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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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