WordPress How To: Making Sense of AdSense
While you have to be careful, selective and discriminating as to how or even if you should display Google AdSense ads on your site, there are a bunch of Plugins created for WordPress to make your ad insertion life easier.
Here are three plugins to assist you with your network advertising needs:
- Advertising Manager: Advertwhirl(pronounced Adver-Twirl) is the ultimate WordPress plugin to manage advertising campaigns for your site. Advertwhirl not only allows you to manage exactly how and when ads are displayed on your site but allows you to serve your ads to external sites and smartphone apps. Manage ads for your guest posts and get a return on your hard work.
- Author Advertising Plugin: This plugin allows blog admins to create a revenue sharing program utilizing one of the many advertising programs out there i.e Yahoo, Google Adsense, Amazon, Allposters etc. It can also be used as a banner manager, author photo/website widgets.. actually it has about a zillion uses. Give it a try and lemme know if you use it for anything really groovy.
- Google Ad Wrap – Section Targeting is a way of embedding special tags inside HTML to give Google’s omnipresent spider a better idea of what’s important on your page. This is a really simple plugin that wraps posts and comments inside these tags, in the hope that they’ll lead to better search rankings.
AdSense can be a way to get a couple bucks a month sent to you from Google for ads displayed on your site that are then clicked on. I am part of the camp that folks are pretty much “zoning out” ads and ignoring them when they are on a mission and find a site that has the info they are seeking.
The analogy here is that similar topical ads enhance your site and offer value to visitors, in my opinion — not so much. Ad placement, filtering and quantity can play into the perception of your site overall. In some cases increasing value in other cases diminishing the credibility of a site.
I’ve run a bunch of tests and over the past year have watched AdSense revenues decline on both geographically targeted niche sites (which I believe are ads that also are more relevant to a searchers quest) and topically very niche focused sites. The more niche your site, the better chances the ads displayed will be complimentary.
As with anything “online” do it right or don’t do it at all applies here and the plulgins mentioned above can help you in that effort.
At your service,
Judith
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