Revenue based incentive scheme - Adsense account at risk!

[anand84]

Hi

Need a suggestion people..My employer owns a few websites using Adsense (not my personal Adsense account). The websites are content based, and to boost employee moral, they are planning to introduce an incentive scheme based on so many parameters like the quality, quantity of content that they post, revenues generated from the categories that every content writer writes on, etc.

I fear that this might lead to the content writers clicking on Google ads themselves so that they make more money from their respective categories. Of course, the management is going to tell them the hazards of doing such a thing, but every employee might think that only he/she is doing it and in doing so, the company's Adsense account might get blocked.

How do you suggest we address this issue?

[cgiscripts4u]

anand84

assuming the employees have to log in some way to post the content, you could add a small script that disables adsense ads to those IP's that have logged in to publish/submit the content. This will not be 100% as people have access from other locations and IP's do change from time to time, especially if on dialup connection, but it could help.

[anand84]

Thanks for the reply CGIScripts4u.,

We already have that installed. But I am worried about them clicking ads back from home or in case, we educate them about fraud clicking, asking their friends to click from various locations.

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In the incentive structure I am currently devising for them, I am taking the following points:

1. No incentives on category based revenues
2. Overall revenues given the last priority (out of the 6-7 different parameters I have chosen like the quantity, quality I have already mentioned) so that they would rather add more content in their free time than click on ads.
3. Pageviews minus my local city traffic as a parameter to consider.
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I think it would serve decent to counter their ad-clicking tendencies. But there is a new problem. Incentives are mostly from the newer profits that we gain by improved efficiency of the employees. By giving revenue the least preference, I would be putting the company profits on the backburner, and this would not be accepted by the management,right?

[Hobbs]

There's a simpler solution now that the cat is out of the bag:

The owner to communicate the following to Google first:
Every employee will apply for their own AdSense account and a script will randomly alternate the employee & the employer code at a fixed % of the impressions.

Now the employees will read and personally commit to a TOS, and it will be hard(er) to personally gain by clicking ads, this solution is not a good one, but so is your prospect of a long term relation with AdSense.

[cgiscripts4u]

What Hobbs suggests is probably a good one, you could set up revenue sharing with adsense, you will need to search out how to do this but it is available via adsense, it would mean you could put the content writers adsense code on their content and then both the content writer and the company would earn from ad clicks but if content authors click on their own ads then they stand a chance of loosing their adsense account.

[rocco]

Aren't employees supposed to be employed? Not paying them on a fixed base, is just suggesting them doing some sort of fraud like clicking themselves etc or spamming links on board and blogs. This seems to be the goal of this business model to me.

[anand84]

Hi Hobbs

That's innovative stuff, definitely my Plan B. But, I still wonder if that would cure-all..Because, that would veer their focus from their job, which is writing content, into seeing how much revenues are made. Revenues, is indeed the bottomline,and while it's good for the content writers to see how much their content is contributing, providing them such a facility would distract, in my opinion.

And another major drawback with this method is the slow rate of revenue progress in their accounts. The employees wouldn't lose much (at max, their incentives which is above the pay that they are getting anyway) by clicking ads. The company has a huge stake in this fraudulence, if it occurs! The employees have nothing to lose from the point of view of status quo..

[anand84]

Rocco

They do have a fixed pay which they are earning right now. This is going to be over and above this pay to incentivize them to contribute more. Otherwise it is more like a cartel among the writers who simply choose to contribute less saying it is simply not possible to contribute more..

[Future]

small script that disables adsense ads to those IP's that have logged in to publish/submit the content

can you explain more about this process please ?

[cgiscripts4u]

small script that disables adsense ads to those IP's that have logged in to publish/submit the content
can you explain more about this process please ?

it does depend on your setup as to how you do it but as an example when a 'member or employee' logs in you would store their IP address ($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] in php) in a database, when your content is viewed you would check the visitors 'REMOTE_ADDR' against the database, if there is a match then don't show the adsense ads, if no match then show the ads as normal.

The same could work if you just wanted to block visitors from a particular IP address, ie all employees accessing the site from work, sharing the same connection for example.

[netmeg]

I would run from this whole scenario like it was the plague.

[farmboy]

I would run from this whole scenario like it was the plague.

Yep, me too.

But I guess Webmaster World always has room for one more "Our account got banned" thread.

FarmBoy

[explorador]

For everything I have found in this forum I can tell you, revealing the mechanics of the system compromises the account. You don't have control (can't) over the people who eventually will tell others how they earn money and then the clicks come from the same source...

There are threads where the girlfriend began to make clicks...

I wouldn't do it. Is not a bad idea (as incentive) but hard to avoid problems.

[dataguy]

I was faced with the exact same situation. With the Analytics integration, we could tell exactly how much money each writer was bringing in. After a month of batting around ideas, we came up with a plan.

We now have an obscure "commercial value" that we assign articles and writers. They were told at the onset that this number is derived from a secret formula that will change over time. We never mentioned cpm or click thru rates, hopefully they never figure it out.

So far our system has worked well, though I see that over the weekend Google has lost a weeks' worth of our analytics/adsense data, so I'm not sure what we're going to have to do about that.

[farmboy]

Another thing to consider is some number of those employed writers are going to figure out they can easily do this for themselves and have 100% of the income.

FarmBoy