Comments (10)

By Les Scammell, May 8, 2008 7:16 am

If you are an Adsense publisher then you need to take care in your quest for increased visitor numbers. Some visitors may actually be costing you money, and I am talking about a sizable percentage.

Your income per click may come down to as low as 0.05c per click ‘across all of your Adsense sites’ when they could be earning as much as 0.80 or more per click.

The income you receive per click can be affected by poor click through rates. The optimum click through rate (CTR) is  between 4-9% or higher. If your CTR drops below 2%, Google will often tag your site as a poor performer and only pay the lowest possible rate. The problem is, you will receive the lowest possible rate for all Adsense units on that account.

This means that although you may have a very good site receiving 4%+ CTR, that site will still only receive the smallest per click price if one of your other sites is performing below the 2% thresh-hold.

Visitors  I label as ‘tip N run’ are those that arrive on your site through social media. Stumblers, diggers and Entre Card visitors are notorious for not clicking on ad units. Stumblers will stumble to the next site, diggers will return to digg and EC users click through to the next EC card holder. If you are reading this from one of those sites, when was the last time you clicked on an ad unit? You are shopping, you are visiting so it is only natural that you wont click these ads.

These visitors are all increasing your visitors numbers, however the number of clicks on ad units each day is staying the same. This has the effect of dropping your CTR – your CTR is, in simple terms, a mathematical equation that divides the number of visitors by the number of clicks. The more visitors, the lower the CTR.

Some promotions work better than others. Through the use of Entre Card my CTR has fallen to about 1% so I have been getting only 5 cents per Adsense click. Prior to this I was receiving around 40 cents per click. Buying traffic through Better Traffic (see ad at top of sidebar) has seen my CTR increase to just below the required 2%. At a cost of $15 per month I am making a marginal profit. If I can lift the CTR to above that 2% thresh-hold my income will jump dramatically.

You need to keep an eye on your CTR through your Adsense account. If a site is really performing badly then it may pay to remove the ads from that site. The lost revenue may well be made up by the sudden jump in per click income on your other sites.

Once all sites on your account get above the Google thresh-hold CTR the, income per click goes up. If you are blogging on a high paying Adsense niche, then you may be losing big dollars in the quest for extra visitors. Check each CTR level for all ad units on your sites. It only takes one poor performing unit to kill all of them.

Comments (11)

By Les Scammell, May 3, 2008 11:31 am

If WordPress charged for their blogging software they would most likely be seeking bankruptcy right now, or be ripe for a Microsoft or Google takeover. The latest version of WordPress 2.5, to put it mildly, sucks!

I would like to put on record right from the start that I am a WordPress fan – I like the software and the relative ease of use. Although I have only been in the blogging world for 6 months, I have used several different platforms including Drupal. Hopefully I can continue my happy association with WordPress, just not with release 2.5. Fortunately I didn’t upgrade this blog so I can continue to operate in a happy blog environment. I did upgrade three of my other sites and so far the experience has not been great.

There has been a lot of discussion about the WordPress 2.5 release and the lack of support on Andrew Boyd’s On Blogging Australia site – the discussion makes for interesting reading so I wont go back over those issues. If your interested I suggest you click on over and have a read.

My title says it all really. WordPress 2.5 would be a commercial failure. Proof of this can be seen by the relatively quick patch release that fixed around 70 – yes seventy issues. Talk about product recall big time.

I think WordPress as an organization has become stuck in a mindset that says ‘this is free software’.  The reality is, free or not, they should be taking a commercial approach. At present, part of their ‘mindset’ seems to revolve around having specific release periods which seem to be scheduled for 3 or 4 times per year. Commercial software goes through an annual release and thats it.

Having regular scheduled upgrades is a great motivational tool, particularly when you are relying on unpaid programming support. You can still achieve this motivation whilst have longer release time frames.

The beta testing phase was far too short and did not leave any time for ‘fixing’ issues prior to its release. The more workable timetable could see annual releases, say in January each year with beta versions released for testing in July. This would enable three months of testing and feedback followed by three months of fine tuning prior to the following release. To have 70 issues that needed ‘fixing’ is testament to the lack of beta testing.

WordPress needs to undergo a cultural change within the organization that can relate to users on “commercial” rather than a “free” basis. WordPress has been, arguably, the best platform available for self hosted blogs for a long time with millions of blogs using the software.  The problems that users are now facing is providing real motivation for alternatives to update and promote their software.

Once users find viable alternatives, they will slowly move away from WordPress – and as has been shown in the past with other software, a dribble soon becomes a flood and WordPress will be left with a small dedicated group of users and developers and a poor reputation.

I hope WordPress can open its ears a little more, listen to what the users are saying, and return to a more user friendly blogging environment. I would like to think I could continue using this software for as long as I need it. Sometimes, we can be too smart for our own good and this time around, WordPress got it wrong. Fair enough – let’s get it right and move on.

happy blogging – les