Caydel’s SEO Blog

A friend of mine recently let me into an early beta of MFABlocker, a new service he is developing.

The Problem of Low Paying Clicks

Any webmaster or publisher who employs Adsense or any other form of PPC advertisements in order to monetize his sites has no doubt been frustrated from time to time with the miniscule revenues some clicks often generate.

The problem lies in the fact that much of the inventory advertising in Adsense is composed of MFA (Made For Ads) pages, which are often nothing more than pages full of ads. The people who run these sites will often bid very low on a large number of keywords in the hopes that people who click to their pages will click on higher paying ads. This is the concept of ad arbitrage.

While many consider this a legitimate form of business, there is no doubt that the practice warrants lower advertising revenues for the average webmaster.

MFABlocker - the Solution

Enter MFABlocker - a great tool to fight low paying clicks!

MFABlocker takes a list of your sites along with an Adsense publisher ID in order to determine which advertisers are showing ads on your sites. They then follow these ads, and analyze the resulting pages in order to determine whether they share any of the characteristics of MFA pages. If they do, they are added to a blacklist which you can then add into the Adsense competitive ad filter.

The Results?

So how well does it work? In the past week that I have been using this tool, I have seen my Adsense revenues jump by 25-30%. This is a welcome jump, although I admit that it may just be regular flux considering I have only been using it for a week. But there’s something, at any rate.

The Future

MFABlocker is still in early beta, but it is already showing some promise. The interface is quite rudimentary, and there is no help section yet. However, the service is developing rapidly. In the two weeks or so that I have been in the beta, I have been seeing major feature updates daily.

Keep an eye on this - it will be a great service!

Share This

I just came across this over at Jason Bartholme’s blog - he built his own clickbot out of a Lego Mindstorms kit.

It gave me a good laugh, anyways…

Share This

Kevin from Adbrite just let me into Adbrite’s new video ad program. The ads are currently running on a CPC basis. This will be a very nice feature. Users who view the video will be able to embed it in their own site, or send to friends, and you collect the revenue for all embedded copies as well.

If a video were to go viral and make it’s way around the internet, you could potentially be collecting revenue on thousands or even millions of views.

Above *should* be my first attempt at using the system. This is a video of Jesse Cook playing ‘Rattle and Burn’ in Montral at Jazzfest 2006 from his latest DVD. He is one of my favourite artists - I had the pleasure to see him play in Dec. 2004 and he was simple amazing!

Note: To get this code working, I had to modify the Adbrite code a bit - remove the noscript tags and anclose it in a div. But - it’s working now!

Update: It appears that clicking on an ad in the video causes a popup. This popup is blocked by default for Firefox, so I doubt we see the revenue for it…. Hope they find a way around this.

Share This

Ever since my early days in the webmaster sphere, Shoemoney’s adsense check has been a motivation and an inspiration to me. Well, now I’ve had mine and become a successful webmaster myself, so I would like to provide a new image so that the next generation of marketers will have something to work towards:

Adbrite is perhaps not proving themselves to be the most efficient company by sending checks for that amount, but I can never say they didn’t pay me in a reasonable time. I only ran Adbrite for the last day of that pay period… Hopefully the next check is somewhat more impressive

Share This

Update: the mystery is finally solved

Setting

This yesterday, I mistyped the URL as I was visiting Google this morning; I accidentally typed http://www.google.cm. This redirected me to a page on the domain of http://www.agoga.com, which actually looked like a somewhat convincing, spartan page, very similar in style to what you would often see if your browser. Except that it also contained a search bar, and a few unobtrusive links to subject like ‘Travel’, ‘Cars’ etc., the kind of subjects you would see on a typical parked domain page.

I thought that was kind of interesting, a way of monetizing typos that looked to me at least like it would be somewhat effective way of squatting a typo. At the time, though, it didn’t seem noteworthy enough to me to give it further thought.

A little later, I was trying to get to Paypal, and again I accidentally typed http://www.paypal.cm. Once again I was at the same page. I was intrigued, and began experimenting by checking a variety of other domains with the .cm extension. Many big names in the industry had the .cm TLD pointed to the same page I had viewed earlier.

That also, is not that notable. A squatter could easily have registered a whole variety of company names in that TLD - it’s done all the time, and is considered a valid tactic for making some money off of parked domains.

What made it notable finally is when I started entering random domains, and sequences of characters in the .cm TLD. such as http://sdfjhksd.cm and http://www.oiyt.cm. These also are pointing to a landing page on agoga.com, albeit a different landing page from the ones used on major domain mispellings.

Agoga.com has every unregistered .cm TLD pointed to their landing pages!

While there are a bunch of legitimately registered .cm sites which resolve elsewhere, any other .cm domain, whether nonsense characters or misspellings of ‘real’ domain names resolves to the same IP address which is a cluster at agoga.com. The only way this could be accomplished is to change the default site settings of the master DNS serving the .cm TLD. Agoga must have either hacked the .cm registrar in Cameroon, or paid the registrar off for this. Either way, I suspect something illegal has occurred here; I doubt this type of redirecting is approved by IANA.

Opportunity

How much type-in traffic would you think would be generated by people misspelling .com as .cm? Agoga.com has an Alexa Rank of 6,915 which indicates thousands or tens of thousands of visitors per day by some estimates. Keep in mind that this site has not been running for even three months yet; today’s Alexa rank was 2,913.

Since Alexa ranking is biased towards a technical crowd, I think it is safe to assume that the true numbers are fairly large. Now, it is easily attainable that a proper landing page optimized for Pay-Per-Click advertisements will result in a 30%-40% click-through-rate. Especially if one was to put some effort into ensuring the advertisements were targeted around the domain name or keywords at the similar .com page.

It is obvious that with this type of traffic, Agoga.com could be pulling in some huge advertising revenue - as much a $1000-$2000 per day. They should have it made in the shade, for all intents and purposes. But, they have screwed up royally.

How did they screw up?

Agoga will return you to one of two landing pages, depending on what type of domain you enter. One version, which they seem to use when squatting the domain of a large company or popular website, can be seen at . The other, which they seem to use for the domains of smaller websites and nonsense or misspelled domains can be seen at http://www.oeiurt.cm (note the random domain name…) or http://www.caydel.cm (a typo of this domain) or at the Agoga main page at http://www.agoga.com.

The first type of landing page is broken - The first type of landing page is relatively well done - it is minimal, and could easily get the user to click onto their main site. The problem lies in that no ads are served if the user enters certain search queries. While an advertising page is shown if the user enters a query such as ‘digital cameras’, ‘dvd’, ‘knitting’, other queries such as ‘infohatter’, ‘caydel’ or whatever return nothing. Sure, probably nobody is bidding on that term; wouldn’t it be a better plan to grab the first result from a Google query for that term, scrape it for keywords, and return ads based on that? Potentially millions of long-tail opportunities are being missed here, thrown away for no good reason.

The second type of landing page broken - The script that Agoga used to generate the second style of landing page is broken. Any search query or link click redirects you to the same page you just left, with a nice photo of a mountain range, or other scenery visible in place of the advertisements that should be shown. They are making nothing from this type of landing page; in fact, they are losing money due to bandwidth costs.

Opportunity Missed

I would be willing to bet that the majority of the traffic that Agoga.com receives will end up at the second landing page, the broken one. While they probably have their highest traffic domains such as http://www.google.cm pointing to their ‘working’ script, they are missing out on the whole long-tail of domain misspellings. Think about it this way - any mistake made by anyone anywhere when he misspells .com as .cm will send him to the broken script. This could be anyone typing in one of a billion domains.

Additionally, a fair number of people who misspell the the domains of large sites such as Google will make multiple mistakes - they may mispell google.com as google.cm, but how many are prone to make multiple mistakes such as gogle.cm or googel.cm and be sent to the broken page?

What Are You Trying to Tell Us Here?

The point of what I am trying to say should have become clear by this point, but I will write it out nice and neat anyways: an neglect of details can lose you a lot of money. I do not know if this second landing page has ever actually worked for Agoga. Perhaps it has, and only stopped working 15 minutes before I stumbled upon it the first time. Perhaps it has never worked. The fact of the matter is, the person or persons who own Agoga.com (Whois data indicates Nameview, Inc, BTW) are losing thousands of dollars per day. It is probably safe to assume that they don’t even realize this; if they did, they would fix it in realtively short order.
The people responsible for this had an amazing idea, which they ran with 90% of the way to the perfect money-making opportunity. But they have missed a few small details which are costing them perhaps thousands of dollars per day. If they were to fix these small problems, they could probably nearly double their income.

I appreciate your comments and feedback!

Share This

So, now you’ve decided that you want to monetize your blog. Additionally, now you’ve set your goals. You know where you are, and you know where you want to be. Now you have to decide how you want to get there.

There are a variety of different options out there to monetize your traffic, each with lesser or greater amounts of intrusion upon yourself, your visitors and your ethics. I will give a quick rundown of some of the different options available to you.

Google Adsense

is the ‘typical’ text-based ads that you see on most sites. You are generally paid a cost of $0.01 - $5 per click, depending on the keywords on your blog. You can run image or text ads on your site.
Adbrite

Adbrite offers a variety of different methods to monetize your traffic. You can run network ads similar to the Google Adsense program, as well as allow advertisers to purchase ads on your site directly. This type of ad is paid either daily, weekly or monthly. They also offer interstitial ads.

Performancing Partners Network

The Performancing Partners Ad Network is a newer program which allows you to sell 125×125px graphical advertisements on your site. The slots are sold on a monthly basis.

PayPerPost

PayPerPost is a network aimed at bloggers, which gives the bloggers the chance to review or write a post for an advertiser. These offers typically pay $1-$20 per opportunity.

Please note that you should research your options thoroughly prior to choosing your programs. The information given above is merely to give you an idea of what’s out there.

To monetize this blog, I chose to work with Adbrite and the Performancing Partners Ad Network. I made this decision since in my prior experience, i have found that the payouts from Google Adsense are generally fairly small for blogs, with low click prices and click through rates. I rejected PayPerPost because I have no desire to do paid posts; while I am interested in advertising on this blog, I do not want my content influenced by too many outside factors.

The benefit common to Adbrite and Performancing is that both programs allow me to sell ad slots myself. They both allow me to control the prices of the ad spots I sell. Additionally, they are paid on a weekly or monthly basis, rather than by traffic. Because of this I can leverage the fact that since a blog is made up of many repeat readers, even if an ad is not clicked, it still has strong branding potential with the blog readers.

A large factor to consider is how the ads will work within your layout. I found that the Performancing ads work well within my sidebar, and the flexible unit size in Adbrite allowed me to create a large unit on the right side of my screen that may contain a larger number of ads.

Placing Your Ads

Placement of your ads is very important for them to have the maximum effect and monetary return. Rather than cover this (exhausted) topic myself, let me refer you to one of the best resources for ad palcement information. Please see Google’s ‘‘.

Conclusion

Research the programs above, and decide how you want to advertise. For the rest of the series, I will mainly focus on Adbrite and Performancing, since they are the programs I am using, although I will make some reference back to Google Adsense.

Share This

Today, Adbrite launched some great new features to publishers.

New IAB Ad Units: A bunch of new ad unit sizes have been released in accordance with the Internet Advertising Bureau’s Standards and Guidelines for Internet Marketing Units. This will allow even more flexibility when placing ad units into layouts.

Reserve Pricing: Are you an Google Adsense user? Well, now AdBrite has a new feature in which you can enter your Adsense client code. The AdBrite unit will then show Google Adsense ads until the estimated CPM for your site falls below a certain reserve level you set. At that point, AdBrite will step in and display their own ads, if they can deliver a CPM above the reserve you set.

From the Ad Zone setup page

We want you to earn as much as possible from your ad placements, whether that’s through AdBrite or the networks you’re already working with.

You can run ads from your current ad networks within your AdBrite code, and we’ll always show the ads that earn you the most money. In other words, when we can earn you the most, we’ll show our ads. When we can’t, we’ll rotate your other ads back in. You can’t lose.

If you go to my main InfoHatter site, you will see an AdBrite skyscraper on the left hand side. At the moment, it should be displaying Google ads wrapped in the AdBrite box. And I apologize in advance for the horrible look of that page!
It seems that AdBrite has been working quite hard launching many new features lately. I guess they have to; in the arena with Google, MSN and Yahoo! no doubt means that they have to step up to compete. I think we can expect to continue seeing great features from AdBrite in days to come!

P.S. When I tried to create a new text link zone, the form now say ‘Text and Banner Zones’. I guess this means that AdBrite’s long-awaited banner advertising network is soon! I would hazard a guess that this is no more than a week or two away!