My Adsense Failure & Success

I’m hoping some of us can benefit from my experience (stupidity). I started experimenting with Adsense about three years ago. At the time, I had a site dedicated to the opinions, critiques, and comments about Las Vegas, from Las Vegas locals. When I finally implemented the Adsense code, I averaged about 800 unique visitors per day, with an average of about 2000 page views across about 230 unique content rich pages.

After 45 days I was disappointed to see my total earnings were less than $10. I read everything I could on ad optimization, and enlisted the help of other publishers for their advice. Nothing I read, and nothing suggested to me seemed to work. In frustration, I began changing everything about the site. Color schemes, layout, and some of the content. Slowly but surely all of my visitors disappeared. I was now averaging around 10 – 15 visitors a day, with an equal amount of page views.

At this point I was ready to throw in the towel. I was blaming Adsense for ruining my site, when I should have (of course) been blaming myself. And for about a year I left the site alone. I experimented with four other sites, two of which along the same concept, the other was based on information concerning a recall on a popular product. I again followed the tips of being successful at Adsense, but these four sites did not have the traffic, or the rich content that the original site did. I didn’t have the time to write new content, and I wasn’t about to steal from others.

By now a solid year had past since my original Vegas site, and it finally dawned on me why it failed:

The site was about Las Vegas directed towards Las Vegas Locals. The content had articles about Las Vegas but written from the perspective and benefit of Las Vegas Locals. The ads that appeared were for the major hotels, and resorts, and gambling related etc. But none of these ads matter to Las Vegas Locals. Who cares what kind of special room rates The Bellagio, or the Mirage may have when you already live there?

Looking back, this seems so simple. I am convinced that there is nothing I could have done to fix the situation, unless I changed the target audience from Las Vegas Locals, to Las Vegas visitors, which would have meant changing most of the content, and creating new sources of traffic. Which deviates from the whole purpose of the site to begin with.

My failure only wanted me to create a new site and try it again. So I thought long and hard and came up with some strict requirements that the site would have to meet up to:

1. The site must appeal to a large demographic
2. The site must have plenty of unique content that’s easily created
3. The site must provide a reason for repeat visitors

It took about two months and plenty of brain storming until my wife made a suggestion in passing that fit these three requirements. Since the site still isn’t a year old yet, I’ve chosen not to share the URL here or its purpose (that-and I’m also carefully tracking the browsing habits of the visitors and I don’t want to taint it from others just “checking it out”.) But what I can say is compared to my original site this new one is much more successful. It took three days to set up and went live on 5/23/06. It has 1100+ pages of unique content as of this morning (some of it very rich, other not so rich), created freely by the visitors of which I have tracked an increase of about 10% monthly. The page views have increased proportionally as well, and the click through rate has been to my satisfaction. I’ve not advertised the site anywhere except with a magnet on my car, and all of the visitors have either come from there, or from search engines. I can always tell when my site has been crawled because I get a surge in visitors, especially to the pages that have obscure topics.

I’m a Process and Quality Analyst professionally and I feel like such an ass over not identifying the problem I was facing with the original site. So my suggestion to any of you who feels frustrated by the success (or lack there of) of your sites to take a stroll through your site with the eyes of your visitors. You may see some contextually targeted ads to your content, but if your ads don’t target your audience, don’t get frustrated or go on the war path like me and start making drastic changes and ultimately flushing a good site away.

My new site does very well considering I spend less than an hour on it each week, and that time spent is mostly used to read the content that has been submitted by others (if I spent more time on it I have no doubts I'd create more revenue.) Now I know some of you might be wondering what’s so special about a site that people would readily want to submit their unique content to it?… well as my wife so simply pointed out to me “some people like to moan and groan about things because they have nothing better to do.” And believe me, their are at least 1100 people on the Internet that have nothing better to do!

 

You are a talented writer indeed. After finishing reading this post, i read it again and again. The words simply comes out...
Great job. Who knows? maybie i am one of the 1100 people who have nothing better to do.

 

Nice story, I'm glad you worked out the problem, as it is very easy to give up with somthing completly.
Some good advice there, thanks for sharing!
DD

 

Very nice post! Thanks for sharing... another classic... think about your visitors... not your earning of the day.

 

Nice story mate. Its always important to remember that google will often direct local users to tourist sites

 

When you see your own website every single day and constantly work on it then spotting the most simple problems can be hard. Because you are used to it you just dont realise.

Ive been guilty of this relating to writing to much text when it simply isnt needed, the visitor cant be bothered to read it all and goes elsewhere!

I suppose this highlights the need to get reviews from 'fresh eyes' on forums like this to really show to you the problems of the site.

Great thread mate. Regards, Chris.

 

indeed, great thread.

In DP there's from time to time a thread like this that causes me the urge of doing something special to my own sites.

thanks!

 

good work Salzmedia

 

Very good thread and good writing
And thanks for sharing, very good point
Greens added too

 

Salz, thanks for the great insight. Worth its weight in gold!

 

Nice thread. You're a good writer. Thanks for sharing.

 

Thanks for the very good thread and the good words "think about your visitors... not your earning of the day"

 

Excellent post! When working with contextual ads we really need to make sure that we're targeting the correct demographic. I think we sometimes forget to analyze what ads are being shown on our sites and make sure that they are targeting our users. Until AdSense and other networks are able to tell the difference between a site for Las Vegas locals and a site for potential Las Vegas tourists, we're going to have to do a lot of work tweaking our sites or perhaps change the focus entirely.

Thanks for the great story! I'm sure it will be useful to many of us.

 

Well i keep getting frustrated with Adsense and sometimes i just want to set/modify a site just for revenue but all it needs is reading a thread like this to keep one on the right track, eh!

Thanks and good luck with your site.

 

Excellent article with great inspiration! It's worth reading and thanks for your time to share this with us too!

 

Is your site some kind of online community or forum? How did you get visitors to start contributing content initially? After some content was built by users, it is easy for other visitors to put in their 2 cents as well. But how did you get the initial few to put content on your site?

 

Not to nitpick, but I'm a little confused about this part of your post:

How could the site not be a year old yet, if it went live in 2006?

Edit: WHOOPS - never mind, I see this thread was resurrected from early 2007