How is everyone using Alternate Ads?

Find anything that works?

[lorenzinho2]

Hi All, as more and more PSAs get served on my site, I will be trying out the alternate ads. Options that I'm considering include - direct sale of text links (kind of hard because you don't know where, and how many impressions you will deliver), network text ads from MarketBanker (untargetted, low pay-out), general interest type affiliate programs (e.g. dating Web sites), and PSAs advertising new content on my own site.

Does anyone have anything that has worked well in this format? Is there any way I can tell what percentage of my current AdSense ads are PSA's to get an idea of available impressions?

Thanks.

[JollyK]

I'm using a script that spits out text-based affiliate ads that are more-or-less targeted to the site it's on. E.g, if Adsense shows "Blue Widgets" ads, then my alternate ads will show affiliate ads for "Blue Widgets" for that site. I've just looked at what Google mostly shows on my site, and then found affiliate programs that are somewhat similar. If all else fails, Amazon links for books work too.

To find out how many PSA's there were, about, I took a week where my alternate ad script did nothing but log the page. Something like:

#!/usr/bin/perl

print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
open(LOG, ">>adsenselog.txt");
print LOG localtime() . "$ENV{'HTTP_REFERER'} $ENV{'QUERY_STRING'}\n";
close(LOG);
exit();

That was pretty much the whole script, although since I used it on other sites, and you don't always get the referer, I called it as "adsensetest.cgi?SiteName" to get which site it was running on. Then I pretty much just looked at how many pages showed up in that log, which pages they were, etc.

How's it working? Hard to tell, since I just started, and it's not pay-per-click. There haven't been very many PSA's shown actually, but I imagine this will pick up towards the end of the month.

That's my amateur 2 cents. :-)