Web Development Blog » Advertising

Adsense for WordPress – 5 Plugins reviewed

finalwebsites.com — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 05:41:41 +0000

If you try to monetize your blog with Google Adsense you might have noticed that this is not an easy job. Blog reader are very focused on reading the content and writing comments. Many readers will not visit your site since they read your blogs in a RSS reader. That will say that we need a very flexible Adsense plugin to place our ads on the right place in our blogs articles. Some of you will say “I place them always on place A, B and C”, but I’m sure that this will not work all the time.

We need a plugin that has the following features:

Single blog post placements
Unlimited number of ad layouts
Easy to integrate with each blog post using tags
NO revenue share with the plugin author!

Additionally we like to see features like:

IP-based filter functions
Alternative ads for the IP filter
Using ad code from other networks than Google Adsense

For this review we selected the 5 WordPress plugins because they have recent updates (active projects) and many features:

Adsense Daemon

This plugin supports three different Adsense layouts. All configured ads are placed on all your blog pages (single view). For each layout you have the control (7 options) where each ad will show up. The plugin has basic features and acts very static. A good plugin if you don’t need so much functions.

AdSense Integrator

If you need a more flexible plugin, you should check this Adsense plugin for WordPress. It has all the features we mentioned above and more: Default settings for automatic placement, full control about which pages have to show the automatic placed ads and a CSS margin for some better ad placement. Revenue share is enabled by default, but you can change this setting (if you don’t like to support the developer with 4% of all your ad impressions).

Everything seems working, except the single ad placement
With every placement the “initial” ad is placed too, maybe a recent bug? I posted this to the WordPress forum and will post the result here. Anyway a good plugin if this bug is fixed.

All in One Adsense and YPN!

Great plugin idea on how to configure your blog using Google Adsense or YPN (Yahoo Network). While the configuration options are very comfortable is this plugin less flexible. All settings are site-wide and valid for all ad formats.

The plugin offers an option to use multiple ad formats, a random function will show them all. I don’t think that this really works (maybe for different colors?). There is an option to disable ads for single pages, but this will disable all ads on that single page. While this plugin looks really good, I will not use it.

Easy AdSense

If you check the WordPress plugin page you should think that this is a great plugin, but I deactivated the plugin very quickly. At the moment that the plugin was activated, it shows already the Adsense ads from the plugin author and also at least one link to his website on each of your blog pages. I need to mention that I choose the plugin because according the author, is this version more advanced and doesn’t include a revenue share. The plugin has a lot of functions to configure the different products like Adsense for search and feeds and of course the content and link units. I’m sure you can treat the setting that way to get a static ad setup for your site, but I don’t like a plugin that includes code in my site without permission and that’s the reason why my advice is to NOT using this plugin. You never know what a future version will do with your website!

Quick Adsense

Finally a plugin that has all important features and works for 100%! Using this plugin you have all the options you need for your blog site: Static placements for your whole website, custom placements for your posts using simple snippets or just disable ads for a single post. This plugin has more features:

Add your Adsense code to your blog posts and your sidebar widgets, all settings are controlled through a single settings page.
You don’t need to remember the tag names, just place them using quick tags in the HTML mode of your editor.
There is space for 10 different ad layouts for the blog pages and 3 in your sidebar.
There are no strings attached will say no revenue share or unwanted links, the only thing the author asks is to place a link or button.

There is one feature missing; the IP filter with the option to show alternative ads. Since this feature is very special and should work together with a GEO location script, I think I can miss this feature for now.

At the end I must say I go for the Quick Adsense plugin, because I need a plugin that makes it possible to place the ads on locations I choose while writing a blog post. The Adsense Integrator is also a good plugin, but because of the bug in the current version it’s not useful for my website.Similar Posts:

AdSense for Domains, just another Domain Parking Service?

Olaf — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 19:44:17 +0000

Actually “Adsense for domains” is just like most of the other domain parking services. So why should we park our unused domain names with Google?

For a long time I never used any domain parking services because I didn’t believed in that product. I checked the first time “Revenue Parking” provided by my domain registration provider Dynadot, after several month I was not very satisfied with that product. Another point to not use that kind of service was that you need host a domain name with the same provider if you want to their domain parking service.

Several weeks ago I read on the Adsense blog about this new service and forget it already because the “Adsense for domains” was not yet available in my account. By accident I noticed the new link on my Adsense setup page and started to plat a little with this new product.

Add domain names and configuration

Adding domain names is quite simple just add your name together with the language and in the next step you get the information for the DNS settings. As with most other parking services you don’t need to change the name server entries. You need to enter at least 4 A-records and one CNAME for the “www” sub-domain. The CNAME holds also your Adsense Publisher ID which should be used for the validation that a domain belongs to your Adsense account. For the DNS configuration you will find help files with information how to change the DNS with the bigger domain name provider. I created one account on my own server and add other domain names as domain pointer. This way I’m able to copy past the information directly into “named” data base files.

Validation process and add styles

After you add the domain to your account and the DNS configuration is done it needs a few hours until the validation is done. At the moment you need to check the your account by yourself and if needed to re-validate there is an option too. After validation you’re able to add channels to your parked domain name: “I suggest to do that other wise you didn’t know which domain performs very well and which not”. Tray also to enter some keywords to your domain name and maybe you like to change the style from your parking page. Right parking pages are not very “stylish”, but maybe some custom colors will let the visitor generate more page views.

Reports and earnings

“Adsense for domains” is (great) CPM based advertising. It look to me as for regular ads, that some domain names perform better some than another. Just like with content related ads Google will show ads with higher and lower revenue. The reports are the same as for the other ads (content, search…) and doesn’t need any explanation. At the moment I can’t see if impressions from the landing page will earn more or less than impressions from other result pages. There is no information about the how many clicks are generated.

Rules for publishers

There are some new rules for the “domain park” publisher, since the earnings are CPM based it’s not allowed to redirect traffic to that page, advertising for parked domain isn’t allowed…

I use the Adsense product for names which are not used anymore and still have some traffic. I noticed that some domain perform much better than earlier with content ads.

What is your experience with “Adsense for domains”?

Similar Posts:

In-Text Advertisements: Publisher Review

Olaf — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 17:24:30 +0000

We know them all, they look like a text link but if you hover your mouse above those links, you get a small window (pop-up) with some advertisement. Well some visitor doesn’t like them and several webmasters earn some money as a publisher.

In-Text ads are from the PPC type where the publisher gets paid for each click which is made by a websites visitor.

This review is not about how useful they are or if they are good money makers, this article is about some ad-providers I tested in the past month or years.

Kontera

I think the biggest In-text advertising network, they show good content related ads on your website.

In the past 2 year there was personal contact via e-mail and they paid as promised. Sometimes the eCPM is a little low, one the reason for the low earnings could be the type of website where I placed their ads. Since a few month they offer payments via paypal. They have quiet strong rules about websites which they accept as a publisher. They don’t provide channels or other advanced features. I think they are the best partner for common/quality websites.

Adbrite

This company offers a lot of different ad types like regular banners, text ads, pop-ups and also In-Text ads. They have a very big market place where advertiser can search for their publisher. In-Text ads are also content related. but doesn’t have the great content match like from Kontera. They accept almost every type of website (even web proxies). The control panel has a lot of features for reports and advanced ad configurations. They pay per check as promised, but you need some time until you get your commission.

I posted already a review about Adbrite some time before. Adbrite is for sure not th beste advertising partner for a lot of websites, but I used them to publish ads on web proxies. Banner ads are fine but the eCPM is very low. Currently I publish only the In-Text advertisement on some web proxies with a moderate result.

InfoLinks

I get in contact with this company because they contacted me by e-mail. They try to get you as an publisher because they promise a better deal than Kontera. Since I’m looking always for good (paying) ad networks and they look reasonable I tried them. Because I planned to show ads on proxified pages, I asked them before (they contacted me because I show Kontera ads on a proxy list site). They told me that this is not a problem. I placed the code on my proxies and noticed ad views and clicks with a delay of more than 24 hours. The number of impressions doesn’t look real since the number was much lower than other banner ads I have on those pages. Their ad impression count was even lower than the number of page views I counted in the same time. After several days I noticed that my access to their control panel was disabled. I send an e-mail to their management and they explained that showing ads on proxified pages is against their terms of service. That was the end of my InfoLinks adventure…

As you see the ad market is not easy, you should think about which partner you choose and which ad type/network is the best for your website. While my experience is based on “trial and error”, I hope that my article will help some webmasters.

If you like to support me and you didn’t joined one of these networks before, please join while using my affiliate link/code:

Adbrite: Monetize your Site with Adbrite

Kontera: Post me your email address and I will send you an Invitation.Similar Posts:

Some nice Google Adsense updates

Olaf — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 21:12:03 +0000

Several weeks ago a several Adsense publisher has complains about recent modifications in the click behavior for Adsense ads. While an Internet visitor was able before to click the whole ad area to reach the target page, is the new ad only clickable on the ad title and the URL. This modification was done by Google to ban unwanted clicks for their advertisers. Afterwards I think that most of the publisher doesn’t have noticed a change in their earnings (maybe a publisher who need those unwanted clicks to earn money).

Enough about this, there are new features!

Managing Ads via the Adsense control panel

Since a few days it’s possible to use this great feature to maintain existing ad code without changing your HTML. Just create a first (new) ad zone and place some standard Adsense code into your HTML (yeah I’m talking about an account from a publisher in Europe). If you need to change the colors, ad dimensions or ad channel on a later moment, just do it within your Adsense control panel. This is really a time safer! This way it’s easy to change for example the color for multiple pages from your website with just a few mouse clicks.

Ad container with dynamic controls

Maybe some of you have already noticed these new type of ads:

Ad banners with the more or related links to show the “other” ads
smaller ad boxes with a dynamic “flashy scroller” to show more ads without reloading the page
… and maybe there are more?

Sure this feature is only useful for AD-surfer (I hope there are some of them) and maybe this new links/navigation elements makes some people curious.

Video units? And why not (ad free) YouTube Videos?

A few weeks ago the Video ad format was added to my Adsense account, I played with it for a while but skipped this format for the next time.
How does it work? People can watch the videos within the theme you have selected for your video ad and MAYBE the visitor will click some (tiny) ad which is placed above/below the movie and YOU (the publisher) became rich.

Sorry, but these ads make no sense (to me), the video player is really big and will take on some of my websites ~50% from the content space. All this afford to have (maybe) some clicks from a banner with one or two small ads? This clicks need to be very high priced because they could give your website the imago from some MFA site.

People from Adsense thanks for the “Manage ads” feature, I like to see more of them!Similar Posts:

Monetize your website with AuctionAds

Olaf — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 21:54:20 +0000

About 3 month ago a lot of TLA (Text Link Ads) publishers got an invitation to join the new publisher service AuctionAds. This program is smart way to show ads eBay auctions without to be an eBay affiliate. After using these ads for more than a month it’s time for short review.

First of all the account functions are very easy to use, showing reports and generating new ad code is done within no-time. There are reports for campaigns and for different time periods about impressions clicks and earnings.
I like the ad code generation tool at most, you can choose from the most common standard banner sizes to get an ad for every place on your website, blog or forum. Choose what the color scheme you need and most important you can choose the keywords for the auctions you want to publish. There are also advanced keyword and price options like:

Select only auctions from advertisers you want
Show only auctions where the price is equal to minimum and / or maximum
Rotate ads for different keywords

Good points

Payment is very fast, at the first day after the previous month (if you reach minimum amount)
Ads for almost every keyword and category
The generation of easy to use JavaScript code
They provide referral link code

Bad points

I can’t see how much earnings I have from my referrals
The website has some downtime during the last weeks (I guess they have solved this problems the last days)
Campaigns cannot be renamed

I think AuctionAds is a very good alternative to monetize your website even if you don’t have thousands of daily page views. How much you can earn? A lot, just imagine that one of your visitors has won an auction for a car or other high priced stuff!Similar Posts:

Google Adsense Referrals 2.0 or continue with PPC ads?

Olaf — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 10:37:04 +0000

These days Google announced that the product Referrals 2.0 will become available to the most of their publishers. Yesterday I got the chance to have a first look on this new product. The first thing I noticed is that its very easy to use, just like the other Adsense products.

The old Referral product screen is extended with a number of categories where the publisher can choose multiple categories for his ad publishing campaign. From every category it’s possible to preview the advertisers. At this point there was the first “scary” thing! SPAM!

I checked the telecommunication category and found several advertisers for diet pills! I checked some other popular categories and got the same result.
Nice is the feature to select ads for specific countries and languages, but also in other countries and languages the same situation: non related advertisers in multiple categories.

For my first test I created some Adsense code for my new referral ad and placed it on some web page and hello! These ads are looking the same as the regular Adsense text ads. Nice this way the visitor will just recognize some ads by Google.

Good points:

Easy to use interface, any experienced Adsense publisher doesn’t need to learn (again) how to get the ad code on some web page.
A good amount of categories for almost every type of website.
The payment is done together with the earnings from other Adsense products (you can reach faster the minimum amount)

Bad points:

The categories are spammed by unrelated advertisers (I’m sure some editor will remove these ads after some days but in the meantime you will publish some yunk)
Only text ads are available (at the moment), no special ad variations
No contact to the advertiser (like on publisher networks like commission junction)

I don’t have good results with the old Google referral products and know that monetizing a website with PPA (pay per action) ads needs much more work than adding some PPC ads to your website. I know a lot of companies supporting their affiliates with the result of higher conversions. I’m sure that every Adsense publisher is able to generate better earnings using PPC ads from Google.

Related links:
Check this thread with some guide for affiliate marketing.
Forum thread about Adsense referral 2.0 at webdigity.com.Similar Posts:

Don’t let Google run your site

Olaf — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 03:41:18 +0000

In the quest for monetizing their website, webmasters sometimes forget the base fact that they own the site and not Google Adsense! So, often you see webmasters ask questions like ‘Whether Adsense TOS allows linking to such and such site or whether the TOS allows pictures next to ads and so on and so forth. As long as the queries are related to simple ad placement it may be OK but more and more webmasters are getting influenced by the TOS and ad returns that they are willing to modify the content itself. This cannot be good news for the internet since finally it is the quality of information that matters along with the way it is presented. If you are good at presenting your knowledge in a certain way (say, first person), then you should continue to do so, irrespective of whether Google Adsense representatives likes it or not.

The most common reason for such an attitude would be the so-called lack of alternatives. We would rather term it as lack of knowledge of alternatives. There are other PPC programs available but their is no need to look at only contextual programs. There are a whole lot of other monetizing avenues if only you know where to look, f.e. sell directly advertisements on your site. Plus there are so many different affiliate programs around to choose from.

All these can work only if your content is useful enough. Once you have quality content, you will not have to depend on Adsense for your daily income. Spread out your portfolio and you will have a better chance of maximising returns. In short use Adsense on your site; don’t run your site for Adsense.Similar Posts:

This generation web advertising

Olaf — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 21:21:47 +0000

After writing last week a short review about the advertisement site 43ads.com I got some interesting comments about other nice Web 2.0 styled advertising ideas.

bla.st
This is a nice combination of free and paid advertising, in the beginning you will get a spot on the first page of common key words like “web-design”. Interesting at this site is, that your ad is live after submission and the possibility to get a direct information how much a bid will raise your ad on selected pages. The website is really clear and you get the chance to have a 270×165 pixel banner ad for free.

ispuare
I found this advertising site via other blogs about the popular “Web 2.0 advertising thing”. Placing a link is for free and after that I got the invitation to get also a free “square” in exchange for a link. Sure the websites idea is very “original”, but I’m not sure that this is the “coolest” way to surf the internet. Placing a square inclusive an extra text link is € 50 at the moment.

At the end I’m asking me, who will visit all the websites behind the ads? In these days there is a lot of traffic because of all the blog posts but what about the real visitors a website need to sell products?Similar Posts:

Is AdBrite your advertising partner?

Olaf — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 22:31:36 +0000

Some weeks before I was looking for some advertisement programs to promote my new website project a shopping Cart template affiliate website. After starting a campaign with Adsense and some other CPM banner campaigns I re-visited the AdBrite website.

Text links
There is a moderate collection of websites where you can place your link for a limited time period. In their publisher list are also big names like Opera or Friendster, but they are too expensive according my budget. I selected for my campaign some websites for only a few USD a month. Currently there are running four link campaigns for the template website and I receive several visits a day, but there are zero conversions until now…Conclusion: there are link campaigns from websites with a lot of impressions and that for only a few USD, but I don’t think that these will help you with sales (at least not in my case)

Interstitial Ads (kind of popunders)
I started also a campaign of this ad type, I got a total of 40.000 page views in only a few hours and that for 10USD. It happens while I was driving home from my work with the result that I didn’t noticed this traffic live, but another CPC program has returned a part of my advertising costs.

Publishing
I started a publishing campaign at finalwebsites.com to show some text ads in a regular banner format (468*60). While you’re waiting for advertiser it’s possible to show network. This campaign was very short because I saw max. three different ads and only one was related to my selected categories . I removed the ads to use my spare advertising space (again) for Adsense. Within these few days it was not possible to start a link campaign with some third party advertisers.

Bad unrelated visits
While running a AdBrite CPC network campaign (webmaster related), I noticed several XXX referrals inside my website statistics. My complain by AdBrite was answered within a few days with some USD rebate to my account (it seems to me that AdBrite thinks that this is not so bad…)

I will finish my current link advertising campaigns, but I don’t think that AdBrite is an alternative for Adwords / Adsense or self selected banner CPM/CPC campaigns.Similar Posts: