. Operating system, referring domain, browser and version, JavaScript enabled. I am positive that someone who elects to use firefox is telling you something meaningful about themselves.

    Geotargetting is already huge at a country level and is the first step into more granular targeting of users. A typical way of monitoring offline ad performance is to have dark regions and light regions and then observing what happens in each region.

    Google has made a move with CPM banners into their adsense network but I wonder if their brand has the elasticity to stretch beyond being a highly targeted direct response advertiser. There is a space here for someone else to really nail this… could it be Yahoo?

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  • Using PHP setcookie() for an adsense test

    I have wondered for a long time whether people who come to my site via google behave differently in respect to ads than other users. There are lots of reasons for wondering this but specifically for now I am thinking that potentially someone who has just come from google may be more likely to click on an adsense link than someone who has come from somewhere else.

    Thankfully I have 10s of k’s of ad impressions daily to test this on and the technology isn’t exactly challenging. I have set up a cookie on every page of my largest site that drops on a users computer once every 72hrs where they have been referred from.

    Then lower down the page on every page I have a similar include that powers my advertising. Within this include I read in the cookie and test whether it contains the string “.google.” (not perfect I know but good enough for my purposes.

    Note the === in the strpos() function is because strpos() doesn’t always return false when it is false therefore you have to look for responses equivalent to false (===) rather than just equal to false (==). So for me this looks like it could be a really interesting test, I will of course paste the results of the test here and if there’s any substantial difference in results I will of course make changes to capitalize.

    I may choose later to also split out people with cookie blocking (since I love vinny’s article) and see how they behave but for now I will just let the results tick over like this for a couple of weeks.

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  • Paying for community created content

    Postbubble has an awesome article today about digg, netscape, social news and remuneration for community driven content. I think this is a really interesting area since there is inherent value in content created by the community but there is also value in giving people a soap box.

    At the moment digg, amazon reviews, wikipedia and even webmasterworld run on a similar basis to speaker’s corner… I like the sound of my own voice, I love having an audience hence I contribute.

    There are however a new breed of sites out there that are starting to pay people to create content. Some examples are Google Video, forums.digitalpoint.com, Netscape Navigators and About.com guides.

    The old adage goes there is no better price than free but as a contributor, you know what? I want to get paid.

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