Omar Kattan

Archive for the ‘Website Monetisation’ Category

On it’s official Adwords blog Google has announced Interest-based ads, a new advetising model that serves ads based on what a user has previously viewed in their browser. 

This, according to Google will allow them to serve better targeted ads to users of their network including YouTube.  But how does this fair in terms of privacy concerns? 

Google has officially stated it’s plan to combat the privacy issues arising from such advertising model by allowing users to opt out of such model.  This can be done by installing a browser “plugin” that controls whether or not internet users wants to participate in such a programme, but is this enough?

Not according to many webmasters who feel that Google’s new interest-based ad model, while in alignment with their objective of increasing click through rates of their ads, is a huge blow to online privacy efforts.

I for one feel that Google is right in trying to maximise returns from it’s cash cow (Adwords) and the introduction of interest based ads will do just that.  However, the idea that you would need to download a plugin and clear your browser cache in order to safeguard your privacy disqualifies many non-techie internet users who will be unable to understand how to do this let alone even know what a “plugin” is. 

Will interest-based ads succeed? Sure they will.  Will Google fair well out of all of this?  Sure it will.  Will advertisers be happy?  Definitely.  Will internet users complain?  ofcourse they won’t, that is until internet privacy becomes more of a top level priority for governments around the World.

Many Adsense users believe that Adsense revenue derived from forums is not as lucrative as revenue generated from regular content sites (all things being equal).  Well, I’m here to set the record straight and say it is very lucrative, but you need to know what you’re doing.

First of all, unless your website is generating at least 1000 unique visitors per day, don’t quit your day job!  One you’ve started hitting these visitor numbers then there are a number of opportunities to increase the revenue on your forum (my experience and the content of this post is about Invision Power Board, IPB) a great forum software and one I’ve used to power one of my very large community sites for over 5 years now!

Here are a few tips to help you maximise the revenue generated from your forums:

1) Ensure that your forum is very well targetted, general discussion forums are very difficult to monetise (unless your visitor levels are in the millions per month)

2) Install Google Analytics on your forum (it now has an adsense addon) and know which parts of your forum get the highest amount of traffic.

3) The adsense ad unit that’s worked best for me is the Large Rectangle (336X280) placed on the top left hand corner below the navigation bar (only in the highly trafficed subforums)

4) Do not be tempted to add Adsense code on the index of the forum.  it will only increase your ad impressions and decrease your CTR (this will eventually decrease your eCPM and eventually kill your revenue!)

5) Ensure that you’ve also included the same Ad block mentioned above on the lofi version of the forum (again top left hand side of the page above the Navigation).

6) Make sure you include the same block in the forum portal if you’ve activated it (act=home)

7) Finally, and this is really important!  Do not use the forum’s internal search engine but instead create a Google Internal search engine and include adsense for search on it, this has worked wonders on my site!

Hope these tips help you to better monetise you IPB forum!  Good luck!

Google will launch Adsense video units over the next few days according to the official Adsense blog.  The video ads will be rolled out to English-language publishers in the UK, Ireland, and Canada.

Video ad units are similar to adsense ad units except in that they have an embedded, customizable video player in them that can display relevant video content similar to the content of a publisher’s site. 

The videos displayed on the publisher’s site have ads embedded in them and so a publisher will only get paid when a user views the ad.

This new feature from from Google’s Adsense programme is in collaboration with YouTube another Google company bought just over a year ago.

Google’s adsense programme is an extension of adwords which extends advertising from the sponsored listings in Google’s search results onto publisher’s sites.

Do you use Adsense to monetise your site? If so then you might be interested in this, Google has posted an Adsense Optimisation Tutorial on its official Adsense blog.

What is Adsense?

Adsense is a Google advertising program that allows website and blog owners to place Google targeted ads onto their sites and get paid either on a per click, per impression or per action basis.

How much money can you make with Adsense?  

The sky’s the limit really, it all depends on the field (niche) you’re in and how much time you have to writing unique insightful and useful content about a topic of choice.

I’m using adsense on one various sites of mine and the I’m definitely happy with the results I’m getting.