Hot Traffic - Should AdSense filter clicks

I wrote about a post of mine that was receiving quite a bit more traffic than I normally receive because it got popular on Reddit and StumbleUpon for a couple days. It looked like Google might have been ignoring the AdSense clicks from that post and counting them for any other posts during that hot period.

A couple people commented complaining about similar incidents and how this affecting their income. It is a point that I can’t disagree with as a blogger who uses AdSense on my blogs. If Google is applying any kind of filtering to abnormally hot posts, that is money that I will never see.

The question is whether Google should be filtering clicks from the hot posts.

I’m not sure I whole heartedly agree with the points I’m about to make, but let’s call them the Devil’s Advocate arguments.

What advertisers want

Orders and branding. When people click on an AdSense link it can do two positive things for the company. People can place an order. People can become aware of a company and/or product line that they might someday order or mention to a friend.

What contextual advertising provides

On a normal post on a normal day, the people visiting my blog are interested in the niche of the blog and are either regular readers in that niche or visitors that found an individual post through a search about that niche. These are people advertisers want to reach. If I am blogging about all weather tires, and car fanatics and people searching for “Best all weather tires in Missouri” are the ones clicking on the ads those are pretty legitimate potential customers.

The magic black box at Google will do what it does best and provide ads that are going to be as marketable to these visitors as possible which should lead to the highest click through rates and the highest conversion rates.

What happens when you get Dugg

So a post finally made the front page of Digg, Reddit or blew up on StumbleUpon. Thousands of new visitors land on your post. Who are these people? We all know that the percentage of people that are even going to bother clicking an ad from any of these sources is all but nonexistent. These are casual surfers. They are not looking to delve into the depths of your blog or niche while reading the post. Most of these visitors are one page and done. The best case scenario is that you will get another vote at whatever source is providing the traffic.

Sometimes their are clicks. With an thousand people that stop by, you figure somebody is going to click the ads every once in a while. I have no stats to back this up, but I would imagine that a fair portion of the AdSense clicks from Digg/Reddit/StumbleUpon traffic are either accidental or “tips” that the reader is giving the writer in appreciation for a good story.

Why these clicks are bad for everyone

Let’s assume Google isn’t filtering clicks from hot posts. That means people with virtually no interest in considering the product/company are clicking the ad and probably hitting the back button as quickly as possible. No sale. No real branding opportunity. Advertisers would end up spending money for very poor leads. These advertisers might get frustrated with the lack of return on their investment and abandon the online advertising scene for a while.

That would be bad for everyone.

The best scenario for everyone involved is a post that has relevant content with ads that are properly targeted leading to landing pages for items/services that match the interests of the readers.

While there is a side of me that might believe most of that, there is a wallet that would be pretty angry. My wallet believes that if I write something that sends readers to companies, that I should get paid for that service.

At some point, the companies looking for the sales need to make sure their landing pages are set up for the best conversion rates and their ad campaigns are set up to get the most appropriate customers from my site. I send them. They sell to them.

If they are worried about getting the most qualified leads, then a magic black box that reads my words to determine which ads to display probably isn’t the best advertising vehicle for that company.

Google AdSense click reporting oddity

Jeremy Zawodny mentioned a pretty big discrepancy between Google AdSense clicks reported and the number of Google AdSense clicks being reported by MyBlogLog and asked what we have noticed. I mentioned that they looked pretty close to me and thought nothing of it.

Then, a post I wrote on another blog about why dads should read to their kids got a bunch of Reddit and StumpleUpon traffic that last couple days and I noticed something odd.

I ended up getting about 10X the number of pageviews over a two day period and about 2.5X today as the traffic trailed off. I’ve been getting about 15-30 AdSense clicks a day and have no reason to doubt those numbers. I know that the Reddit and StumbleUpon crowd don’t bring many clicks, but I did expect to see a very slight increase in clicks and at least end up in the upper range of clicks since the main two days were Wednesday and Thursday which are normally pretty decent days.

Instead the clicks reported by Google dropped to lower than normal (11 and 14). Strange. The following mornings I noticed something even stranger. MyBlogLog reported 23 and 33. Since MyBlogLog says which post the clicks came from, I can tell that the Google counts match up pretty closely to the MyBlogLog counts if I subtract the clicks from the hot post of the last couple days from the MyBlogLog counts. Odd.

I don’t see anything indicating that my normal search engine and normal regular visitor traffic was any lower than normal.

It makes me wonder whether Google has algorithms in place to notice when certain posts get traffic spikes and consider a higher percentage of those clicks as invalid clicks.

What would be really nice, of course, if for Google to let us see how many clicks they count as invalid.

Update: I forgot to link to the post that got Jeremy Zawodny talking about this. Dom Ramsey noticed a difference in the counts and wrote about it on his blog in this post.

WordPress plugins I use

I have the basic template migrated across my little mini blog network. I still need to tweak the CSS to get the colors distinct on each blog but I’m going to ignore that for a few days and work on getting my plugins back in check.

Since each of the blogs was created at a different time, I have a lot of shared plugins but sometimes different versions. And I have never cleaned out the plugins that I know longer use.

First step is to identify what I am using. These are the plugins that I am using on at least one of the blogs that I intend to make sure each blog ends up using. Please note that the link is what I pulled from the Plugin page of my WordPress admin screen. Newer versions of the plugins might use different links. As I grab the newest versions over the next few days, I will update any links that are no longer the right one.

WordPress Plugins

• Akismet - Bye bye spam
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator - Nice pretty easy to implement sitemap that blends right into your template
• Democracy - For when you really care about your readers opinions
• Full Text Feed - I hate partial feeds. The WordPress 2.1.2 upgrade made partial feeds the default with no way to turn them off. This plugin fixes that and I will be a happy man when all my blogs use this.
• Google Sitemaps - Makes the sitemap that Google Webmaster Tools likes
• Next to Last - Let’s readers scroll through a lot of posts easily by click the next link at the bottom of pages
• Optimal Title - Makes it easy to switch your title from the default of Blog Name - Category - Post name to something more search engine friendly.
• Permalink Redirect - Handles the FeedBurner redirect (which I couldn’t get the FeedBurner redirect to do for some reason and also handles redirects for all your blogs URLs to make them all the same format.
• Related Posts - Adds a block of links to your own similar posts at the end of every post.
• Subscribe to Comments - Let’s readers get email updates when new comments are added to a post they want to keep track of.
• Text Link Ads v2 - Handles the Text Link Ads program. It is only on the two blogs accepted into the program at this point,.
• WordPress Database Backup - Backups are good. I need to do them more frequently.
• WP-ContactForm - Provides easy to implement contact form that blends into the design of your blog.

I also have installed WP-Cache to handle the few times when my sites got bogged down. I don’t regularly use it though because I seem to get a lot of 500 errors when it is activated and I haven’t had a chance to try and figure out why.

Those are my plugins. Over the next few days, I am going to find the most recent version of each, migrate that up to each blog, and then remove all of the other programs from the plugins directory.

Any other plugins that you think I should look into? Make a case and I will check it out.

Adding new blogs to your network

I have one blog that gets reasonable traffic and reasonable revenue through a growing variety of sources. Then I have the other 4 (including this one). About the only real opportunity that fits with my desire or lack thereof to micromanage the advertising streams is Google’s AdSense at this time.

To get into some of the programs and to make money with any of them, I need to increase the pageviews which means posting more often, submitting to blog carnivals and commenting on other related blogs to hopefully get some links and wait for the next PR update.

More posts, more links, more readers. I know how to do it but it is frustratingly slow to go through it from scratch again. At least this time I have the advantage of knowing what kind of financial payoff is available.

Web promotion through BlogBurst

One of my blogs was invited into BlogBurst a couple months ago. I accepted to see how good blog burst would be for web promotion.

I have neglected that blog a bit since then but started posting again recently and one of the posts got syndicated through BlogBurst. The post was talking about the NCAA tournament and got posted in 4 different online newspapers. So, what does something like that do for traffic/blog revenue.

According to BlogBurst, the headline has been displayed 8,888 times over the last two days between those four sources. The article has been read 68 times between those sources. Somebody clicked through from the post on the newspapers sites to my blog 6 times.

As for revenue, the only income on that site is through AdSense. That blog has only made 6 cents over the last two days. There were no direct clicks on the ads. The 6

cents came from the video ads that Google displays that are paid per impressions instead of per click.

As far as I can tell, there have been no links created to my site or the post as a result of this bit of BlogBurst exposure.

So, the post has not brought me fame nor fortune. It is fun to read the post on the news sites. It is nice to think that some of the 6 people that clicked through to my post could end up becoming regular readers.

I decided to submit my other blogs to BlogBurst to see if something from another niche could benefit a little more. If anything happens, I’ll post the results.

MyBlogLog - One thing I like and one thing I don’t like

I signed up all 5 of my blogs with MyBlogLog over the last couple weeks figuring I would find out what all the buzz was about.

I haven’t really figured out the “social” aspect of it yet.

I do really dig their stats, though. I like the main page where it lists all my blogs together with the pageview stats for each. That is a great way to get a quick overview of the sites. I also like how they not only report the AdSense clicks but tell you which posts the ads were clicked from and how many clicks came from that page. When I was in the pro trial period, I loved seeing that stuff in pretty close to real time.

I do have one little complaint with MyBlogLog. I sent them an email about a week ago asking a question about upgrading to the Pro service. I was wondering if the fee was per blog or per account (in my case all 5 of my blogs are under one MyBlogLog account). I never heard back from them. It is always kind of disappointing to be interested in buying something, ask a question, and then have to follow up just to get the information. I’m just not interested enough to bother right now.

Does anybody know the answer?

Updating templates

I have 5 different blogs that I maintain with quite a variety of consistency. I have completed upgrading all of them to WordPress 2.1.2 instead of being split between 2.03 to 2.1.

Now, I am working on standardizing the templates. The goal is to have the same layout with different banners and different color schemes defined in their CSS files.

Once I have all of that taken care of, I will look into pulling all of the custom information into seperate files that I can generically include into the theme and when I create a new blog, I can copy the template and only have to modify those separate files.

I have 2 of the blogs on the new template and will be working on moving the other 3 over the next week. If I get the time, this blog is next on the list so look for the new layout sometime between this afternoon and Monday morning.

Cleaning up after Ultimate Tag Warrior

I decided to start overhauling this blog by fixing the Ultimate Tag Warrior problem caused by a bad version. I could probably use a newer version and have it clean up the mess but I don’t plan on tagging my posts anymore.

I would backup the DB first, but the bug caused tons of extra records to get loaded into the WordPress tables making backups virtually impossible.

It looks like this is going to talk longer than it should. GoDaddy (my hosting provider) is running extremely slowly and I’m getting a fair amount of timeout errors.

My wp_postmeta table had over 300,000 records. Almost all of them are bad UTW records.

To clean up the records, I used this SQL command:

DELETE FROM `wp_postmeta` WHERE meta_key like ‘%utw%’

If you decide to try something similar, make sure you know how your database works. Not all of them use the same syntax.

Here are the results:

Deleted rows: 301693 (Query took 20.7045 sec)

Afterward, there is only 1 record. And everything is loading much more quickly (although GoDaddy admin page loads are still pretty slow).

That takes care of the first phase of cleaning up this blog. I’m going to be cleaning up a few other blogs at the same time. After I take care of this problem with the other blogs, I’ll be upgrading to WordPress 2.1.2.

Writing about blogging

This site was originally set up to be a generic chat about anything I found or wanted to talk about pertaining to the internet. I planned to focus mostly on blogging but didn’t know that much about it at the time.

Since then, I’ve avoided posting too often over here while developing another blog. I’ve learned a bit about blogging, making a few bucks blogging, and how to stay blogging work.

The other day, I decided that I wanted to start writing over here a little more and decided to use this site to talk about blogging and making money online.

Sure there are a ton of sites like this already online, but they are not mine. One thing that I have learned about writing a blog that you still want to work on a year later is that it needs to be on a topic you really like to talk about and I like talking about this stuff.

I’ve been helping a couple friends with a few technical aspects of their site and realized how much fun it is to share information. My wife has started helping me with the writing on one of the sites and normally just rolls her eyes when I tell her why I edit some of the posts the way I do.

Hopefully, it will be more entertaining to somebody who cares about how the nuts and bolts of the internet and the online advertising work. Maybe you are that somebody.

I’ll eventually be trying to write a post or two a day but it will probably take a few weeks to get there. I want to upgrade to WordPress 2.1.2 since I am horribly out of date now. I also want to completely get rid of the current theme. I liked it when I first installed it, but I want to get rid of the excerpts type of front page. I also need to clean up some database fluff from a bug in a version of Ultimate Tag Warrior I used for a while.

The posts over the next couple weeks will probably talk about these things and the plugins that I decide to use or not use.

Making money online

My Google AdSense money went down just a tiny bit in February as compared to January and December when I started making enough to get a check every couple months. Part of that is that there are fewer days in February. But, I also made just a few pennies less per day than those other months.

But, I ended up making more money in February than I have in any other month because I started listening to people like Darren of ProBlogger and his advice fo not relying on one method of income.

I was able to get one of my blogs accepted into Text Link Ads, and they sold 4 of the positions for the second half of the month which more than made up for the ever so little drop in AdSense income.

Since today is the first of a new month, I logged into my Text Link Ads account to see if any of the advertisers stuck around for another month. All 4 of them did. So, already I am locked into making about 50% of what I normally make in a month. On the first day of the month.

Plus, now I’m a little more protected if the price per click of the AdSense clicks drops or something strange happens with my search engine traffic.

Sometimes I end up reading the advice the big money people write and think but what difference does it make for us people making peanuts. Now that I’ve started to see it in action, I can see two important reasons to start diversifying early on.

1. If you happen to get lucky and have a site get huge, you will already be set up to implement multiple income streams.
2. If the plans are complimentary to each other, meaning implementing one doesn’t steal income from the other, then you can see a fairly sizable percentage wise jump literally overnight. After all, I went from peanuts to…well maybe chocolate covered peanuts while barely lifting a finger.

If you are interested in trying it out, please feel free to use this link to Text Link Ads (affiliate link).