New Affiliate Discoveries

I installed AdSense on another blog of mine and was thrilled to see $2.00 in income on the first day. It is an established blog with about 50 hits daily on days with no new content. When a new article is posted, I see about 100 hits per day.

It is a niche medical blog and I anticipated some interesting AdSense ads showing up on my site attracting the attention of my visitors. But after a few days I noticed something very strange happening with the earnings.

I went from about $2.00 per day, more than enough to pay hosting fees and a month’s worth of coffee (OK, maybe 10 days of coffee) to about 3 cents per day. Viewing my blog several times on my own computer, I noticed several CPM ads, or Cost Per Mil (Mil=1000 impressions). My 50 hits a day were getting me only 3 cents in revenue. Not to mention that the CPM ads were not targeted, or only loosely associated with healthcare (things like sleep medicines on a blog that discusses blood & gore & traumatic injuries!).

SInce the previous ads, which were targted, were much more interesting to my readers-and thus resulted in more clicks-I have decided to block these CPM ads, which do not seem of interest at all. An AdSense income of $2.00 doesn’t sound like much, but a drop in advertising revenue of nearly 99% certainly is a big deal regardless of your blogging income.

In come the Competitive Ad Filter . By logging into my AdSense account, clicking on the Setup tab, then selecting the link from the horizontal row below called the Competitive Ad Filter, I’m able to enter the URLs of the offending advertisers.

It seems that large pharma, or at least the makers of Ambien, are preying on the small medical blogs…an advertiser has to pre-select the content sites on which their ads appear. I’m sure this is an automated process, but the end result of them selecting my blog was a monopoly of untargeted ads appearing on my site.

I’ll update you on the progress of successfully blocking www.ambiencr.com from my ads. Oh, and I’ve also blocked out these last two paragraphs from the content search of this post so that their ads do not appear on this blog, either! This technique is called “section targeting” and I’ll post about it tomorrow.

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