Some thoughts about the new Google Adsense Ads

The new Adsense ads that saw a reduction in the area that can be clicked are live on most websites by now and first reports come in confirming that webmasters are seeing an decrease in click through rate, eCPM and revenue. Figures range from 5% to 40% so far and it is a bit early to judge if those decreases will remain like they are now. CPC seems to drop between 0-2% for most websites which is a huge decrease reflected in the income level.

Google is hoping that this move will show advertisers that they are indeed fighting for them battling invalid clicks that most likely will not lead to a sale. Their reasoning that advertisers might spend more money for advertisement if they see an increase in ROI could become true but publishers will most likely see a decrease even if advertisers add more to their spending budget.

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Google Adsense alters Ad Units

The following news could be devastating for a lot of webmasters who do use Google Adsense to monetize their website. Currently they do get paid when a user clicks anywhere on an Adsense ad which consist of a title, a description, the url and the background area.

The new ad format changes the content that can be clicked. Only the title and url can be clicked in those new ad units while the description and background are not clickable anymore. The intention is to reduce the amount of accidental clicks.

A reduction in accidental clicks will keep users on your pages, interacting with your content until they choose to click on an ad. This change will enhance the users’ overall experience with your websites and improve advertiser campaign value, but it’s likely that your click-through rate will decrease

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Will you continue selling links and reviews ?

Google decided to punish websites that are selling text links that are casting votes at the same time, which means that all sites not using the nofollow link attribute are in danger of loosing their current Pagerank. This puts services like Text-Link-Ads, ReviewMe and Linkshare into serious danger.

It remains to be seen if they will start adding nofollow link attributes to the links that they sell but it does not look that way at the moment. Only the visible Pagerank is currently decreased which has no effect on search engine rankings.

What I don’t like is that it could very well be that Google decides that this punishment is not enough and decreases those rankings as well to further punish webmasters who are selling links. No one knows for sure and once the webmaster community finds out it is to late to react.

Some sites were punished for links that they had months ago but removed since then from their website. I would like to see a little bit more transparency here.

Why is a site getting punished and what should the site owner do to reverse the punishment ?

Many webmasters will most likely remove their websites, at least the ones that depend on Google, from Text-Link-Ads and the like. A PR4 site making some money from selling text links getting just a handful of visitors from search engines will most likely continue selling links. A site with thousands of visitors from search engines and an Google Adsense account most likely will not.

What is your stance on the matter ? Will you continue to sell links and reviews on your website ?

Commission Junction Module for ALinks

ALinks is a very useful plugin for Wordpress that allows the blog owner to define keywords and assign links to those keywords. The plugin then adds those links in realtime to the blog post which has several advantages. The first is that you do not have to edit several posts if a link to a website has changed. The same holds true if you want to change the advertisement.

Lets assume you promoted an iPod summer special which recently ran out. Instead of editing the links in your blog posts you simply change the url of the keyword once from within your Wordpress admin panel.

We all know that context related advertisement works much better than banners that are placed somewhere on the outside of the article. Let me give you another example to explain what Alinks really does.

The first step is to select a keyword which can be one word or a phrase and use one of the modules available to add a link. Modules are tiny forms that are used to create special links. There is one module for general links which would mean that you can enter a url and the keyword would automatically be converted to a link to that url.

Other possibilities are Clickbank, Linkshare and Amazon links that can be added as easily. One thing that was missing though was a module for Commission Junction links which I created and added to my list of modules.

Commission Junction uses a combination of links and images that have to be added to be valid and earn for you. My Alinks Commission Junction module lets you add the image url and the link url so that both are added when you add new keywords.

I’m using this Alinks module to create specific links to keyword phrases and it is working very fine. The only problem is that there is some whitespace after the link because of the image that is added afterwards. The image is only 1 pixel in size but the space is visible.

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Download Alinks Commission Junction Module
Download Alinks Plugin

Vizu and Feedburner Ads not performing that well

I’m using Vizu Answers and Feedburner Ads on my main website and both perform badly since I started using them. Vizu Answers adds a poll to your website and pays per impression while the Feedburner ads are added to your feed and are paid by impression as well. Vizu seems to lack advertisers at the moment - I rarely see a poll on my website. My site with 10000 visitors a day had only 38000 ad impressions which means that the poll was not displayed most of the time.

Feedburner on the other hand seems to geotarget traffic really well which means that their ads get only displayed in my feeds if the reader comes from a certain region of this world. It is mostly US-based from what I can see and only 30-40% of my feed readers come from the United States. The other readers do not see an ad at all.

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My first paypal payment from Vizu

A great way to add another revenue source to your website is by adding a paid poll from vizu to it. You configure the settings by yourself, add some keywords and categories to it and select the amount that you want to earn per 1000 impressions.

Vizu then tries to find advertisers that fit your description and adds automatic polls to your website. I had great success with a setting of $2 per 1000 impressions (vizus share is 50% of that number). I just wanted to let everyone know that they actually pay in time and can be recommended. They seem to have troubles finding enough advertisers for my website this month, only 1/3 of impressions have been served.

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Adsense Smart Pricing

You might have heard that Google introduced a feature called smart pricing to Adsense some time ago. Smart Pricing is supposed to punish websites that have a bad ctr by reducing the amount of money a click on the ads earns the webmaster. The most disturbing feature of smart pricing however is the fact that not only the ad units on that website are affected but all the sites in the account of the owner of the adsense id.

This means that if you have adsense on a big forum with a low ctr and bad feedback from advertisers your whole account might experience the effect of smart pricing. Everton from connected internet is trying an experiment and reduce poor performing ad units on his network of sites and monitor the results over the course of months. It will be interesting to see if there have been indeed changes to the better because of this.

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Youtube to introduce ad revenue sharing

Video blogs will soon be able to add another revenue source to their websites by uploading their videos to youtube and earning a share of the money that youtube generates from it. It remains to be seen how this revenue sharing will be implemented but I suppose it will be similar to Google Adsense using keywords and geo targets to calculate revenue for the video.

Ads will most likely be delivered right before the original video starts which will surely drive at least some users away from youtube to other sites that do not show advertisement before the videos. It is hard to predict how much revenue a successful video would be able to generate, guess it will be most likely a per impression payment instead.

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Don’t panic when earnings drop

It can happen to everyone anytime. Your revenue drops from one day to the other with no plausible explanation whatsoever. This has happened to one of my own sites just a few weeks ago. I had record earnings with adsense in December that plummeted by nearly 25% in the beginning of January. I did not change the layout or ad placement or anything else on the site at that time.

I would have went right into panic mode if this would have happened about a year ago but not this time. I do know that my adsense earnings, and all other earnings as well, change in a certain range every day. Drops are as normal as peaks and should be seen as a usual behavior. There could be many reasons for dropping revenues, some of the most popular include end of fiscal period, holidays, appearance of made for adsense sites and drop in search engine rankings.

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How I made $1500 in four months with a website

I promised to write about a real example that would show how to buy, optimize and sell a website in a short period of time. I do check the sitepoint marketplace once a day to see if someone offers a great website that I could buy and optimize. Sites are sold auction style on sitepoint, the owner decides the starting price, the bin, buy it now price, and the amount of days the auction will be running.

I spotted one site that was currently offered for $400 with a buy it now price of $1200. It made about $1 a day and had some nice extras such as a yahoo directory entry, a wikipedia link, great google keywords, more than 80% of users came from search engines and a pagerank of 4. Visitor flow had been stable for eight months and it did not look like this would change anytime soon.

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