Caydel’s SEO Blog

Back in January, I wrote a piece on whether the newly-popular Blogkits blog ad network lived up to their claims of outearning Adsense on blogs. My feeling at the time was that they did not even come close, but I was willing to give them more time to prove themselves.

Nearly five months have passed since I wrote the original piece on Blogkits; by now, Blogkits has been on my blog for nearly six months. Before someone points this out in my comments, I must admit that I did cheat on the blogkits challenge a bit; rather than removing Adsense and completely replacing it with Blogkits, I ran both ad networks side-by-side.

So, what are the results?

Blogkits
Impressions: 50,716
Clicks: 286
Leads: 0
Payout: $0.00

Adsense
Impressions: 22,340
Earnings: $39.64

Within the six-month time period, Blogkits has not earned me a dime, despite nearly 300 clicks. This indicates horrible conversions on their part. Meanwhile Adsense was been quietly accumulating the whole time.

Of course, we should not forget that a single sale on Blogkits has the potential to generate more earnings than Adsense; it could just be a string of poor luck that I have no conversions yet. On the other hand, I think enough time has passed to show that Blogkits is not a particularily effective blog monetization solution.

One interesting point is the fact that Blogkits reports twice as many impressions as adsense for the same time period; neither ad network correlates well with the pageview statistics shown by my analytics / stat programs.

Share This

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

Perhaps you’ve already seen it, but Michael Gray (Graywolf) about ‘MFA’-style pages he found while clicking around in his GMail.

I checked in my own account, found the pages in question, and found that there was more to this than Graywolf mentioned. At the top of the page, they have a 4X3 or 3X4 ‘Sponsored Links’ section containing Adsense ads, fairly well targetted to the subject you clicked on.

Below the Adsense-type ads, they have a list of 4-7 ‘Related Pages’ which point to news articles relating to the topic you clicked on. The ad copy is the headline of a news story, with the text containing the first sentence or so of the story itself.

Of course, these ‘Related Pages’ are also ads. For instance:

Layton hopes to mobilize Cdns against ATM fees; says banks don’t …
Canada.com - 8 hours ago
TORONTO (CP) - New Democrat leader Jack Layton is launching a ..

has a URL pointing to: (broken into 3 lines to solve formatting issues)

http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/pageclick?client=ca-gmail&type=1&
redir_url=http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html
%3Fid%3Dd7e600a2-5817-48cf-a902-015cb247c737%26k%3D49477

What program do these news companies use to get these ads? Is this a custom offering by Google where news sources can automatically attach keywords to their stories to trigger links in the ‘Related Pages Section’? How are these paid? Or has this been in existence for a long time already, and I just don’t know about it?

I wouldn’t mind learning more about this. For regularily updated news-type sites, this could be a great way to get relevant, interested readers, better than even ‘normal’ Adwords advertising. Please, comment if you have seen these before!

Roughly one month ago, on December 11, I signed up for Jim Kukral’s BlogKits service. Blogkits was designed and is marketed as a way to monetize blogs, aiming at taking over the advertising positions on blogs most often filled with Google Adsense or a similar PPC service.

The truth is that the vast majority of blogs don’t make more than pennies per day using Google Adsense. And here’s a little secret that even the “big” bloggers (the ones with tons of traffic) don’t want to tell you… Even they only use Google Adsense to supplement their blogs. They make a lot more money selling other ads because they have traffic.

It’s true, if you don’t have a ton of traffic like the vast majority of blogs, running Google Adsense is a waste of time. Take our challenge. Sign up and run BlogKits partner ads on your blog for 30-days in place of your Adsense ads. Then compare the earnings, and you decide which one is more worthwhile.

I was definately interested in giving it a shot, so I signed up and placed a BlogKits block on my blog, which is visible to the right, above my existing Adsense ads, as well as in a text link following the title of each post. Now, nearly a month has passed, and I have made my decision.

Before I comment on my earnings, I should mention that I cheated on the BlogKits challenge a bit - I did not remove my existing Adsense ads. I figured that the influence each ad service had on the other would be minimal; if people are interested in an ad, they will click it, regardless of what else is on the page.

For the time period from 11/12/2006 to 08/01/2007, BlogKits has taken 61 clicks, with a 0% conversion rate, and $0.00 earnings. For the same time period, Adsense has had 22 clicks, with $8.33 in revenue.

Now, I realize that the click volume to each is somewhat small; it may take more clicks before I see any conversions with BlogKits, and even a single conversion has the possibility to pass my Adsense revenue. Nevertheless, after just under 30 days, BlogKits has not performed for me!

I will leave BlogKits up for another month or two to collect more data, but so far I am not holding my breath! How has your experience with BlogKits been - has it worked well for you?

Share This

About a week and a half ago, I wrote a post ‘Adsense Should Allow Contextual Ad Filtering by Keyword‘. In it, I made the suggestion based upon an article posted by EGOL at SEOmoz that in order to prevent certain types of ads from showing, Google should allow us to set negative keywords for the Adsense ads on a site.

In the comments, Joost de Valk informed us that Google is indeed beta-testing such a program, and that he is actually part of the limited beta-test.

I know for a fact that Google is testing with negative keywords like that, since I have been testing it myself

I can’t tell to much, except that i was given the possibility to give a series of terms for which they broad matched and didn’t show ads. And no, no release date…

That is extremely encouraging - I can’t wait for this feature to be released to the general public. There are some categories of ads that I would *really* like to see banished from my site (such as the $0.07 CPM ads Google is running advertising Adwords and Adsense). I think that this toold could really help Google - I think the publishers know what is on their site better than Google does. It seems every day I see ads which are close to a good match, yet still manage to miss the point of the page entirely, and thus result in unsatisfactory, off-topic ads which probably don’t get the CTR they should.

Plus, this would be great for people who have definitions of ‘family friendly’ that are perhaps more stringent than those of Google. I don’t really want to see seduction tips and other crocks advertised on my site, regardless of what one or two keywords I may have that might trigger those ads.

What do you think?

EGOL recently made a post on the SEOmoz blog about one of the major shortcomings of Adsense: the lack of a feature to set negative keywords for the contextual ad matching. In short, EGOL is having a problem where many of the contextual ads showing on a few of his sites are not family friendly, leaving him with a poor image when people associate him with these ads.

EGOL’s issue is that while his sites are family friendly, some of his ads are not. Since most visitors do not understand the nature of contextual ads, they would have no choice but to consider him personally responsible for the smut ads Google is giving him. I also see a use for functionality such as this; most SEO types who would be visiting this blog probably aren’t to motivated to purchase ‘Get Rich Quick With Adsense’ ebooks and MFA templates. Knowing this, I could probably largely increase my Click Through Rate by eliminating these ads altogether.

Domain filtering can only go so far; I am sure that I could spend all day placing domains in the contextual ad filter, and I would never be able to remove all the Adwords and Adsense oriented ads showing up in the units to the right of this page. Yet it would be helpful if I could just set those as negative keywords in the Adsense control panel, and not have to worry about them.

What do you think? Would this be a useful feature? I am curious to hear from more people on this. Perhaps if enough people ask for it, we may see the Adsense team implement this type of functionality.

Share This