AdSense Revisited

I’ve been running AdSense for about 6 weeks, and appear to be making enough to cover my monthly hosting bill or a dinner for four at the local McDonalds. So that’s great…actual passive income! This was just with ads appearing on 10 or so specific posts that had retail possibilities.

Here’s what I’ve noticed about the effectiveness of the placement on this site, and how I’m trying to figure out how to best optimize ads without being overly commercial.

The big tradeoff, in my opinion, is having terrible advertisements appear that were out-of-context with the content. That sucks. I had to test each post to check whether “good ads” would appear. Sometimes the results were surprising. One of my favorite posts, “Crafting for Manly Men”, is all about awesome tools and gear I want to buy; I figured I’d get some neat tool ads. But no…instead Google served up “men in high heels”. So no AdSense for that post. Posts that were specifically about product, such as the one about my light saber replica, did much better.

Last week, with the introduction of QuickPosts, I thought I’d put advertisements on each of the permalinked pages. My reasoning was that these were very targeted posts, so they might serve up more traffic. I created an AdSense channel for this so I could isolate the specific traffic that these ads got. After a week…nothing. I should really run it longer, but I really hate the way they look and have removed them, but here’s one last ditch effort to use that channel…

Heh :-)

This week’s experiment is to put advertising on some of the Printable CEO pages. It also has its own advertising channel. I had avoided putting ads on these pages because I think of them as being “all me”, a service to the world that is also a testbed for my own design experiments. But recalling Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #109: “Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack”, I thought I should see if I can derive additional revenue from that. My justification is that more revenue from the site means more resources I have to actually pay for some prototyping I’d like to do. In any case, it’s worth running this experiment for a week or so to see if any clicks are derived from it.

My biggest complaint about AdSense is its inability to serve relevant ads for the kind of writing I do. Clever headlines rank you lower than literal headlines. Anecdotes diffuse the search relevancy of your content, or confuse the AdSense service into providing completely inappropriate ads. Long articles that explore the boundaries between different disciplines and ideas also end up confusing AdSense. I’ve heard that Yahoo Ads allow you to choose the category of advertisement, but I haven’t tried it.