Blogging, Business blogging, Technology

Do Google Ads make cents II – the sequel

As you may have noticed, I have started adding Google Ads to the posts on this blog, as well as to the blog itself.

I took a look at the site stats, and decided which of the old posts receive the most traffic and I have added Google ads to these posts.

Again, like the ads just under the header image, these ads are, I think unintrusive and will hopefully help me become the dot blog millionaire I have always aspired to be!

I am adding the ads to individual posts using the fantastic WordPress plug-in, Adsense Delux which Michele recommended to me last night. Adsense delux allows me to individually format ads to suit posts so ads can look completely different from one post to the next.

For the moment, I am going to stay with the understated ads and I will monitor the click through rate they provide me. As a matter of interest, I don’t have a baseline to work from – what kind of Click Through Rate (CTR) should I expect to get?

14 thoughts on “Do Google Ads make cents II – the sequel”

  1. Everyone new wants to know what CTR they can expect. There is no answer, only diligent effort on your part.

    (as an aside, your live-preview comments feature makes typing tedious in its slowness; I’ve seen solutions which offere a preview button to manually update the preview…)

    As you’re doing, monitor your traffic and popular pages. Play with different placements, styles, etc. View the pages yourself to see how relevant the ads for the content are. The more relevant they are the more likely someone wants to click. On my blog, some pages which I think should get targeted ads sadly get irrelevant ads which are relevant to other areas of my blog/site (seems like adsense takes into consideration other content within your site when it’s having trouble finding something on target for the current page). As an example, even though I write about wordpress and SEO all the time, I have some technical stuff about … about parsing the magnetic Track data contained on credit/debit cards, and too often I get ads for card swiper hardware in a post having nothing to do with that.

    Another important suggestion: turn on permalinks in your blog (Options->Permalinks). that gives you much more SEO-friendly and adsense-friendly URLs. To do that in a nutshell with shell access to your server, go to your blog’s root directory: if you do not already have a .htaccess file there, type ‘touch .htaccess’ to create the file, then change the permissions so that WP can write to it (or else you have to paste in the rules manually). command for write access is a variation of ‘chmod a+w .htaccess’

    Did I mention I hate the live-comment preview??!! 🙁 It took me ten minutes to write this when it should have been two minutes. Oh well, thanks for blogging abbout AdSense-Deluxe.

  4. @Wayne, I’m interested to hear that the live preview is causing you problems. What OS and browser are you using? It used to slow down for me too occasionally but since I upgraded my Firefox to 1.5 Beta, I haven’t had any problems like that. I’m not sure if it is Firefox or the fact that many of my extensions were disabled by the upgrade(!).

    I have permalinks turned on, (my premalink structure is set to /%postname%/) thanks.

    I have noticed somewhat irrelevant ads on some pages as well – I’ll have to watch that.

    @Michele, you don’t have to talk about your CTR rate – all I was asking is what kind of CTR I should expect to get. Should I expect 80%, or 8%, or .8%, in your opinion? What would be considered good?

  5. Tom – if you get over 1% you would be doing very well
    The ad relevance improves over time and will also depend on the ad position. The fact that your archive includes the word “blog” in the title doesn’t help

  10. Tom, I guess I was using Apple’s Safari (re: slow live preview). It’s not too bad this time around though, not sure why it was so slow for me on the previous post, bu it was taking like 5 seconds just to see the actual text I was typing catch up with my fingers.

    Good job turning on permalinks. Go get Optimal Title plugin which I blogged about and linked above and switch your page titles around so that the post title comes first, then the blog name. I think it’s a good thing for SEO to have the keywords up front.

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  13. HI Tom,

    I installed Adsense Delux to my wordPress blog. I added my own adsense in Adsense Delux admin. The only problem is, only “keaywors with BLOG themes” adsense appears at my web site, which I did not included.

    http://www.web-handwerk.eu/press

    How does it come?
    I host my wordPress blog at my own server and it works fine.
    Everything works fine except the adsense theme – which I did not included in Adsense Delux Admin.

    nice greetings, Marta

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