Positive Adsense Experiment

Those of you running Adsense on your blog might find this interesting. Over the weekend, I decided to change the number of ads units on my blog based upon where the traffic is coming from.

I have a small PHP function that checks to see if the referrer is a search engine, and if it is, I display and additional two ad units. My thoughts were that since 80% of Digital Media Minute traffic is coming from search engines, I might test to see what happens in terms of revenue, but also against bounce rate, when I serve a few extra Adsense ads to visitors.

My thinking is that if they don’t find what they were looking for at my blog, maybe a Google ad could help them. And by the way I’m serious about that. At least the idea behind Adsense is that if the advertising inventory is there that Adsense’s ability to match ads to content on the page is pretty good. (And yes I know it fails spectacularly at times too!)

The results have so far been very positive, with my Adsense revenue increasing by 284% on Saturday, Sunday and Monday! To see what my blog looks like from a search referral, do a Google search for Jim Rutherford and click on the top result. My next step will be trying to remove ads for regular readers – chances are you probably don’t click on my ads anyhow!

10 thoughts on “Positive Adsense Experiment”

  1. That’s a great idea actually. Why didn’t I think of that? And it’s not “tailoring to SE’s” – that is in reference to cloaking and serving different output to spiders.

  2. A good way for finding regular readers (like me) might be by disabling ads if the referring link came from Bloglines (which I use) and other online RSS readers. Just a thought. Awesome blog!

  3. Kevin – absolutely! My thought was to create a whitelist of referring sites like bloglines, searchfox, google reader, etc., and also looking for hits coming from aggregators like Feed Demon and Net News Wire.

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