by psionmark on November 5, 2007
I’ve read a number of posts on the blogosphere about reducing the number of AdSense ads on your site actually increasing the revenue you get. So, I’m giving it a try on FlightSimX. I’ve removed my 160×600 sidebar and 480×60 header and left just the one 300×250 inline ad and will see how it goes for a week or so.
It makes sense, I guess. If there’s less ad space on your site, there’s less ads for advertisers to “bid” on, so you should get the higher CPC ads showing. I’ll report back when/if I see any impact.
On the subject of ads, I’ve been trying out Pubmatic. You tell them which ad networks you belong to - they currently cover around 10 and will be adding more in due course. You then design your ad, selecting the type, size, ad network etc and they then supply you with a small chunk of Java code to pop into your site where you’d like the ads to appear. The neat bit is that it constantly monitors the ads performance and serves up the best performing ads automatically for you after an initial “training” period.
Again, I’ll report back when I’ve let it run a while, but first impressions are favourable.
by psionmark on October 25, 2007
Further to my previous post on WidgetBucks, they’ve now updated their code to speed up loading. I’m not convinced it’s that much quicker, but it’s good to see they’re trying to resolve the problem. WidgetBucks sent out an email to users last night:
One of the concerns we’ve heard from many of you has been the slow loading times of our widgets. We really appreciate your feedback and comments in helping us improve in this area. So, today we addressed this issue by rolling out new code that ultimately delivers faster loading widgets.
You need to re-install your widget code to take advantage of the changes.
I’ll keep an eye on it and report back in a week or so.
by psionmark on October 23, 2007
I’ve been trying out WidgetBucks on a few of my blogs for the past few weeks. If you’ve not heard of them before, they’re a fairly new company that lets you create an advertising widget to place on your blog or web site - look at the sidebar here on Psionmark for an example.
Widget creation is pretty straightforward. You specify the size and colour of your widget, then tell it the category of items you’d like to appear in the widget, or tell it to automatically select items based on the content of your site/blog. Once you’ve finished creating it, simply drop the supplied code into your page and you’re set.
Clickthrough rates have been pretty good. On one of my sites, I’ve seen as high as 10%, which is better than any other product I’ve tried. One nice little incentive is that they’re offering a $25.00 bonus for new signups. Once you’ve received $25.00 from the ad placements, they’ll add the $25.00 bonus to your account.
Despite this, I’ve decided to, at least for now, remove it from my most popular blog. There are 2 main reasons for this:
- The ads shown are not particularly relevant to the content of the blog
- Speed. These widgets slow down the page load way too much. I was taking a hit of more than 10 seconds which, frankly, is not acceptable
This is a shame, as the ads themselves look pretty slick and I think they draw the eye of readers, which is a good thing. I’m going to leave them in place for now on my other lower traffic sites and I’ll keep an eye on their performance. If I see a sudden improvement in either speed or number of categories - or preferably both - I’ll reconsider them for my main site.
by psionmark on October 8, 2007
As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, I’m often experimenting with various advertising elements on my sites. One that has worked quite well is AuctionAds. AuctionAds display eBay items matching keywords you select when defining your ad. You can also modify the colours of the ad to blend in with your site. Once you’ve specified the parameters of the ad, you simply paste the supplied code onto your site/blog and you’re done.
AuctionAds offers near real-time reporting on click through rates etc. Reporting of actual income
AuctionAds
by psionmark on October 5, 2007
I run ads on some of my sites and I try to keep them as closely related to the contents of the site as possible, for obvious reasons.
I’ve been trying out some of the new Amazon widgets on one of my sites, in particular the Context Links. These ads scan the content of your page and offer ads to match the content. In theory. Of course, they can only look at the individual words themselves, buy they do a reasonable job.
The content of the site in question is flight simulation. So, imagine my surprise when I looked over the orders received as a result of these ads for the past week, only to discover that only one item ordered was flight simulator related. The other items that visitors had ordered had absolutely nothing to do with the content of my site. My question is not why Amazon served those ads so much as what made a visitor to the site click on an ad and order an item that had nothing to do with the site they were on!
I’m not complaining, of course. But I do find I’m starting to ask myself if it’s really worth my going to the (considerable) effort I currently do to ensure appropriate ads are shown on site.
Anyone else experienced this?
