Personally, I love it.

I’ve been a member of Google’s Adsense program since it launched, and my how it has changed. Specifically in recent years it has gotten very very good at behavioral tracking. I’ll often find myself shopping with purpose, or maybe just browsing an ecommerce site, then I click back to one of my sites and see ads for the site I was just on.

I know my Adsense revenue has been getting stronger and I think the reason why is other people are being as targetted as I am. Yes, it can be creepy, but it is also very useful.

For instance, we have recently decided that a one day a week nanny would be a good thing to have for our kids. So, I went on this website called SitterCity.com and started looking around. They offered a free 7 day trial but most useful features (background checks, reviews, etc) cost money. The price was $140 a year. I did not sign up, but I thought about it.

So I go and then visit one of my sites, I see an ad for SitterCity half off. So I clicked it (yes, I clicked my own ad – but only because I was really interested in it, and I have the credit card bill to prove it). Now suddenly thanks to the discount tied to the ad click through URL, the price is only $70 a year. Open wallet, remove credit card.

This is the kind of advertising that really really works, and I’m glad its showing on my site. And now I have another story to tell when I explain to people that blocking cookies and tracking on your home PC really isn’t that necessary.

This is also why online advertising will continue to grow and eat away at TV and print.

Perhaps terminate is the wrong word, they’re basically going to end all existing Right Media services for small publishers, which is most of what the company offers.

Coming on the heels of their implosion of YPN I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am. YPN, of course, no longer exists really, Yahoo is going to completely farm out all advertising to Microsoft in a recent deal.

Does anyone take Yahoo seriously as a company anymore? Let us look into the past and see how Yahoo has innovated and improved, or perhaps not.

1. Yahoo starts company as a web directory, the first, becomes one of the most popular websites on the Internet, directory is manually edited by humans.
2. Yahoo starts charging for directory submissions, makes a gold mine. Search results are based on on directory listings primarily, making directory listings important for ranking well, everyone buys one.
3. Yahoo deemphasizes directory listings in their search results, but still links to matching categories, less people buy them.
4. Yahoo stops even linking to directory categories in search results, “Directory” doesn’t even get a main tab. No one buys listings anymore, nearly impossible to justify the $300 yearly fee with the paltry traffic received, only the most profitable sites should do it.
5. Meanwhile, Yahoo purchases Inktomi, an early search pioneer, to power their search results. Yahoo eventually also absorbs Lycos, Fast (Alltheweb), and Altavista, all early pioneers, all at one time the most popular search engine on the Internet, Yahoo kills them all like so many wives of Henry the VIII.
6. Yahoo inks a deal with Microsoft for search, effectively exiting the search business, all the money spent on acquisitions could have been saved if they just partnered long ago.
7. Meanwhile, Yahoo had purchased Overture, formerly Goto.com, the original PPC search engine.
8. Despite buying the creator of PPC search, Yahoo allows itself to be out manuevered and out innovated by Google.
9. Google PPC ads get smarter, like Google’s search index. Google launches Adsense PPC ad syndication platform, eventually syndicated PPC ads account for something like 85% of Google’s ad dollars.
10. Yahoo plays catchup, launches YPN, perpetually in-beta ad network sputters along through mismanagement after mismanagerment. Yahoo lets in large publishers of spammy sites but doesn’t allow advertisers to opt-out, sites make good money, for a short period of time, but advertise ROI plummets, advertisers flee. Yahoo keeps crappy partners in network, but kicks out good ones for sending international traffic, which every other network on the Internet has no problem just filtering out. Network never leaves beta, network dies.

11. Yahoo buys Right Media, an innovator in small publisher advertising. Creator of an exchange to match up small publishers with small advertisers. Does some innovative things like allowing “R-Rated” sites (and labeling them as such), something most networks do not touch (but should, look at how much money R-rated movies can make). Eventually, Yahoo kills Right Media, reasons unknown.
12. Meanwhile, Yahoo inks deal with Microsoft to outsource all PPC advertising, effectively killing the original PPC search engine.

For all these reasons, I hereby crown Yahoo, the worst company on the Internet.

This, I think, has mostly been overblown, and really, is a good thing, not a bad thing.

I’m taking my wife to Vegas this Spring and these past two weeks I’ve been booking our trip and shopping for clothes. The evil ad company has profiled me, undoubtedly with the help of the evil travel website, and now on many sites I’m getting ads for… Las Vegas coupons and hotel deals! The nerve of those people to give me special offers and more targeted advertising just because they know I’m going to Vegas. I’m so offended!

Seriously though, they don’t know that I, Chris Beasley, tall goateed man, is going to Vegas. They know that user 897987 or user with ip of 333.444.555.666 is going to Vegas, and so, they’re showing this anonymous user appropriate ads. Sure, the travel website I booked with knows my personal information, but they don’t (and more importantly, don’t need to) share it with their ad partners. They just need to share a cookie, a small anonymous marker, and or my IP.

I’ve also been shopping on Bluefly.com for hot dresses for when I take my wife out at night. So what do I see on some sites now? Ads for 10% off my next purchase at Bluefly. The horror! Again, sure, Bluefly knows my personal information, but they don’t need to share it for this tracking to work, they just need to set a cookie or give my IP to the ad network.

As a consumer, I like this personalization and customization of the ads I see. I’d much rather see an ad for 10% off a store I might buy actually from, rather than an ad to download a smiley screensaver. I don’t feel creeped out about tracking because I know I’m just an arbitrary number to them, like just another box in that warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

As a website publisher, this kind of advertising excites me and makes me feel good about the future of online advertising. In the February 18th issue of Fortune there was an article about one of the largest ad buyers in the world and how he is both impressed with and encouraged by the tracking ability of the web (and so spending more money on Internet advertising) as well as how he wants to port that same type of targeting to TV, if possible. So, really, this kind of tracking and targeting of advertising is what brings the big money to play on the Internet, making it important for every publisher.

Unfortunately, public perception of the negativity of such advertising persists, we all need to do our part to help our industry by educating, friends, family, and customers, as to the true value of these tracking systems.

Honestly, I don’t understand this move.

Yahoo sucks. Their search engine sucks, their advertising service sucks. Who here doesn’t think Microsoft Adcenter is better than Yahoo Search Marketing? I believe until just very recently YSM didn’t even allow you to opt out of their syndicated results, so to advertise on their search results you had to deal with a ton of spammy clickfraud like clicks.

Personally, MSN traffic converts better for me than any other search engine, I think their Adcenter program is well run, and I also think their search is better than Yahoo’s.

Granted, Yahoo has many other properties (Rightmedia, Flickr, etc), and Yahoo’s horrible performance over the past few years has hammered that stock and made it very cheap, but still, I feel MS had turned a corner as far as catching up goes and they could have had all of Yahoo’s market position without paying for it.

This is big for our industry of course. It would mean that those hoping MS would be able to offer an alternative to Adsense (in every way) will be disappointed since undoubtedly they’ll keep that comedy of errors that is YPN (read more about the joke that is YPN.)

Also, consider history. Yahoo gobbled up Overture, Inktomi, AllTheWeb, and AltaVista. Supposedly combining the best features of all of those sites (results to be determined), and now Microsoft wants to gobble up it all.

This will mean one less bit of diversity in our businesses, both in advertising and in SEO, and that I dislike. Additionally, what kind of pressure is this going to put on ASK.com? That will be interesting to see.

I get really decent eCPMs from Adsense with it, especially this time of year, because there are a lot of outdoor retailers who do typical Christmas advertising. Yesterday was one of the best normal days ever for Adsense with it in fact, I saw normal days because abnormal days when I was on the frontpage of Digg or in USA Today, etc, were of course so high in traffic that earnings were way up.

I’ve had this site since 2001 and one of the main draws on it, responsible for getting me tons of links and media mentions like the aforementioned ones above, is the quiz. It features 21 questions and a snarky Sergeant who insults the quiz takers both before, during, and after the quiz. One of the main reasons I made this quiz was to increase pageviews per visitor by making everyone who takes the quiz generate atleast an additional 21 page views. It works beautifully for that purpose and so makes up half of all pages view on the site (not counting the forum).

However, here is the dumb thing, I’ve only ever run 1 banner ad on the page, despite it being such a large portion of my page views. Since 2001, just 1 banner ad. How much money have I left on the table? Who knows, but I did just now add a new footer Adsense ad. It’ll be interesting to see how much this ad position makes me, but I’d guess it could almost do as much as $1000 per month. Wish I had thought to do that sooner.

Let this be a lesson for those of you like me with many different sites, be constantly reviewing them for better ways to monetize them.

I do not like this change. The thing is, Google created this type of advertising, they have been the standard, and surfers are probably used to their ads to the point where now they know they don’t need to click on the title or URL, just on the ad itself. This would only then confuse surfers.

Oh I agree that maybe reducing accidental clicks will increase advertisers value and raise rates, but that is a very long process to deal with and it doesn’t tackle the real problem sucking down advertiser value, MFA sites. In the meantime we’ll all have to tighten our belts I think.

A reasonable compromise would be to make all the text of an ad clickable and merely leave the whitespace (which is currently clickable) non-functional. That way users can click on the title, the text under it, or the URL, and be taking to the advertiser’s website.

Tribal Fusion used to be a great ad company with high rates for niche sites and a dedication to high quality ads. They were the Macys of Internet advertising. But apparently Macys got a little jealous of Dollar General and Tribal Fusion got a little jealous of all the general audience/low rate/high volume/crap networks out there.

So Tribal Fusion launched TF Direct, the worst idea ever by any head of any ad network. This is a program of crappy little ads that pay crappy little rates that publishers are not allowed to opt out of. We can set a pricing floor, a minimum CPM we’re willing to accept, but it can be no higher than $0.60 CPM (pre commission). Also, that is for all ad units. It is impossible to specify a different pricing floor for popunders or other intrusives, banners, leaderboards, boxes, or skyscrapers. Apparently Tribal Fusion thinks all those ad unit types should have the same rate.

So of course I set my pricing floor to the minimum $.60 CPM, but what do I see when I login, for the last 7 days it has averages $0.36 CPM. The minimum it should be is $0.60, but instead it ends up being almost half that. What is worse is after commission that means I’m only taking home an averaging of $0.20 CPM, and again that is an average that includes large & intrusive banners stuck at the top of the page. For a bottom of the page ad I might accept $0.20 CPM, but for a top of the page ad from a first tier? No way.

Tribal Fusion lists of course the advertisers in Tribal Fusion Direct, but they do not tell you which advertisers pay what or how many times the ads get displayed, only in aggregate total statistics do they tell you what TFD does. The only way for a publisher to block such advertisers is to block them all by domain. One thing Tribal Fusion does though is have advertisers with both normal campaigns and TFD direct campaigns so if a publisher wants the higher rate they need to deal with the lower rate which could be as low as $.05 CPM on a popunder for all we know. It seems very much more and more to be a bait and switch type manuever and one I am quite tired of. The other option is to block by domain, the only real way to turn off TFD ads on your account, but then you block both the higher paying ad (bribe ad) and the lower paying ad (which again, you have no idea how much it pays individually or how many impressions it is getting). It is something I do though for TFD popunders, I will not serve a popunder for less than $1 CPM, let alone less than $0.60 CPM.

Another idiotic thing Tribal Fusion does is make default campaigns expire yearly, but they give you no notification when they expire, so you have to remember and if you forget, oops, lost revenue. I have never seen any other ad network that does something like that, their whole system would give a usability guru nightmares.

For years I’ve recommended Tribal Fusion as a 1st tier provider and have used them myself, but they just keep getting worse and worse and it seems like they’re driving down that path on purpose.

This could end up being both good and bad for Adsense publisher revenue. On one hand it is another way to make money, on the other hand it could end up having the same problems of many CPA programs, namely a merchant who has poor conversions which end up earning us less. That is the main different in my eyes between say CPC & CPA. With CPC the publisher get paid no matter how poorly the merchant’s website converts. With CPA the publisher only gets paid if the merchant’s website converts. So with CPA you’re really dependent on the merchant knowing what they’re doing (and they don’t always).

Adwords advertisers now can see performance data for individual sites in the content network (Adsense) and then exclude the bad ones and or do site targetted ads on the good ones. This should, hopefully, benefit quality Adsense advertisers (most of you who read my blog I’m sure) and hurt the ones who just publish garbage/scrapers etc. This was in beta before, but now it should be for everyone.

Google has updated their webmaster central interface, including adding a new paid link reporting tool. Additionally reinclusion requests are now called “reconsideration requests.” Why the change? Beats me.

Finally, Google Analytics has made a series of updates including turning all the lines in your referrer report into clickable links, something that always annoyed me in the past. However, they still truncate off the query string of your referring URLs, so if your referrer is a dynamic page that uses a query string you still can’t figure out what that query string is.

Well myself, and others, block many PPC arbitrage type bad sites with a poor user experience because we’ve notice an earnings increase by doing so. There is also a theory that Google is looking at how often people click the ads and then immediately hit the back button as a way to gauge the quality of our traffic. This seems unfair when it is the shoddy ad that is causing it but anyways…

After getting those rather annoying optimization reports I sent an email to an Adsense rep I’ve worked with in the past, his answers were enlightening somewhat.

Thanks for your in-depth email.

The situation you’ve described is not an easy one to diagnose. The truth
of the matter is that blocking MFA-type URLs from your site can result in
either a rise or decline in revenue (depending on what those ads were
doing for you earnings-wise prior to blocking them).

What I can tell you regarding some of your ending questions is that our
system takes into consideration factors such as what keywords and concepts
triggered the ads, and also which ads that are shown. For example, a click
on an ad for digital cameras on a page about photography can be worth less
than if the same ad shows on a page where digital cameras are compared.
Please note that the system is dynamic and can change with time. The goal
is to ultimately offer even more relevant ads with a better customer
experience.

I hope this clarifies matters. I’m sorry to hear of your declines, and
hope to see your revenue returning to levels with which you’re satisfied
in the coming weeks.

Feel free to let me know if you have any additional questions.

I then got this further followup:

Thanks for following up. To clarify, the targeting mechanism takes into
account a number of factors including the price of the ad, as well as the
ad’s relevance to your page, and the likelihood of the ad being clicked by
your visitors.

There is no blanket policy, but in general, if one of the types of ads to
which you’re referring is predicted to have success (both in terms of
revenue and click-through) on your site, the algorithm will opt to show

I never knew it before, and I’ve never seen anyone else mention it certainly, that ad pricing can change based on relevance. One would think though that Google wouldn’t be penalizing you for shortcomings in their content analysis and targeting algorithms. What is more likely I think is that they, obviously catering to advertisers, make judgement based on the ad’s relevance to your page and then apply a modifier to ads that aren’t 100% matches. If, with that modifier, the ad still pays more than the less than 100% matches it’ll be shown, but you won’t earn as much off it as if your site was perfectly targeted to it.

What concerns me though is how Google Hints affects this since using hints you can get ads that differ from your content. Additionally I feel that Google is putting maybe a little too much stock in pure content matching, which isn’t the same as serving ads your visitors are most interested in. Your visitor’s desires do not always match with your content.

For what its worth, I’ve also tried stopping all the blocking I’ve done and my income did not increase at all.

Anyways, count me as yet another webmaster frustrated with the seeming endless gradual decline in Adsense earnings.