Discussions on Adsense, best practices, ... etc.

What is not clear to me at the moment is that there does not seem to be a "home" for users of the AdSense module to discuss problems (not necessarily bugs), best usage stragegies, and so forth. It seems to me the messages would get lost if posted in the generic support forums. So, where to take this type of discussion? Drupal.net or baheyeldin.com/technology/drupal/

I have points I'd like to share and am not clear on the best platform. For example:

I've noticed that if I let Drupal choose the path for a node, getting targeted ads is a shot in the dark even if I make sure to have subtitles and links loaded with keywords, I still end up with some pretty strange stuff. AdSense seems to put extreme weight on what it THINKS are keywords in the URL. So if I haven't used the path module to put keywords in the URL and I'm using /node/ I will end up with ads for things like Cisco servers and assorted networking devices, even if the page in question is a recipe for chicken soup!

Item 2. One ad method that has a high CTR for me is links that look like navigation buttons. Links (vs Ads) also show you what key words your page is pulling in. I design these to look similar to navigation links, and they are a very unobtrisive form of advertising in prime real estate locations, such as in the header.

The TROUBLE with links, though, is that they very frequently get confused, especially when the page in question is an index of polls, recent posts, etc. In this situation, for normal ads, Google shows a public service ad. For links, though, you get a pretty hideous looking and less-than-click-inspiring "Search for ads" search box.

Really now, how many surfers are going to go out of their way looking just for ads???

The good news is that if you've got an alternate URL defined, you can display that instead. The bad news is that Google's HTML example is singularly uninspiring and limiting. Given that the alt url will be displayed so frequently in indexes, I put on my thinking cap and attempted to come up with a way to get some potentially serious revenue out of the alternative URL.

This is what I've come up with as an alternative design for my site:

http://www.gunthersoft.com/alternates/linkbar.php

and

http://www.gunthersoft.com/alternates/leaderboard.php

Both of these do NOT map to a single URL, but the image coordinates to back to Gunthersoft and get routed to an appropriate URL. Basic image mapping stuff for master web designers.

Now what makes these interesting... for people with clickbank accounts, you can use these on YOUR site by simply plugging in your Clickbank ID like this:

http://www.gunthersoft.com/alternates/linkbar.php?id=gsoft

What this will then do is, like AdSense revenue sharing, it will use YOUR id 80% of the time and mine 20% of the time.

Currently these are designed to work exlusively with the BlueMarine theme (PHPTemplate version). The linkbar is designed to go in the header, and the leaderboard in the footer. I'm willing to discuss custom colors to match specific user's themes if anyone is interest.

Also on the to-do list:

1. Auto-generating the images so that color schemes can be provided in the URL parameters.
2. Ways to call up specific Clickbank sub-categories.
3. Rotating ads for specific products from a database (which I plan to start promoting to Clickbank vendors directly).

All for now. If anyone knows of a good place to discuss AdSense-Module specific stuff, please let me know.

- KGB out.

mailto:klaus@gunthersoft.com