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Copyright 2005 Randy Charles Morin
Part of the KBCafe Blog Network.
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Copyright 2005 Randy Charles Morin
Part of the KBCafe Blog Network.
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Chris Thilk: Apparently there was a bit of a kerfluffle over the fact that the marketing team behind United 93 initially made a blog ad purchase on a conservative blog network. A representative from the liberal network counterpart contacted the team handling the movie's online stratgy and a purchase on teh liberal network was finally made.
Everyday, I scan thru my referrers and examine their conversion rates to find interesting trends, like the one I'm about to describe. Today, I found a search referrer on the keyword craiglist. Note the mispell, which happens because of a typo in the title of a blog post from 2 years ago. Examining further, it turns out that my conversion rate on this typo is a phenominal 40%, that is, 2 in every 5 pageviews of that blog entry result in clicks on my Google ads. I thought about this. First thought, would be that craigslist users wouldn't be ad clickers. Second thought, these are not craigslist users, rather they are less savvy users looking for craigslist and don't know how to spell it. Can you image how many of these people are out there? Now type these typo-ed craigslist followed by dot-COM. These are called typo squatters, they more often than not host porn and arrays of ads and it's not just a couple guys, it's an industry.
Clicksor is starting their own referral program on May 1st. Two sample referral buttons follow. I haven't been particularly pleased when I've used Clicksor, but on the oft chance your desparate, click here for Clicksor.
Couldn't resist posting this :-)
According to ehlist, I now have 1,010,000 webpages from the kbcafe.com domain in the Yahoo! search index. Also, the Technorati rank for kbcafe.com is 356, the lowest ever.
Advertising Age: Coming soon to iTunes: ads. [cut] The introduction of visual ads could be the first step to allowing ads in other content areas or on iPods.
Philipp Lenssen: A YouTube video analyzes forms of potential AdWords abuse, like an ad leading to more ads.
Clickety Clack: By passing on a partnership to distribute contextual ads on MySpace, Google is signaling that MySpace can't be monetized very well with performance based contextual ads. From the POV of a product manager for AdSense, it sounds like MySpace traffic would get him high volume, low CTR traffic, which would only piss off advertisers and drive AdSense eCPMs down significantly.
http://ecpm.typepad.com/clickety_clack/2006/04/google_and_yaho.html
Randy: Another so-call online ad blog, doesn't even understand the ROI (return on investment) of CPC (cost-per-click) ads. A low CTR (click-thru-rate) is irrelevant to advertisers. The quality of traffic for advertisers is determined by conversion rates and conversion costs, that's the number of sales relative to click-thrus and CPC. Where's CTR? It's on a second tier of consideration for advertisers. So then why does this piss off advertisers? A giant leap of ignorance!
CTR is important for Google. Why? Google is a media buyer and media buyers are concerned with dollar throughput. Total dollar throughput is a factor of CTR and other variables likes CPC and total impressions. Advertisers don't care about CTR, media buyers (Google) do. The premise remains true, MySpace traffic is low quality advertising, but advertisers don't care about CTRs, they care about conversion rates.
MHO. Google sees MySpace as a competitor for eyeballs. Giving MySpace access to AdSense could turn that unprofitable competitor into a profitable one. I suspect the truth is a mix of Google worried that MySpace will dillute the ad supply for its existing AdSense users and Google worried that MySpace will make Fox an online competitor.
Inside AdSense: You can already customize the style of your AdSense for search results. Now, you can customize the substance of them, using the new site-flavored search option available in your AdSense account. The learning technology used in site-flavored search offers a subtle flavoring of your results to match the themes and topics of your site.
http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/04/search-results-with-flavor-of-your.html
Danny Sullivan: Steve Berkowitz, head of Ask.com and the man who has helped steered that service to new successes, has been hired by Microsoft to run its online business group.
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060422-045733
Randy: There seems to be a lack of company loyalty in Web 2.0.
Philipp Lenssen: I’m seeing two new graphic ad options on Google’s AdSense ad formats page. A graphic Square (250x250) and a graphic Large Rectangle (336x280), both previously available as text options (I think Google made an error on the page, as they call both new graphic options “Medium Rectangle”).
PR: Google's partner sites generated revenues, through AdSense programs, of $928 million, or 41% of total revenues. This is a 59% increase over network revenues of $584 million generated in the first quarter of 2005 and a 16% increase over fourth quarter 2005 revenues of $799 million.
One feature I really love about Alexa is the "People who visit this page also visit" on every site's overview page. If you check that info for KBCafe.com, then you get the following list...
Those are four pretty awesome blogs, which are also on my reading list.
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main?q=&url=http://www.kbcafe.com/
Google now offers text links for their referral programs; AdSense, AdWords and Firefox. The text links was a common suggestion from AdSense publishers according to Google, but I think Google missed the point here. This isn't what publishers wanted. What publishers wanted was the ability to put a link that included their referral code on random pieces of text. So that when they wrote about AdSense in forums and blogs, they could link the text using this referral code encoded URL. Other ad networks, like AdBrite and Chitika, already provide this capability, while Google specifically prohibits it in their AdSense program policies.
Thought it might be interesting to enumerate my top 20 Amazon referral sales.
Anybody interested in starting a Quickbooks blog?
I found the following post on the AdSense Google Groups. I thought it was worth a chuckle.
My account also says 0 for cpm and earnings but everything else is ok how or what ads do i click on to start seeing my earnings go up? My percentage rate right now is 58.82 % but no earnings please help asap, im new to this also. I have adsense for search on there!!!!!
I have to wonder how many AdSense accounts, like this one, are banned per day by Google?
Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo says YPN Pay the Bills. What he means is that many Websites are making enough with YPN to pay for their hosting and domain name registration.
I say those people are just not trying hard enough. I have this new rule when making new Websites. HURRY! Why? Because I'm amazed how quickly the bills get paid. I spend $400 on a new Website, which includes 10 years of domain hosting and 1 year of Web hosting. Usually, by the third month, I've paid those bills, the revenues keep increasing and I'm making a living. It's really that easy, if you are WILLING TO TRY.
But more than just paying the bills. In one case, I made nominal money on a Web application for 2 years before something triggered and overnight I was making $10 per day on just that one Web application.
Fathom Online: In the first quarter of 2006, the average price that advertisers bid for keywords on search engines dropped three percent to $1.39 from $1.43 at the end of 2005. Overall, the average bid has increased 1.4 percent since the September 2004 inception of the KPI when the average bid was $1.37.
Jennifer Slegg on Search Engine Watch is suggesting that webpages with AdSense are better indexed in the Google search engine than pages without.
Rogers Cadenhead has written an article in Wired on the risk of running gambling related advertising on a Website. A few excerpts follow.
Websites in the United States that accept advertising from internet casinos are rolling the dice, says the chief of the organized crime and racketeering section of the Department of Justice.
Mark Ward: You may not know it, but every time you search on Google, the company makes 12 cents in revenue.
Two days ago, I created my own Ad server, called Rmail ads based on serving relevant Amazon product links. I also opened up the Ad server for use by anybody. Simply copy the HTML code given by the Ad setup wizards and you can use it too.
Of course, some of you will want to use Rmail ads as AdSense alternative, so I created a simple method of doing just that. Simply set the google_alternate_ad_url in your AdSense code block. Here's an example...
google_alternate_ad_url = "http://www.r-mail.org/ads/alternate.aspx?q=adsense&x=468&y=60&refid=kbcafe";
Which will produce an ad block similar to the following...
There are currently five parameters, which I will be expanding on later. q is keyword string, which I use to find relevant ads to your topic. x and y are the size of the ad block. refid is your Amazon associate ID. The last parameters, not shown in the example, you can set image=false to remove any images from the ad block.
Note: This is currently pre-alpha, so do not impress more than 100 per day during the initial phase. Occasionally I impress my own Amazon associate ID instead, to pay for the bandwidth. Yesterday, I set that at 50% of the time. Today, I reduced that to 10% of the time.
Joe McDonald: Google Inc. (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt on Wednesday defended the search engine's cooperation with Chinese censorship as he announced the creation of a Beijing research center and unveiled a Chinese-language brand name. [cut] Schmidt was speaking at a ceremony to announce Google's Chinese-language brand name - "Gu Ge," or "Valley Song."
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20060412/D8GUEFQGF.html
Randy: Hehe, I think I'm gonna start referring to Google as Gu Ge, all the time.
For the last couple of years, I've been in search of two things in the field of Internet ads.
I was somewhat successful with Chitika, until I gave up with the constant excuses on why they couldn't pay me and steadily decreasing CPMs. I haven't even bothered to ask them for their latest excuse. Oh well!
After all the frustration, today I wrote me own. It can be used to embed ads in both email and as an AdSense alternative. Right now, I'm just testing it out. Feel free to run a couple impressions (not more than 100/d please, this is pre-Alpha). Basically, you put your Amazon ID in there and Amazon pays you on conversions (not clicks). Right now, I'm impressing my associate ID half the time and whatever associate ID you provide the other half.
Why Amazon? Because my Amazon associate earnings have been about the same as my AdSense earnings over the last week and I'm barely impressing any Amazon links, compared to the tens of thousands of AdSense unit that fill my blogs. I think Amazon just might be better than AdSense.
About: The Inventor's Commercialization Toolkit, is a 150 page, roll-up-your-sleeves workbook divided into three major sections. Each section is designed to help you understand the questions that investors, business backers and licensees ask — and to help you answer those questions in a compelling way.
PR: Combined spending on blog, podcast and RSS advertising bolted 198.4% to $20.4 million in 2005, and is expected to grow another 144.9% to $49.8 million in 2006.
Barry Schwartz: Which niche topics does not typically work well in generating Google AdSense income.
Andrew Grumet: IT Conversations is auctioning a month of advertising on Tech Nation. [click here for eBay link]
Alex Papadimoulis: On day six, things went not-so-well: all of the content on the website had completely vanished. [cut] One particularly troublesome external IP had gone in and deleted *all* of the content on the system. The IP [cut] resolved to googlebot.com, Google's very own web crawling spider. [cut] A user copied and pasted some content from one page to another, including an "edit" hyperlink to edit the content on the page. Normally, this wouldn't be an issue, since an outside user would need to enter a name and password. But, the CMS authentication subsystem didn't take into account the sophisticated hacking techniques of Google's spider. [cut] As it turns out, Google's spider doesn't use cookies, which means that it can easily bypass a check for the "isLoggedOn" cookie to be "false". It also doesn't pay attention to Javascript, which would normally prompt and redirect users who are not logged on. It does, however, follow every hyperlink on every page it finds, including those with "Delete Page" in the title.
WebmasterWorld forum user: Does anyone else think that Google's actions over the last few years indicate a gradual change in the importance of traffic patterns over inbound links?
Elinor Mills: With a planned $90 million settlement, Google could soon dispense with a class-action lawsuit involving so-called click fraud. But while that may be good for Google, it doesn't mean the problem of bogus clicks on online ads--which advertisers have to pay for--is going to disappear anytime soon.
Kent Lewis: Where the ball often gets dropped is once the visitor actually hits the site, and most likely, leaves. [cut] I’m going to discuss some of the most effective and relatively easy steps to take to maximize conversion on your Web site.
http://www.dmnews.com/cgi-bin/artprevbot.cgi?article_id=36365
My Amazon Associate earnings yesterday came within $1 of matching my Google AdSense earnings. Although my Google earnings continue to increase, my Amazon earnings are accelerating much faster. Now there's a one big reason why this happened yesterday. It was Monday! Orders get back-pilled over the weekend and filled on Monday.
Two months ago, I would have bet that it's next to impossible to make money with Amazon. My best Amazon associate quarter by a mile was January to March 2006, yet in the first 10 days of April, I've made over half the earnings I made in that quarter.
All week, I've been stumbling onto this article titled "Yahoo! Outnumbers Google" and in the article by Nielsen/NetRatings you'll find the first phrase is "Despite Google's reputation, Yahoo! ranks as top search engine".
http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/8919.asp
I couldn't possibly believe this was true, so I dug into the Nielsen data and here's the real truth. The number that ranks Yahoo! ahead of Google includes all properties, not just search. So, how does Nielsen than write that Yahoo! ranks as top search engine? It's called a lie.
Digging deeper into the Nielsen data, the truth is that Google is still well ahead of Yahoo! Read this document by Nielsen from a couple weeks ago that shows Google has 48.5% of the search market compared to Yahoo!'s 22.5%, MSN's 10.7% and AOL's 6.6%.
Zobbler, a website that offers free resources for the users of one of the largest websites on the net...MySpace.com, is being offered for sales for $785k. It reportedly is making $500k/year from Yahoo! Publishers Network on 500k/m unique visitors.
Note: Examining the Alexa data for zobbler and the numbers don't match up.
Another one of those nice emails just arrived. This one from ExpoActive.
Hello,
This message is to notify you that your withdrawal has been approved and your check has been sent.
Keep up the good work!
Best regards,
ExpoActive
I was getting a little worried, I had tried to withdraw a couple weeks ago and even sent them a support email (no response), when I didn't receive any notification on the status of the withdrawal for a few days.
Nathan Weinberg: This didn’t take too long: As Google Blogoscoped shows, one blogger has already figured out how to combine Google Related Links with advertising, simply by putting the Links box on top of an AdSense ad.
http://jobert.blogspot.com/2006/04/101-fabulous-freebies.html
image via Google Blogoscoped.
I just signed up for Oxado. Those are my affiliate links linking to their site. I terms seemed reasonable, but the sign-up process is taking a lot of time. I don't have any ads up just yet.
A week or so ago, I finally crossed the $100 mark with ExpoActive. I don't really use it much because the ads are pretty dumb and I feel like I'm ripping off the advertisers because the ads are so dumb. Anyhow, I crossed $100, the minimum payout and decided I'd test their payout system. I clicked the Withdraw Funds button and the Webpage refreshed, but nothing actually happened. I tried it a few times over a few days on different browsers and nothing ever happened. Eventually, I sent them a support email and it remains unanswered. Anybody else have any experience withdrawing money from ExpoActive?
Danny Sullivan wonders if the Google Zeitgeist is being edited. Really Danny? That's rather naive. Sex is not #1? Not even in the top 10? The Internet is for porn! Remember? Sex sells! Remember?
Google has decided that contextual advertising in the dating process is a business model. Why not, they can sell ads to desperate house wives and perverts. WTF?
There's nothing like some good old associative relevance to make you buy new books from Amazon. Last month, I bought Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel for Coolz0r. Of course, a few weeks later, you get the staple email saying...
We've noticed that customers who have purchased Naked Conversations also purchased books...
The recommendations?
I think Amazon should investigate another type of matching algorithm known as demographics. I suspect that male customers don't buy these books as often as female customers.
Let's examine these selections from the point of view of the Amazon associative algorithm. I assume that one or more Amazon customers who bought Naked Conversations, also bought the above books. Judging from narrow topic range, I suspect that the words or more were unnecessary in the last sentence. In other words, Amazon must be matching on single data points. I have a hard time believing that is very effective.
The best PPC April Fools joke came courtesy of Eric Giguere.
http://www.memwg.com/blog/adsense/Chitika-Declares-Invalid-Clicks-Valid.html
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