Adsense - is it too good to be true
I tried adsense ads on my website a year ago. I ran the ads for a period of a week, and kept an eye on everything starting from stats, conversions and ad revenue. I only added a link unit on the top of each page.
After a week, I stopped the ads. I got the feeling that my page views were less and so the possibilities for conversion are now smaller.
I gave adsense another try. I’ve been running ads on my website for almost 10 days now. I loaded the pages with ads, tested channels and kept an eye on which channels are converting more. I also kept an eye on signup rate and number of visits, average time of a visit and on page views.
Since I gave adsense a longer chance, this time revenue is much larger, almost 10 times more the previous test. The adsense bot crawled different parts of the website, although it did not crawl every possible place. Some places are still showing public service ads, flu shots and things like that.
The number of page views fell almost a half. One other reason that might have affected the total number of page views is virtual earth maps, which are now showing on the property pages. Those are ajax based and so the users don’t move out of the page and keep playing with them.
The number of signups fell but not drastically. The average time per visit is around 80% from the original. My conversion rate in terms of users and showing requests and phone calls was not significantly affected.
My own conclusion is most of the people who left the website were going to leave anyways. Little of them were going to stay, and that’s why the average time per visit on the site fell only 20%. Further, it is good that leavers leave while your competitors pay you for those leavers - at least it covers hosting and the basic real estate bills.
I will continue testing and moving ads around, and in the same time I’ve got a load of features to add to the website and lots of new cool toys for my web visitors to play with while they are searching for homes.
December 15th, 2007 at 10:56 am
How many unique visitors are you getting? You gotta get thousands for those adsenses to pay off, don’t you? Also it looks like your ads go to your competition? You don’t mind?
December 15th, 2007 at 11:55 am
Yes… my website gets a lot of traffic. Actually my website is the largest in the DC metro area, which is owned by a Realtor. My competition are websites of brokers or offices.
My bottom line is people requesting to see properties, and I’m happy with that. Actually, I’ll be rolling an update soon that will enhance on a lot of features in the website. The times when I roll new features is usually followed by a big increase in traffic, followed by an increase in business.
The main thing that grows a website (at least my websites) business is content, quality and features it presents.
I have another one which is actually growing faster than this ! http://www.clker.com may be because its audience is worldwide instead of MD & VA.
December 17th, 2007 at 10:44 pm
But then again, Realtors aren’t supposed to have direct feeds from MRIS like you do. MRIS requires that to be only for Brokers.
Agents have to use the Broker’s site, or pay for a monthly service through a 3rd party provider, like homesdatabase or MLSFinder.
Don’t worry, your secret is safe with me. Feel free to not post this.
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