Alex Schultz: APIs

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.

I clicked through and got the following landing page with modal overlay.

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.

Part 2 Median vs Mean: Diminishing return on user value against page views per user

On the margin optimizing to make your experience (yes you, the person reading this now) better is not a good idea for most of the advertising supported websites you use (the one notable exception is Google). I say this because if you are reading this post you must be a web power user :) so view a lot of page views. Their time is better spent working on their least loyal users.

Here is why (using data from my sites).

The deeper a user is into a site the less likely they are to click. The following graph shows CTR by depth (in page views) into my site for a user on ads. For a CPC driven advertising marketplace getting someone with 5 page views to view 6 is half as valuable for me as getting someone with 2 page views to view 3.

This following graph shows the relative value (for me) of getting you from 0-1 impressions on my site, 1-2, 2-3, etc… As you can see the value added is rising to 4 page views and then starts to decline after 4 page views. A while ago I did another post on this showing the double impact of google adsense sell through rate http://www.alexschultz.co.uk/weblog/2007/07/google-adsense-.html as you increase page views per user.

Now don’t get me wrong you are probably a massively valuable user to all the content sites you regularly consume. Below is the revenue per user curve for my sites based on how many page views you have viewed. The last bucket is 6+ (not just 6) so you can see someone who views 6+ pages is 5 times as valuable to me as someone who views one.

That being said my biggest return is by getting all the folks who view 1 page to view 2 and that’s pretty much true for every content publisher I have ever seen (have done a little side consulting for a few companies).

I guess the big question I don’t answer here is how much investment does it take to get a power user to view one more page than getting a low use user to view 2 pages rather than 1 :) Perhaps my note on reducing bounce rate via recommendation engines gives some answer to that.

Planned posts:

• The key to understanding your website
• Diminishing return on user value against page views per user
• Cume vs GRP in offline media and what it means for internet marketing
• How to optimize for the median

I hope you stay with me and read them all :)

Upshot of blocking weight loss ads – 50% of revenue

I made the decision a couple of days ago to remove weight loss (and a bunch of other low quality) ads from my site having been told by a friend that google gives that option.

As you can see from the below image that should have cost me 20% of my revenue (stretching to around 25-30% with everything else I blocked) and with even backfill (as another friend pointed out on my Facebook note) I should really have only lost 10-15% of my revenue. No biggy and a warm feeling at that.

It turns out that isn’t what happened.

So I essentially halved my cocktailmaking.co.uk revenue which definitely cost me $1000s (I am hoping for a rebound in revenue next year as adsense retrains to the new ad selection otherwise this will have cost me more than $1000s :( ).

I still feel good about the decision though. When I was describing the change to my mum she told me about clicking on one of the ads on my site herself and she was smart enough to see it as a scam and pull out.

There is a lot more to be said on this subject. The most important point is that it’s hard for small publishers like me to keep on top of stuff like this but the remnant inventory ad networks can only make decent money by running these scam ads. This creates a very difficult situation.

We really need the brand building $$$ to start flowing online. I have an audience of 400k people this month with the vast majority in the US and UK. A magazine or newspaper with that circulation can command far higher revenue for that. Some day I hope the web will be able to do so as well.

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

Google has this handy feature (which is certainly new from when I started using adsense) that allows you to block weight loss ads. You can find it at this url: https://www.google.com/adsense/site-targeted-ad-review

Mr Mander argued that my last post was unfair and that Google offers me the option to block these ads and that was a fair argument so I have gone ahead and done it. In general I agree with him but given I am a professional in this industry and wasn’t aware of this page (whereas he actually worked on adsense for 2years :)) it certainly suggests it wasn’t very well promoted vs the optimization reports on my homepage that tell me to add multiple ad units per page.

Anyway decision is made. Scammy weight loss ads removed from my site and I hope my users will benefit from a higher quality of ad on my site.

I then went on to block the rest of the exploitative ads on my site (I don’t in general think politics is exploitative although I realize it offends some folks) and I find Google only allows me to block 8 of their 11 categories. Why? This just seems like a silly decision given together they only make around 25% of my revenue.

Ah well. I feel a lot better for blocking these evil ads. You should consider doing it too: https://www.google.com/adsense/save-excluded-ad-categories.do

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.

 

Revenue drivers (or not) in last two years

If you have a website that gets 100k’s of visitors you can make a decent supplementary income from the web. Depending on the topic area you can make a lot. In some niches that can make you a lot more than a decent supplementary income but my sites aren’t in that category (yet :) ). That being said I am lucky enough to have enough revenue and traffic to have fun data to share from time to time. So here are some fascinating points. 4 things have driven my revenue over the last 2 years:

1. Traffic (specifically unique visitors not page views)
2. CPMs (revenue per visitor in effect, I may write another series of posts about this)
3. The bubble in video revenue around revver’s funding and the subsequent collapse in that bubble
4. The economy collapsing and now the start of the recovery

The below graph shows the collapse in revenue per visitor after Sep 07 when revver CPMs started to tank

The below graph shows year on year revenue growth which you can see took an initial hit post revver changes but tanked even harder in the middle of 08. I firmly believe advertising revenue for smaller sites is a great indicatory of economic trajectory (around the last recession my cpms tanked and then the news started talking of recession the same happened here).

Overall visitors have grown through this whole period very nicely. Page views have not since I have optimized for things like video views which users seem to love but means they view less pages.

And revenue has now recovered very nicely so that November was almost equal to the video bubble peak with revver paying out huge amounts for video views. In general I think this emphasizes that your view should always be on the long term… build traffic, build audience, make your sites better and revenue will follow over a multi-year period.

So I am focusing on integrating social more and more right now into my sites and adding more video. Looking at the multi-year web trend I believe that’s where the future is so better get to it sooner rather than later. The present will take care of itself.

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 the following 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. This is also not the first time I have seen Google funding this kind of abuse.

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. A couple of examples of urls showing up would be:

http://www.cocktailmaking.co.uk/displaycocktail.php/241-Slippery-Nipple?test=test

http://www.cocktailmaking.co.uk/displaycocktail.php/241-Slippery-Nipple?test=control

http://www.cocktailmaking.co.uk/displaycocktail.php/435-Blue-Lagoon?test=test

http://www.cocktailmaking.co.uk/displaycocktail.php/435-Blue-Lagoon?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 :)