Ads on unreachable member pages

pros & cons of placing ads on internal member pages

[TheFlipguy]

I have some dynamic pages on my free website that can be accessed by members only after they are logged in. Obviously these cannot be reached by adsense crawler (redirects to the login page). I would like to know what you guys think about the pros and cons of placing ads on these pages? I have not done it till now but some of the internal pages are also some of the most visited pages. Any suggestions?

Flip

[Mr_Fern]

I have something of the sort set up on my site. In the Private Messaging area.

One day G sent me an e-mail (which made me nervous due to reading so many threads on here). The e-mail was about if I had a read only access account that they could use so that the media bot could better browse the site. I didn't think it would be that much effective since the read only bot would see an empty inbox, but you can always do that. Create a read only account and send it to G.

[mack]

The problem with Adsense in a protected area is the ads will not be very well targeted. Mediabot needs to be ale to spider and analyse a page in order to serve really targeted ads.

The other flip of the cong is you may have users who repeat click on ads. Depending on your membership umbers this may look suspect if you have many clicks from a fairly small number of users.

Mack.

[TheFlipguy]

Fern, I didn't know G could actually be set up so that they can access member areas! I hope you are not pulling my leg here :-)

Mack, I kinda knew the ads will not be well targeted. But I have noticed on another site that has a similar setup that the ads displayed are according to the content on the login page. In theory I am assuming that if I put some content on the login page that will be relevant to my website, the ads will still be reasonably well targetted. Is my theory right or someone wants to kick it out the window? :-)

As far as number of members are concerned, it is small right now but then I have recently created the site and going all out (hopefully in a correct manner) to get more traffic and members. And going by the past 10-12 days numbers, the clicks are not so high so as to be considered suspect vis-a-vis the number of page impressions (i.e the ctr is low). And why should they seem suspect when they are genuine? My site is about 6 months old but I had set it up using phpbb without much customizations. Recently I removed phpbb and have created a full fledged website with lots of features and content sections that will be driven by the users themselves (this is why I have some private sections so that users can submit their content).

Any comments, suggestions or brickbats?

[ncreegan]

Why not just allow access to the mediabot UA or ip range?

[inerte]

Once I emailed Google asking if I could display AdSense on password-protected pages and they replied with a flat "no".

But I didn't, at the time, ask if I could allow MediaPartners to access it, because we went with a subscription mode instead of ad-supported (it's a very good system for law firms).

But my opinion is, well, it depends ;)

If you have some crazy dynamic pages that generate content that you have no control over, or no idea what it is, AdSense looks like a cool idea. But if you have a focus, like "used widgets", then affiliate links or targetted ads (per category, or keywords) are better.