AdSense Strategies for WordPress Blogs
Richards1052 left this comment for me a few days ago in response to using AdSense adware plugins with WordPress blogs:
Wayne: I haven’t installed your plugin yet. But I did install Phil Phord’s adsense plugin & what I didn’t know was the 3 ad block maximum for any pg. So I merrily went about adding adsense blocks to various posts & the noticed that the major adsense tower ad in my sidebar disappeared. I stopped using the plugin as a result.
So I guess what I’d like to see is a plugin that would allow you easily to monitor the ad blocks on any given pg. so you wouldn’t knock the sidebar tower off. In fact, I think the plugin should tell you when you’re about to exceed 3 ads on a pg. if that’s technically possible.
The issues he’s lamenting are the following:
Features Available when using the AdSense-Deluxe Plugin
Unfortunately, AdSense-Deluxe cannot presently track whether your template already contained one or more ad blocks (if I find that this type of tracking has real value I’ll try to add that feature). It also can’t give priority to some ad blocks over others when a listing/post/page contains multiple blocks. To deal with these limitations, I have been using the following strategies.
Strategies for Placing Ads on your WordPress Block
I prefer to turn off the display of AdSense ads on multiple post pages, including the Home page, and instead I manually embed ad blocks into my templates for Home, Search, Archive, et al. pages. I find this looks better and I don’t worry about whether preferred ad styles are being co-opted for the display of lower-priorty ad blocks.
I then embed 1-3 ads blocks into posts (the number is usually determined by the length of the post or page, and how appropriate I estimate the content to be for Google to show relevant ads.
So this is my present strategy, and now I’d like to encourage others to suggest alternatives geared towards either manual placement (in templates) and/or in combination with controlling ad display through the AdSense-Deluxe plugin.
In a forthcoming post or article, I’ll cover some techniques Google offers publishers to control what’s displayed (or not displayed) when no relevant ads can be found (collapsible ad units, replacing public service ads with a color or your own ads, etc.). I’ve also been collecting a number of useful techniques which increase your click-thru rate and will give some examples of those in that article.
August 4th, 2005 at 5:19 pm
[…] Plugin support doesn’t get much better than that.
Wayne also recently wrote a post about the adsense strategy he uses in his blog and there̵ […]
jimg Says:September 23rd, 2005 at 3:55 pm
I also prefer to embed the adsense tags into the template, but I’m concerned about exceeding the 3 adblock +1 linkunit per page threshold set by Google in their TOS.
Example Tech 2 Market utilizes your plugin, but I also have skyscraper embedded in the sidebar. If I create multiple articles with multiple categories and each posting has an adblock, how does one track how many adblocks are being presented to each category? Will every adblock be displayed? Does adsense deluxe limit the number of ads being displayed per page?
Ultimately, I’d like to define the number of adblocks adsense-deluxe will display on a page, and set a priority to them. The max number of adblocks served would get around the adblocks that are embedded in the template issue. Prioritization would allow for newer posts to get the ads vs older ones.
Just a thought - Love the product!
Jim