by psionmark on August 16, 2008
Okay, I guess I should change the title to Life with AdSense!
Yes, I’ve finally folded and put the ads back on. To be honest, I was just losing too much in revenue from the site. On reflection, although there was a spike with time spent on the site, it has settled back to “normal” levels, so I decided they had to go back in.
I’ve made some other modifications to the site, and I think the ads blend a little better than they did before, so I’m reasonably happy with them being there for now.
It was an interesting experiment and I’ll certainly continue experimenting with placement etc.
You can read why all this started here and my previous update here.
Right, I’m off on holiday. See you in a couple of weeks 
by psionmark on August 10, 2008
It’s only been 4 full days since I began my Life without AdSense experiment and, I have to confess, I’m amazed so far.
4 days isn’t enough to indicate that much of a trend, but this is what I’ve got so far:
- Unique visitors per day - up about 10%. Logically speaking, this can’t have anything to do with removing the ads (unless more people are coming back), so something else must be at play
- Page views per day - up around 20%
- Average time spent on site per visitor - here’s the good one! - up 50%!
That last one is the one I was really hoping would improve, but I never imagined it would go up that much that quickly.
So, early days yet, but it looks like my theory may be correct - get rid of the ads and people will stay longer.
More updates soon.
by psionmark on August 6, 2008
You may recall from one of my earlier posts (here, if you’d like to refresh your memory) that I was struggling with the balance of having a good looking site and earning revenue from it.
In that post, I decided to go back to embedding AdSense within the post. Well, I’ve had a change of heart. In fact, I’ve gone one step further and have decided to remove AdSense completely from my main blog - FlightSimX - as an experiment.
I’m going to leave it that way for at least 2 weeks and see if people stay on the site any longer and come back more frequently. This might not sound like much of a big deal, but AdSense is my biggest revenue source on the site, so I will be losing out financially, at least in the short term.
What I’m hoping to see is more page views (not necessarily more unique visitors, as the removal of the ads shouldn’t really affect that). Perhaps I’ll also see an increase in ad revenue from the other, more appropriate ads on the site.
I’ll report back as the experiment continues.
by psionmark on April 3, 2008
I see that Google are now showing the scrolling AdSense ads on all their text ad blocks now. I’m not a great fan of the arrows - they stand out like a sore thumb. Worse still, you don’t even get paid if a visitor clicks on anything other than the initially loaded ads! Seems like a win-win for Google and a loss for web site owners!
What do you reckon? I think they’re plain ugly.
Following on from my post about Wordpress 2.5, I’m loving it more and more as I get to know it. There are some teething problems, as you’d expect of anything this size. The latest gotcha is that the WP-ContactForm breaks the image uploader. Instead of the nice new whizzy uploader, you now get:
Which is not terribly useful. The workaround is to disable WP-ContactForm if you need to upload an image, then re-enable it once you’re done. I’m using cformII here on Psionmark, so will look at integrating that into my other blogs.
