Self-Fulfilling Prophesies and Typos
I check the logs on this blog every few days just to get a sense of what kind of topics generate traffic, and how people find my blog amidst the millions of voices on the net. I’ve discovered some interesting and perhaps perturbing truths:
Google AdSense is really self-referential. Before rebuilding this site, I had an ad click-through rate of small fraction of a percent, but I defniitely had click-throughs. And those clicks shaped the types of ads that appeared under each entry: some NJ Devils related things, ticket broker ads, occasionally pointers to eBay auctions. Once I rebuilt the site, I’ve been getting somewhat moronic ads based on the “snowman” keyword and the “on fire” modifier, including fire equipment, Frosty the snowman related electronic kitsch, and other things that register somewhat above oral surgery in terms of interest to the average snowman reader (all two dozen of you). I’m not asking anyone to click, because (a) that violates Google Adense’s terms of service (it’s a blatant form of click fraud) and (b) I do not want more stupid ads like these littering the site, and clicking on them only makes Google think that “they’re working”. I’ll point this out to my Google friends; if you are displaying 400 ads a month and not getting any click throughs, maybe it’s time to change the sort algorithm?
In response to a promotion from the hosting company that keeps the snowman chill, I signed up for a Google Adwords account. This is the flip side of AdSense — Adsense displays the ads; AdWords lets you pick keywords and phrases to which to attach your ads. My one-liner advertising the Snowman On Fire blog has been shown about 50 times this week, without a single click — so I haven’t paid for any of those displays, but at the same time, the net effect has been exactly what I paid for. Just for chuckles, I sponsor some of the popular mis-spellings that would take people to a Devils related blog, like “Patrick Elias”, and I get more displays there than on the normalized keywords. But the opacity of the process bothers me: Google decides what each click is worth, and one good click might exhaust my whopping advertising budget (best described as “a Hamilton per month”). With a small budget, I’m precluded from ever displaying in a high-click value market, like someone searching for “Stanley Cup,” because any click would exceed my ability to pay for it. But this seems to point at the converse of my click-through problem in AdSense — why not let market forces determine the value of clicks, so that the overall value of click-throughs increases, rather than assigning some known only to the Googleplex value that makes the market slightly more murky that NHL caponomics?
As much as I’m aggravated by Google AdSense, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by Project Wonderful. PW is the ad engine that powers most of the online comics I frequent, helping the authors pay for, well, electricity and beer, I think. I put a footer with three buttons at the bottom of the page, and it turns out that my few page views a day are generating a steady stream of revenue. Not much - a few cents a day, but more than I’m seeing from displaying irrelevant and irreverant Google ads in the same context. The big difference is that PW charges by the day, and sets a market price for display ads using a public auction. You can make your own decisions about the value of having an ad show up for particular content, because you see the style, shape and sequence of the content. There’s full transparency, and that makes the advertising process both wonderful and a self-directed fulfillment.
And for the cosmic coincidence of the day: I love seeing readers arrive here through some tortuous, circuitous path. Earlier this week, someone searched for the phrase “I will praise him the rest of my days,” a phrase usually reserved in our household for Marty Brodeur or Patrik Elias. However, there was a typo in the search, and the phrase “I will parise him the rest of my days” landed the searcher at the snowman’s feet. I only see actual page loads, so I know that the person who went in search of praise found a praised Parise here — something made the person click, and for that action, I’m happy for the rest of the day.