Forum Moderators: martinibuster
1) It forces me to contact advertisers directly and establish relationships with them.
2) It makes me diversify and not rely for my income on one arbitrary and capricious corporate giant.
3) It lets me sleep at night knowing that if I lose my AdSense account, it is not the end of the world.
4) No one else is dictating to me what I can and cannot put on my site.
5) I may actually make more money going the direct route.
So, I think this could a blessing in disguise. I was getting lazy, anyway. Time to talk to advertisers.
I would instead recommend using Google's AdManager. It is basically OpenX on steriods, and it is free, and they host your ads for you (ie - you don't have to worry about performance problems).
Adsense earnings are not dropping due to Google, they are dropping due to the economy and advertisers scaling back.
Most probably likely for many however my earnings have dropped due to a lower CTR year on year through either Google glitches or their "improvements" to the program reducing overall click volume, in fact my average EPC for the first quarter of 2009 is UP more than 15% compared to 2008.
Clicks, clicks, I need clicks, where do they keep disappearing to!
I'm talking about pay per sale (10% ish). Not pay per click - didn't make that clear. I have no idea if a click generates a sale. I really would prefer not to play Adsense at their own game of pay per click. Possibly at very high volumes it makes sense, but not the volumes of most sites, mine included.
Yes there are a few advertisers who use Analytics to track accurately, but my research shows they are few and far between.
I did some quick math, i'm receiving less than 7% of what it would cost me to advertise on my own sites with adwords... something just isn't right. I'm considering removing adsense and contacting future advertisers directly as well.
Just to be fair to Google, they can split the ad revenue anyway they choose. If one reads last quarter’s income statement and others, Google reports that the cost of acquiring revenue keeps dropping. So, maybe Google is a more efficient organization and operating leaner (they should do this BTW), or they are paying less for employees (?) or they are paying out less monies for their revenue share partners (joint venture organization, AdSense publishers, and others) – you pick.
Also to be fair to the AdSense lovers here there is a basket full of other reasons why your revenue is dropping as well. Yes, it could be your fault as some will soon suggest.
I suspect many web sites AdSense revenues are dropping because of ALL of the reasons posted on this and the other 600 threads on this subject.
Unfortunately, you will not know what has happened to your AdSense revenue until Google opens the box and lets you see the details. NEVER!
Yes there are a few advertisers who use Analytics to track accurately, but my research shows they are few and far between.
You must be dealing with lower end advertisers then because the people I deal with hold my feet to the fire for performance, they're watching me like a hawk!
OpenX has a hosted solution now as well, same as Google Admanager.
OpenX has a hosted solution now as well, same as Google Admanager.
Openx works well to rotate the ads, but I have noticed that I get fewer clicks from Google and others when ads are delivered by OpenX (PHPAdsNew)
Slight delay? I don't know.
I am going to use AdManager; Google can't get my existing channels to work anyway, and my accountant just yelled at me to move all my stuff to a corporate account instead of one that pays me personally, so I had to open another AdSense account for that anyway.
So yea, my AdSense is way down like everyone else's - about a third of what I typically do this time of year. I have a couple fewer sites, but that wouldn't be enough to explain away this kind of a loss.
So here is what I am doing.
First of all, I'm expanding and slightly redesigning some of my main sites. Adding pages, adding content for those pages, and moving things around. I'm sure a bit of ad blindness has crept in (I get a ton of repeat business) - so I'm not really moving or changing any of the content, but I'm making a bunch of changes to the ads - changing the placements, the sizes, and the colors around.
I'm putting the ad targeting back in. I have put it in and taken it out numerous times over the years - never saw much difference. But I saw some comparisons recently that lifted my eyebrows - it's going back in for now.
Staying opted in to interest based advertising. Dunno if it will hit any of my sites, but it's the way the world is going. Adapt or die. No point being an ostrich about it.
I typically have people begging me for direct advertising, and I've always avoided it because it *is* a hassle; well no more. I set up a section on my site devoted to that, and cribbed some information from a few friends who have done it successfully. I may end up undercharging this first year while I get my feet wet in it, but it will be a start.
Expanding more into affiliate marketing - sat down and tried to think if I had any systems or ways of doing things that were unique to me, that I could toss up a site about, and came up with three. Went hunting and found aff programs for most of the products involved. Since they're all things I use regularly, I'm pretty sure I can put up quality sites for them, although since it's only me, they'll have to go up one at a time. I may draft some relatives to write for me.
That's what *I* am doing for the rest of the year.
[edited by: netmeg at 8:39 pm (utc) on April 10, 2009]
Time to talk to advertisers.
Sounds like wishful thinking to me, unless you have a great deal of traffic, an extremely small universe of AdSense advertisers, and a way to sell and serve page-targeted ads in real time.
I have some clients using OpenX, and they have noticed a definite drag on ad delivery.
I am going to use AdManager; Google can't get my existing channels to work anyway, and my accountant just yelled at me to move all my stuff to a corporate account instead of one that pays me personally, so I had to open another AdSense account for that anyway.
I'm currently switching off openx hosted and doing what is essentially a forced move to admanager. Openx is a mess. I haven't had stats workign for days. The interface is so slow that it takes 20 minutes to get a 2 minute task completed.
Never could get conversion tracking to work, and all questions were either ignored or misunderstood.
Add serving Monday and Tues. this week for us was either slow or broken. We lost 50% of estimated adsense income due to not serving properly. Worse, it hung our pages.
Terrible support. Good people, overworked.
The risks are too high if you have any significant amount of money dependent on it.
I really want openx hosted to work. But they don't have the resources allocated to qualify it as a professional business type resource.
Just didn't want to spend a week learning a new program.....
which makes me wonder what else is not being tracked and recorded correctly...Smart Pricing perhaps? And as I've mentioned before.
Sounds like wishful thinking to me, unless you have
AdSense isn't a replacement for traditional advertising (or vice versa); it complements traditional advertising.
Look at major media sites like NYTimes.com and Washingtonpost.com, for example, and you'll see that they often use skyscrapers, leaderboards, rich media, etc. for their mainstream CPM advertising and CPC contextual text ads as a secondary source of revenue.
This complementary approach can work even better on niche sites: A site devoted to gourmet cooking, for example, could have display ads for kitchen appliances and utensils ("Grill steaks in your dining room with Volt-a-Grill") along with contextual text ads for appliance and utensil dealers ("Volt-a-Grill Junior, $199"). In such cases, the idea of "replacing" AdSense with direct ad sales is shortsighted, because the kinds of ads that you're likely to sell directly or via a rep firm serve a different purpose and reach a different kind of advertiser than contextual text ads (AdSense's core product) do.
Also, let's be realistic: It's easy to vent frustration by posting a forum message that says "I'm going to replace AdSense with direct ad sales--take that, Google!" Making good on that threat is harder than making the threat, especially in today's advertising economy.
It's easy to vent frustration by posting a forum message that says "I'm going to replace AdSense with direct ad sales--take that, Google!" Making good on that threat is harder than making the threat, especially in today's advertising economy.
It is easy for advertisers to trust a big G than a site they might not know or knot little about its performance.
It is easy for advertisers to trust a big G than a site they might not know or knot little about its performance.
It's also a matter of efficiency and ease. With AdWords/AdSense, an advertiser can buy clicks and/or impressions on many different sites in one fell swoop. (Obviously, the importance of this will vary by advertiser and category; someone who's selling rubber hovercraft skirts to hovercraft hobbyists may know the two or three sites that matter in that field, but someone who's selling glow-in-the-dark dog leashes or the latest generation of Wi-Fi routers has a much larger universe of potential advertising media.)
So I've sent out 10 emails to potential advertisers and gotten 3 replys. They are interested and need more information. Of course, pricing, and maybe how to track, will determine all, and 10 emails is hardly enough to determine anything. But it is a start.
I have used phpAdsNew (OpenX) and a couple of others and AdManager is by far the most flexible and reliable. It is a little hard to learn, as is any other ad server, but it is completely hosted by Google and most advertisers are familiar with it and will accept its reports, which isn't necessarily true of some of the competitors. It's also free, which doesn't hurt.
Not necessarily true. Depends on your niche, your traffic, your demographics, your reputation & authority, your content, and so on.
This goes back pretty far in this thread. The reply was to my comment that most advertisers (and their agencies and media buyers) prefer to deal with Google and other ad networks than with thousands of small sites. (This is, after all, the reason ad networks and media buyers exist -- advertisers are busy running their businesses, not dealing with thousands of radio stations, newspapers, web sites, etc.)
Obviously, some advertisers will make buys of individual sites under certain circumstances but if you have a large site covering multiple topics, Google (and other networks) likely have thousands of ads suitable for the inventory you have available.
Are you able to effectively solicit all those advertisers yourself -- and, more importantly, are they going to want to invest the time and effort required to deal with you when they can buy the same eyeballs that are looking at your site through an ad network for a lot less money and with a lot less administrative investment?
We sell to a few direct advertisers, who tend to be very large companies that have very specific needs that we just happen to fill. But even though those clients pay a premium and we don't have to deal with a middleman, there are days when I would be just as happy if I had never heard from them and from the guy I pay to deal with them.
We're a top 1200 site in most rankings (Quantcast, etc.) but we're still pretty small beans when it comes to administrative firepower -- and the time and trouble involved in dealing with individual advertisers often exceeds the slight monetary benefit we derive from doing so.
This brings to mind my favorite observation -- which is that Google's auction system makes it "squeezeable." We normally have three slots devoted to Google per page but if a direct advertiser buys one of those slots in a certain section, the cold truth is that we don't see a corresponding decline in Google earnings.
Only reason I can deduce is that the lower-paying Google advertisers get shut out and the higher-paying ones get shifted to the two remaining slots.
So, yes, you can sell directly but the return on the investment of your time and trouble may not be spectacular.
Oh, and one other thing, as soon as you start selling directly, be prepared for the advertisers to begin "advising" you on your content, whining about how lukewarm your latest mention of them was, and generally putting the arm on you give them special treatment in your editorial section. It's fair game for them to do this -- but it's something every reputable publisher needs to be ready for. The old-school line of thinking on this is that you only get to sell your integrity once.
I think Google AdManager is still only half of a solution. I would still have to invoice customers, create campaigns etc.
Is there an advertising system that is self-service for the advertiser i.e. a system that allows the advertiser to create campaigns, choose ad slots, upload creatives and pay specifically for my web site?
