One key concern about having advertisement on my blog is the fear of alienating my readers; especially regular readers who come to the blog daily and leave comments. Unfortunately, some of the best monetization opportunities call for disruptive ad placement. For example, one of the best performing AdSense ad is the large rectangular block placed inside the content itself.
So, how can a blogger strike a balance between maintaining an appealing blog while maximizing its revenue potential? On my personal finance blog, I struggled to make decent money with AdSense. I can’t reveal my CTR (Click Through Rate) and eCPM (Effective Cost Per 1,000 Impressions), but I thought they were abysmal. After some research, I stumbled upon what seems to be a perfect solution. The plugin is called, “Who Sees Ads?”
Who Sees Ads? allows me to show a 300 x 250 AdSense ad block for posts older than 20 days old and for anyone that comes through a search engine (note that these conditions are highly configurable). This means that my regular readers (who mostly read newer posts) wouldn’t see the large and disruptive AdSense ad block at all.
This is what most regular readers see:
This is what shown on posts older than 20 days old:
The result? My AdSense revenue (measured by CTR and eCPM) increased by over three folds!
{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
Interesting – I really like this plugin.
I’ll have to try that ad block in the content – I hate when I see it on other blogs but for search engine visitors it should be ok.
My click rates etc are awful – I’ll bet they are worse than yours!
Mike
Pinyo, you’re my hero.
Alright… I guess it’s time to install it!
very interesting. i’ll check it out.
while your eCPM has obviously increased, has your actual revenue gone up or down?
i created separate ad channels for different placements, and removed the lowest eCPM ones.
that boosted my revenue and eCPM.
@Patrick – I’m sure you will love the result.
@Living Off Dividends – The revenue has been growing steadily. Regarding removing the lowest performing ad, I do the same as well.
what about the ratio of traffic growth to revenue growth?
hopefully, it’s less than 1!
Traffic increased 178% (page views) and AdSense revenue increased 238%.
But you are already showing large block on your blog, so I don’t think this plugin would help.
The only problem with that is that if someone comes in with no cookies or a refreshed browser, they see the ads too, even if they are a regular visitor. For example, I see those ads on your site, and I visit almost daily. So just a word to the wise!
David – I tried to replicate the problem but couldn’t. I removed one of the referrer variable and just stick with posts that are 20 days or older (which shouldn’t depend on cookies). I hope this will fix the problem.
Please let me know.
That looks pretty cool. I am going to check it out.
Yeah, I’m going to be switching to Wordpress for my new blog and I definitely have to look into this…
I use something similar with Shylock Adsense and there’s also a hack from scratch99.com for that search engine issue. I haven’t implemented the hack yet because quite frankly, my blog isn’t search engine optimized. I’m all over the place
I wonder about the difference between plugins though…
That’s the hard part if you’re popular with SM, they just kill your Adsense CTR and you get smart priced. That’s okay though as my blog is for fun. If I were more serious about making money, I’d start niche sites.
@Jay – Wow, I can barely tell you are on blogger. That’s some good theme. I think it’s definitely worthwhile to switch to WordPress.
@Mariam – “Shylock Adsense” looks similar “Who Sees Ads?” You’re doing pretty well for a non SEO blog
As for social media, I think it’s worth sacrificing short-term AdSense CTR to gain new readers and subscribers.
Soon enough, soon enough… I think I’ll probably do it at the end of March.
Pinyo – Do you know of a way to not show ads to social media sites like Stumble Upon, Reddit, or Digg? I think there’s may be a way to do that via WSA but I’m not sure how.
There’s another plugin that more accurately detect different type of referrer and you can write customized message for each. Unfortunately, I don’t recall the name of it. Also, I am not sure if it’s worth the effort to go through all that as far as ads go.