I just wanted to give everyone a heads up after the recent post on February 2nd about an update to their program policies. The main change I noticed is that they have now fallen in line with Adsense and only allow 3 ad units per page now. I personally don’t use more than 3 ad unit per page, so there is nothing for me to update on my end, but I expect some of my readers will need to make changes soon.

After reading through the recent news announced Friday, I am really disturbed by what is coming of the News Corp and Google partnership. Michael Grey points out that it is already costing him $2 - $3 a day from clicks on his name that are immediately leaving his site. Not sure what this will mean for the ultra amazing Google quality scores (NOT!) or if advertisers not wanting to pull out of the search network will end up making negative adjustments for the terms getting large amounts of junk traffic. I can see Google will need to address this problem sooner rather than later as not to upset its many advertisers spending $xx,xxx to $xxx,xxx monthly through the Adwords network.

Another fun twist to the Google PPC saga and it will certainly be interesting to see where it all ends up. I will keep you posted on any major news that surfaces on this front.

I knew my account manager was up to something when she emailed asking my sweatshirt size…hehe!

I just wanted to post a picture and say thanks to YPN for sending me this Christmas gift. The thought was very kind and being able to participate in the beta program for the past 15 months or so is even better! I look forward to a profitable 2007 with the Yahoo Publisher Network!

Adsense Blog Post

I was very interested to see something that I felt coming for some time now. Adsense has finally shed some light on what is and is not allowed in terms of using images next to Google Ads on your sites. I figured this was something forum owners would be interested in reading….Enjoy!

I’ve been working on a few other projects lately and in the process needed to create dynamic landing pages based on what a user searched for. For those that don’t know a landing page is:

The specific web page that a visitor ultimately reaches after clicking an advertisement. Often, this page is optimized for a specific keyword term or phrase.

I liked the idea of making a page look exactly like what the user searched for. If I searched for “rusty blue widgets” and the page I arrive at has “RUSTY BLUE WIDGETS” I think “Wow, that’s exactly what I was looking for!” and I’m much more likely to scroll down and read more. I decided to apply this same concept to my programming forum. I already have about 200,000 pages listed in google, and around 80% of my traffic is organic. So making every page a “landing page” seemed like a good idea.

I replaced my welcome message near the top of each page with the parsed out keywords from the search engine referrer. If a user searches for “C++ Sleep” and arrives at my site, they will see “C++ Sleep” in the welcome box and “Register for free and post your C++ Sleep Questions”. You can see an example of this by searching for C++ Sleep on google and clicking the first result.

Since implementing this change, I have seen an almost 80% increase in the number of registrations and my depth of session has increased by over 50%. I’ve also seen a slight bump in CTR and eCPM from AdSense.

I would highly suggest implementing some sort of landing page script if a lot of your traffic is organic. I adapted the code from here.

UPDATE: Michael from RC Nitro Talk put together a tutorial to create landing pages for your vBulletin forum. Thanks Michael!

by Chris Kenworthy @ Ackfoo.com