I’m experimenting with Google Ads. I don’t actually LIKE them, so this experiment will probably be rather short-lived. 
I used to use them a long time ago, but then I stopped. The general point was that they were poor-looking and at the same time generated close to *ZERO* revenue, hahaha. I think that when I went to reactivate my account, I had accrued like $10 or like $9.50 or something. Meanwhile, I could have stood in front of McDonald’s opening doors for people and requesting change from them as they left the establishment and made that much in one day…. well… actually in just a couple of hours.
The reason I decided to bring them back was that I get a lot of random traffic now. Most of the traffic I got before was from my posting links to social media sites, so it didn’t make sense to tell people “Come to my site to look at advertisements! “. At this point, most of my traffic comes from Google, and they tend to bounce pretty quickly, so if they decide to bounce to an ad link, that’s fine with me.
Still, I didn’t want the ads to show up to people who ‘normally’ browse my site, like actually going to my home page and seeing what’s on it. For that reason, I took Tyme’s advice and implemented the ads in my single post code.
I decided to use link units instead of ad units, because I could get link units that were only 15 pixels high. The “thinnest” ad units I could get were 60 pixels high.
I immediately noticed a problem with relevance… Not that adsense was having trouble parsing the text on the page, but because I talk about so much different stuff in my posts. I don’t even TALK about cars, yet they were posting automobile links on my pages. One of my titles included the name “Nichelle”, so all the ads on the page were for “Helle” shoes or something. So, without the ability to specifically say “give me these type of ads”, there’s an incredible relevance ‘problem’. They would probably work better if my posts were only a couple of paragraphs long and about specifically one topic.
In general, I’m not a fan of random advertising anyway. I’ve been saying for probably a year now that product placement and sponsorship is the way to go. This is another reason these ads will probably have to vamoose immediately. 
I don’t enjoy seeing mentions of items that don’t have anything to do with anything on my pages. I also can’t imagine why anybody would want to click on the random words they come up with. Then again, I’m not aiming them at ME, I’m aiming them at people who randomly search through google for topics they want to read about at that point in time.
I guess part of the experiment is to gauge the worth of random google ads vs sponsored ads… which is practically ZERO since you’re guaranteed to get paid whatever amount by a sponsor by the nature of the relationship. Google ads are like a gamble. “I DEFINITELY show your ads, and I MAYBE get a couple of cents out of the deal”.
Anyway, it’ll be an interesting experiment. I’m up to 83 page impressions since this morning, with ZERO clicks and ZERO page CTR, hahaha. I’ll most likely be done with this experiment when I wake up tomorrow morning.
Entries (RSS)
[...] Rewind a couple of days… On July 16, 2008, I was experimenting with Google Ads and wrote a post about it, so the two things that came to mind were that a) someone tampered with my site, or b) I messed [...]