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 2 ad units. My thoughts were that since 80% of my traffic is coming from search engines, I might as well throw a few extra ads at them. My thinking is that if they don’t find what they were looking for at my blog, maybe a Google ad could help them ;-)

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 referal, 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!

Both comments and pings are currently closed.

10 Responses to “Positive Adsense Experiment”

FST said on November 8th, 2005 at 6:54 am
Careful tailoring content to search engines. I *think* that’s a violation of the AdSense agreement-thingy.
Doug said on November 8th, 2005 at 10:42 am
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.
Kevin said on November 8th, 2005 at 11:42 am
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!
Jim said on November 8th, 2005 at 12:11 pm
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.
Eddie said on November 15th, 2005 at 8:17 am
Hi Jim,
great idea! Would be nice, if you could publish the PHP code too!
Thanx,
Eddie
Erfolg mit AdSense: Quellensammlung » Marketing Tricks Weblog said on August 3rd, 2007 at 12:58 am
[...] Positive Adsense Experiment [...]
ryan said on August 5th, 2007 at 11:37 am
What is the php code you inserted?
Things You Probably Don't Know About Google AdSense said on August 29th, 2007 at 4:07 am
[...] “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 2 ad units. My Adsense revenue increasing by 284% on Saturday, Sunday and Monday!” [Positive Adsense Experiment] [...]
Jmm said on August 29th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
[Positive Adsense Experiment] Was the PHP snippet every posted?
programlar said on November 10th, 2007 at 2:52 am
great idea! Would be nice, if you could publish the PHP code too! Thanx,

This entry was posted on Monday, November 7th, 2005 at 1:03 pm and is tagged with No tag for this post.

Changes to Firefox Tabs Coming

My Favorite Flock Feature

, computers and internet, media, internet, web

Dreamhost offers great hosting packages with unlimited domain names and bandwidth! Signup now and enter the promotion code dmm to receive $60 off your first year of hosting. Your total cost for one year will be $59 - that's only about $5 per month! Signup Now!