Caydel’s SEO Blog

A lot of webmasters talk about split-testing their ad layouts, trying to determine which layout or block position gives a higher CTR. Well, perhaps you should take it a step further.

I had a page on one of my older sites which targetted a fairly well-paying aspect of the site’s niche. I was making on average about $0.20 per click on this page, which wasn’t bad; most of the pages on the site have consistently been paying in the range of $0.05-$0.10 per click.

This week, I had a writer rewrite the page. The new version was slightly longer, but had a different feel and phrasing than the original. I updated the page with the new content late last night. This evening, roughly 24 hours after posting the new version, the page was delivering me an average $1.35 per click, nearly 7x the average I was previously getting.

It may be to early to completely rule out the possibility of today just being a fluke, but I suspect that the slightly different phrasing used when the page was re-written triggered different ads than the previous version. Perhaps a word was used in the new version that was not in the previous version. Perhaps a certain phrase came together which never appeared previously. I don’t know.

No matter what you pay per article, I would suggest that it is definately worth writing two versions of an article or page, and split test the content to determine which version gives you the best CPC. Even if you pay $25 per article, the difference will eventually be made up.

update - This is a case of Shoemoney getting massively misquoted in the press. Please see his response at http://www.shoemoney.com/2006/12/07/forbes-article/. I apologize for any defamation or damage to the branding this article may have had!

Shoemoney is going to get his account taken away. Here’s why.

If you have been paying attention to the Search blogs lately, you will have heard about the in which both Jeremy ‘Shoemoney’ Schoemaker and Michael ‘Graywolf’ Gray are both quoted. Now, I haven’t read the article itself yet, but I just came across this extract which :

Schoemaker insists he and others have in fact found a way to circumvent the crackdown. He says he uses techniques like “cloaking” to fool Google’s algorithm. Arbitrageurs know the search engine’s IP addresses, the fingerprints that reveal the source of any Web page visitor. So Schoemaker says he sets his web pages to automatically display legitimate content to the Google spider, while giving other users the ad-filled arbitrage page. Schoemaker says that makes him virtually immune to Google’s quality-regulation measures.

… Since then, he says he’s made more than $2 million by arbitraging search terms related to cell phone ringtones, teeth whitening and mortgages. “I love Google,” Schoemaker says. “They changed my life.”

So here Shoemoney is, admitting on a national-level that he utilizes cloaking to bypass Google’s crackdown on PPC arbitrage. This is in violation of the where it says:

Do not employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.

If Google is really serious about cracking down on PPC arbitrageurs, they will have to ban Shoemoney. For him to announce to the world that he has, does, and will continue to effectively cheat the Adsense program by violating their TOS is a major blow to Google’s reliability. After all, $2 million is a lot to take out of advertiser’s pockets.

What do you think?

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!

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.

I just came across a post on Eches Blog where he espouses the idea of filtering all the MFA (Made For Adsense) sites from your Adsense ads by using the Adsense competitive ad filter. He also mentions that by doing this you may cause your adsense earnings to increase. Additionally, the post also links to AdsBlackList.com, a site which lists a variety of MFA and low-paying sites with the idea that you use the competitive ad filter to remove these low-paying ads. From AdsBlackList.com:

Why would I use AdsBlackList?

There are three main reasons.

1) Increase your adsense revenue up to 50%
2) Increase the reputation of your website by NOT linking to Made for Adsense sites
3) Save the quality of contextual advertising in global

In other words, subscribing to ABL and submitting MFA sites that you’ve discovered, you will be helping yourself to make more money and helping your customers to find quality information when they click on your adsense ad

I am not sure I understand how this could lead to higher adsense revenues. Adsense works on a priority system where cost and relevancy are balanced in order to bring you the best blend of relevancy and price available to you. By blocking certain ads, the ads you do get are likely to be priced lower than the original ads. So, how can they justify the theory that creating a blacklist a mile long and blocking ads which Google would normally show as the best paying ads for that block can increase your revenue at all, let alone by as much as 50%?

Somebody, enlighten me, please!