Experiments to Optimize Web Advertisements

Google offered to run experiments to see how allowing more Adsense advertisement categories on my web pages could increase revenue. So I am running an experiment unblocking "Events, Shows & Cultural Attractions", to see if makes a difference. But I am not going to unblock sensitive categories, such as "Weight Loss Supplements".

Google Shutting Down Cost-per-action Advertising

Google have advised they are closing down the "Google Affiliate Network". This Cost-per-action (CPA) advertising service, allowed web publishers, such as myself, to earn revenue when someone carried out a specified action (such as booking a trip). This is separate to the Google AdSense service, where the viewer just has to click on the ad for the publisher to receive a payment. Google purchased DoubleClick, which had a controversial history. Renamed "Affiliate Network", the system was never fully integrated into their other advertising system (AdWords) and never quite worked for me. In theory you could get a lot of revenue if someone carried out the specified action, perhaps a hundred times as much as for them just clicking on an ad. But hardly anyone ever did and the system required more manual intervention than Adsense (which essentially runs itself). I expect Google are working on expanding Adsense with an integrated CPA function.

Cost of Scholarly Publishing

Mr Peter Booth Wiley, Chairman of the Board, John Wiley & Sons, talked on "Open-access and scholarly publishing in the 21st century" in Canberra recently. This sparked some discussion amongst academics as to the cost of publishing papers and how "open access" (where readers are not charged) could be funded.

CSIRO Publishing charge authors $3,000 per paper, to cover the cost of open access. Alternatively CSIRO charge individual Australian subscribers AU$195.00 per year to access non-open articles.

The Conference in Research and Practice in Information Technology (CRPIT) series charges conference organizers about $50 per paper for electronic publishing (printing on paper is an optional extra). All the papers are available open access and also are included in the ACM Digital Library.

I notice that IEEE are charging readers US$31.00 for a paper I wrote for a conference earlier in the year (a preprint is available free). IEEE is not generally open access, but even so I had to pay the conference organizer a $150 fee to have my paper published.

IEEE also have Google Ads on the public version of the page. I tried Google and Amazon.com ads on the ACS Digital Library some years ago. However the ads tended to detract from the dignity of the papers and so I had to take them off. But the ads on my recent IEEE paper look reasonable:

Going Back To Uni?
Enquire Online Or Speak To Our Student Advisors On 1300 240 976!
www.open.edu.au

Honda Australia
Browse the full Honda car range. Find a dealer close to you.
www.honda.com.au/cars

Keep Your Brain Young
Sharpen Your Memory With Brain Games Made By Neuroscientists
www.lumosity.com

Australia's Coral Sea
Vital areas still to be protected. Find out more!
www.ProtectOurCoralSea.org.au

Buy Ink & Toner Australia
Special Fast Overnight Delivery Save Up to 76%, Fully Guaranteed
www.InkStation.com.au/Ink-Toner

I can understand the relevance of the ads for university, cars, memory games and ink to IEEE publications. But "Protect Our Coral Sea" seems less relevant. The last time I was involved in protecting the Coral Sea, it was in the Joint Operations Center aboard the flagship of the US 7th Fleet. ;-)

Are Image/Video/Animated Ads More Profitable?

The animated Google AdWords image ads on my blog were starting to get annoying. So I decided to turn them off and try just text ads. Conventional wisdom (and Google) would say that image and animated ads are more engaging and therefore the viewer is more likely to click on them and that I, as the publisher, will receive more revenue. But I will see what happens.

Already I have turned off all the sensitive categories of ads for Google (such as religion, politics, weight loss ...). Also I have turned off interest-based ads and third party ads preferences, so that ads will be selected based on the content of the web page, not from an analysis of the characteristics of the viewer. If I am reading a web page about e-learning, then I want ads about e-learning.

Smart Phone Ads Earning More Revenue

There is much talk of mobile devices, such as smart phones and tablet computers taking over the web. I notice that about 5% of the readers of my web pages are using such high end mobile devices. While this a small proportion, they are important for advertisers, as they are more than twice as likely to click on ads and advertisers are willing to pay more for these readers. As a result web pages with mobile ads earn seven times as much revenue as conventional devices and mobile users account for 34% of the revenue overall for my web site.

Telstra Blocking Google Ads

In a J&B HiFi store yesterday I tried looking at my web site using an Apple iPad 2 on display. The web page looked fine, automatically adjusting to fit on the small screen. The Amazon.com advertisements were displayed. But the Google AdWords advertisements were replaced by an error message:

Telstra IP Solutions Security Services
Web Page Blocked

You have tried to access a web page which is in violation of your internet usage policy.URL: googleads.g.doubleclick.net/pagead/ads?client=ca-pub-0383037795937695&format=160x600_as&output=html&h=600&w=160&lmt=1309665424&channel=1696327470&host=pub-1556223355139109&h_ch=00000&ad_type=text_image&ea=0&alternate_ad_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tomw.net.au%2Fads%2Fgoogle_adsense_script.html&color_bg=FFFFFF&color_border=B0B0B0&color_link=000000&color_text=000000&color_url=111EAB&flash=0&url=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.tomw.net.au%2F&dt=1309670690781&bpp=16&shv=r20110622&jsv=r20110627&correlator=1309670690899&frm=4&adk=101579597&ga_vid=207115562.13Category: Advertising

To have the rating of this web page re-evaluated please click here. REMOTE_HOST: 203.48.59.76 HTTP_USER_AGENT: Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 4_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8F191 Safari/6533.18.5