visnum

As an adsense publisher, I am observing the effects of the financial crisis on my advertising revenue. It dropped by more than 50% in the last three weeks. While I was going to blog about only that, I have read Vered’s post on adsense ads.

Then I decided to take her opinion into consideration too. Let’s just start with what I am going to say. It’s not nice to see that adsense income decline but there are lessons from this. I think the most important lesson is that people click on adsense ads really for the reason of being interested in the offer. We understand that because when there is a financial crisis, the click through rate declines. Pay per click cost didn’t decline too much, at least in my personal experience. So, from this data in hand, we can clearly understand that encouraging clicks do not help on increasing adsense revenue.

Encouraging clicks is strictly prohibited by Google anyway but people always try to find a way to encourage people within the rules. This is not going to generate any further income. People still try it because they think adsense ads are there to trick visitors into clicking them. They don’t think adsense as a process. In fact, adsense is a process as I have written earlier about contextual advertising and it involves those steps:

1. You have a meaningful article on your page.
2. You can be found among search results and you are in a relatively decent position, let’s say your page comes up between #1 and #50.
3. The search terms are related with your topic of your article.
4. There are enough adwords clients that need to show their ads on such a page when it is found with such keywords.

Let’s come to where adsense needs more effort in total quality management.

Some advertisers are eager to pull visitors to their website and they design and prepare the copy of their ads to be very attractive. Those advertisers usually decrease the overall level of quality in adsense because they are after quantity, instead of quality. The type of advertising Vered talks about is this kind of advertising.

However, with this financial crisis and lessons from that in mind, push marketing doesn’t make sense. When a visitor has the incentive of buying a product that she is interested in, she is going to click that ad anyway.

Thus the most important part lies in advertising visibility, that is putting the ads on places where people are not affected by ad blindness.

I was going to write more on this but I must stop here because blogger.com is banned in Turkey and I want to follow those news. I’ll continue to discuss adsense total quality management later on.

At this point, we should talk about “smart pricing”. Smart pricing is a technique that Google Adsense program uses. They have written only once about smart pricing. There is not much detail on how this operates. Briefly, if your web site creates too much clicks without ending up with any conversion (which means a sale, a subscription or any other criteria which is set by the advertiser or google adsense, for instance having visited more than one page in the destination web site or spending a certain amount of time in that web site) your web site is then being smart priced for a period of time. This is when you see 20 clicks on an ad which only brings $0.20, for instance. Those numbers are not exact numbers and I am not an adsense professional, so don’t take them as the ultimate truth. I am just telling this to give you a rough idea. I even don’t know whether this smart pricing is still being used or not. This is personal experience and knowledge from my own readings over the web.

This notion of smart pricing should give us another clear idea what adsense is all about. It is designed with the intention of being profitable for every player in the game. Your visitors are part of that game too. According to this perspective, putting adsense ads on your web site is like an additional service that you offer to your visitors. So, it is also meaningless to use plugins to set advertising visibility such as “no ads for friends”, “ads only for visitors who come from search engines”, etc. Advertising may be evil on many levels but Google Adsense is less evil in comparison to other types of advertising. This is the essence of Adsense and other similar contextual advertising systems.

Now let’s come back to the view that advertising sucks. This is the point where I suggest a more thorough total quality management for adsense. Adwords clients must understand at least what I have understand so far. Only than they will design meaningful ads instead of sucking ads.

There is still more to say about that. For instance, about our economic system as a whole. Because you never see an ad that sucks when it is about an absolutely needed good or service. Ads suck mostly when they are about a good or service which is not really necessary. Of course this is also a subjective issue but anyway, sometimes you can decide that only by using your intuition.

UPDATE: Engelliweb commented: blogger.com was banned according to the order of Diyarbakır 1. Peace & Crime Court, 20.10.2008 of 2008/2761.

I don’t think that those bans are related to Adnan Oktar, because he was suing in Istanbul courts, however this one was a decision of Diyarbakir court.

UPDATE: (see above update) There is still no information about the cause of the ban but everybody suspects Adnan Oktar who is responsible for most of the bans in Turkey. He is bringing any content on the net to the court which supports Darwinism and mentions his name as a creationist. But whether he is involved or not in this recent blogger.com ban is still a suspicion.

Blogger.com is censored in Turkey. I’ll keep with details posted later. The ban created a huge response in Turkish bloggers almost immediately. We just see this when we try to reach blogger.com or any blog on *.blogspot.com:

blogger.com censored in Turkey

image credits: Aylin Özdemir

Many bloggers pay great attention to the amount of comments they receive, in fact more than necessary. I have seen many novice bloggers who are upset just because of the scarcity of comments they receive under their posts. On the other hand, very successful bloggers like Steve Pavlina are not interested in comments at all.

We also see many, many successful bloggers like Robert Scoble or like Dooce.com, where comments reach at hundreds. For people who see the amount of comments would think that as a criteria of successful blogging. When they think like that, they would see only a little or no comments as an indicator of failure.

But it is not. Comment amount is not an indicator of your success. If you ask questions on your blog post and nobody comes up with an answer, then you may conclude that nobody cares but apart from such exceptions, it really doesn’t matter whether people comment on your blog or not. Recently, I met a couple of new readers from Facebook and they told me how helpful my posts on moodr are. Most of them pointed to one or two posts to be most successful and helpful. Those posts didn’t received any comments. Yet, people were very satisfied with them.

When a blog goes popular, other bloggers just go and comment there in order to gain visibility for themselves. When Darren posts something new or Tina posts something new, most of the time, people are there to comment for their own visibility. I don’t mean that all of those comments are not useful. There are very useful conversations on many blogs through commenting for all of us to benefit. I just try to add to my argument that amount of comments on a blog post is not an indicator of that post’s success.

So, bloggers usually expect affection in the name of comments and that’s pretty understandable. They put great effort in a post and tens of comments under that post is an instant gratification for many of them. However, know that this is not a criteria and don’t get upset when you don’t see any comments. Look at your statistics instead. How many people read that post, and what is the bounce rate of this post? If the bounce rate is low then you can surely conclude that your post has been successful.

The same is valid for pingbacks and trackbacks but not as much as comments. For backlinks, gaining visibility is again a primary motivation for linking. Don’t get upset by that either. But they are more important than comments because they built long term traffic into your blog. The only way you can get them is the usefulness of your post.