After Jeb’s success with ads on mac.fiveforks.com I thought I would try it out on the only page on my website that seems to get any traffic, the Dejumbler page. Of course as soon as I put an ad on there traffic dropped off sharply and I wonder if Ask Jeeves knocked me down in the rankings when they saw a Google ad? All my referrals come from Ask Jeeves which for some reason ranks the Dejumble page very high when you enter “unscramble” in its search engine.
Anyway, after 4 days I’ve had one click-through which was me seeing if it would really work and I guess they knew that because I didn’t make any money on that one. That’s out of 90 page views. Since you only get paid once you’ve reached $100 it could be a long wait.
What bugs me about the whole thing is that I could tell Google what kind of ads they should put on my page: puzzles, Scrabble, games, crosswords, etc. But instead they are reading the text on my page and putting stuff in there about programming and coding. I couldn’t see a way to give Google any hints on what to advertise.
1. You get paid monthly when you accumulate $100 or, if not, at the end of the year. So you *will* get a check from Google if you generate any money.
2. Put some text on your jumble page that will guide Google. Maybe a paragraph that inccludes the keywords you listed above. Creative writing! It pays off!
3. Get Kelly to visit your Jumble page once a week. I think she is responsible for a lot of MacFive’s Google bucks.
After writing this I did get a few clicks (no doubt from 5forks people). I got 3 clicks for 3 cents each, but then one click was worth 60 cents. Although I’m getting good traffic (more on that in a minute) of 50-80 hits per day, I am 0 for August.
One advantage (possibly) of having a Google ad is all of the sudden Google now indexes my Dejumbler page. Though my page is not ranked as high with them as with Ask Jeeves, I still get about half of hits now from Google searches.
I took Jeb’s advice and added more text that would entice more clickable ads, but it was still showing the same lame stuff (a spell checker for web applications; oh boy). Actually today I saw an ad for something else, but I forget what it was now. I’m thinking before I abandon the whole thing I will put a 3-ad banner on the page so maybe I will get a better variety of ads showing up.
My Web Stats
A while ago I wrote about my web page counter Site Meter and again about dabbling with Ad Sense, Google’s service to provide ads on web pages and pay the owners of the websites for people who follow those ads….
Google Taketh Away
I’ve had Google AdSense advertisements on two of my web sites’ pages for several months now (first post, second post). It started off pretty slow. In August I was getting 54 page views a day and made $2.72. In September…