I have a landing page for an application I've made which users then click through to navigate to other websites. This single page gets around 1-2 million views a month and I'd like to place an ad on the page if possible. However, Google AdSense denied me being that the page doesn't actually have enough content for them to automatically determine relevant ads.
What other options do I have to get an ad placed onto the landing page?
You could get creative, but it'd definitely involve spending some time.
I'd use the space myself for building an e-mail list, Twitter following, Facebook following, or similar which could then be used to make money further down the line. I don't know much about your game mod/project but if everyone going through that page is an avid Steam user and gamer, if you could get 100k people following on Twitter, on an e-mail list, on Facebook, etc, that's a very valuable audience for many people.
TL;dr - Don't let third parties advertise on the page, use the space to build your own audience, then sell advertising/make money on the back end.
AdSense isn't always the right solution for monetization. I was about to suggest AdMob as they had a mobile web component, but looking at it now, it is all native.
There are other ads providers out there that have very good fill rates, I would look at them.
I am still trying to balance how much we talk about other providers on our site vs general themes which are common for all platforms.
Best thing you can do is create a content heavy blog type site with 10 pages or so with 500+ well written words on each page. Submit your blog type site for AdSense approval. Once you get one site approved, you have a publisher account and you can use the ad code on all sites that comply with the TOU.
There is no formidable AdSense competitor or alternative.
Sure, it's for a game mod I created called Cinema [1]. Here's the actual page which I display to the player when they're going to request a video to be played in-game: http://cinema.pixeltailgames.com/search.html
Regarding the article 'Let Users Explore Before They Commit' -
This is much easier said than done, and the effort and complexity will vary greatly depending on your site/app. The example used (nondescript clothing app) is one of the simpler cases, whereby the cross-session and device user-state need not be maintained, or is at least pretty minimal.
For many app developers, though, the richness of their feature-set doesn't come across until the user has a detailed state, such as level achieved, past activity, preferences, etc. Without asking users to "commit", sites/apps need to associate state with an anonymous user.
Unfortunately, it's not quite trivial to maintain the concept of an anonymous user. For one, the lengths the mobile industry is going to restrict the use of unique device identifiers poses a complexity to identify the same device across sessions. Moreover, anonymous users pose an issue for services with a value proposition behind their cross-device/platform support. Also, for small sites, it may not be trivial to introduce a data-model that supports anonymous data, which either needs to be thrown out or eventually merged with account-linked data. Similarly, 3rd-party engagement and funnel analysis of anonymous users is also a hard problem, as when the user does eventually identify themselves with an account, you need to merge their previously anonymous data into their account. Some services call this Aliasing.
I'll echo other comments that the content is sparse - this section specifically speaks as if registration count is the sole goal of the target audience. A comprehensive document would account other conversion-like goals that site/app makers might have, and the weigh the cost-benefit analysis of requiring registration.
We are certainly planning on making these sections more comprehensive. This is just the first iteration of this and as we get more feedback and we create the deeper guidance this will certainly grow. The way this is presented right now is "people found this experience frustrating, don't do it." We need to dive more into "these are 2-3 patterns that we know work really well.". A lot of feedback we recieved is that actually a lot of developers want the seed of the guidance first, specific guidance a little later.
I think you hit the nail on the head about anonymous users. It is hard, and there are patterns that we have not fully explored yet such as sign in on add to checkout.
Google may also not be the best party to listen to for some of this advice. Google has an interest in ensuring they can index as much as possible. If they can't, it's their product that is less valuable. There are enough prominent sites not doing this (facebook, quora, etc.) that it seems Google may be mixing up what's good for you with what's good for them.
I run a small accelerator in Florida and we have two businesses that were primarily monetized with AdSense. The businesses have been growing nicely and as of this month were on a $3.6MM annual run rate. We were constantly working with the AdSense Partner Acceleration team and had even been invited out to Google HQ for their Think Publishing event last spring.
As of last week both the Acceleration Team and Google AdSense Support stated the account was in good standing and ad unit implementation and site content was approved.
Yesterday morning we received automated emails stating "account has been closed for invalid activity" and that all unpaid payments will be withheld. When we emailed the individuals of the acceleration team we had been working they said it was out of their hands.
This is a serious blow to the businesses. After spending over a year optimizing the properties and user acquisition the businesses now need to completely pivot and find a new source of revenue. In addition it is a blow to cash-flow as they have spent substantial time and money acquiring new users based on AdSense earnings.
While AdSense does provide excellent yields for site and app owners, the downside is they can effectively put you out of business with no explanation.
I am shocked at the poor level of service and lack of overall service the AdSense team and Google has provided.
We're excited to see how the teams pivot, grow and evolve from here.
Interesting. Did you eventually get the account re-instated? Seems odd they'd close it without a warning. Did they disable the sites or the entire account?
I would be loath to take advice from Google about how to monetize a small website. Not just because of the conflict of interest (of course they want people to run ads), but because it's not their area of expertise.
I'd think Google knows more than any organization in the world how to best monetize a website. In fact uniquely positioned as the only company to know. Look at all the data they have access to. A lot of these people run g analytics too not just adsense. They give up their website data to g for free. If any organization has the hard data on what's effective and not, they do. Now, take their advice? That's a different story. I'll check industry standards if they say 3$ cpm and I'm getting 10 already, I don't need their advise necessarily.
I think traditionally that is something that rings true. Ads aren't the only answer and this is just the first step in a more comprehensive area that we are planning. I would say that one area that we get a lot of requests for from web developers is strong guidance on how to build forms that convert well. We have data on this, we just haven't formalized the guidance on this.
We are very keen to get feedback on the content that web developers want to see with regards to monetization. For example one area that I am keen to see us grow is building components in sites that optimize credit card data entry.
I would like to ask how these recommendations are reached. Meaning, can you show hard data that backs up the assertions on how people buy, etc.?
I am not trying to snipe you or the site. I appreciate the effort. But in my experience Google recommendations (with Adwords or Adsense or which reports I should see) mean almost nothing and I rely entirely on my own data.
For example, the first article on the first page 'Let Users Explore Before They Commit' cites a research study, which I then have to click through a couple more navigation screens to find. Oh, except the page with the research study throws a 404.
Other than that, the content is sparse. To be blunt at this point I (personally) would not come back because it looks like you didn't even test the site and you haven't actually read the paper and then on top of that haven't actually analyzed the aforementioned paper to see if it actually says what you're asserting it does.
I know this sounds harsh, but I'm being as truthful and direct as I can be because Google hardly ever actually has a human soliciting feedback.
With regards to the study, that data was ascertained by working with direct user studies and taking feedback from them, I think we can certainly make this a lot clearer in the those set of documents.
re:sparse. Yes it is as we are still building this section out and fleshing out the guidance more, but we have worked with the team that did produce the study (It also turns out I am pretty good at making the bad examples of the sites). I do have one follow up question: Would you like to see code that espouses the principles that we are saying are good.
re: relying on your own data. I am curious, what do you look for?
1. Where did people come from and how did I convert them?
2. What is my conversion/impression/sales, etc. for the month/quarter and how does that compare to previous month/quarter or a specific date?
So, what I mean is if I have an event coming up and I am marketing to that event - I have email lists, twitter accounts, FaceBoook, a popular blog, co-op email partners, and I buy ads on multiple platforms...I want to know how many people came from each source, what the conversion rate was, how far they got in the process, and I want to see how this year's event is comparing to last years'. Or last months'. Or last weeks'. Or an event I had three quarters ago.
I need the data to be as accurate as I can get, because if people are coming into the site, and all of the ones coming from, say, Twitter, are not buying and don't even read anything, then I need to know that.
As an example, for a sports event I run in the summer, two years ago I dropped PayPal as an option entirely. I had so many complaints from consumers about PayPal in general I just decided to implement Stripe. A lot of people told me that since PayPal is so ubiquitous, I would be cutting out an ease-of-payment option and I would lose sales.
But my data showed two things: a lot of people DID use PayPal but I lost a ton of conversions when people hit the PayPal page AND my #1 complaint topic was PayPal related. About 60% of the people who signed up used PayPal.
Both of the last two years after implementing Stripe my conversion rate increased dramatically and I have ZERO complaints about the payment process. Literally, zero.
So that's what I'm always looking for. How do I optimize and track turning people who are searching into customers without wasting their time or my time? How do I remove frustration for users? Where do they navigate to? If they hit a specific page and then suddenly jump around looking for a 'contact us' page, I need to figure out what those people are looking for and fix it for them.
With Google analytics or adwords, I get some data but a lot of it other than a few pieces is superficial or the data doesn't match my server logs.
Financial stability from a legitimate high paying career. Where can I use my current covert knowledge and learn the inner workings of this choose your own adventure online saga. I am considering going the robin Williams route..am ibthe only one who realizes I am going crazy???? Am I really a government employee??? Why doesn't anyone at least pay me enough to live comfortably and pay all my bills on time.....why am I denied a living wage.....why can't I even make enough to pay cathy and Greg baclnforball they have done for me?
We are working on getting an analytics section built for this that is just not Google Analytics but also guidance on things that you should be monitoring, why they are important and how to use that information to change your product. I see the analytics and the monetization section actually being quite tightly integrated when we can land it.
Though I've never been banned, I know quite a few friends who have over the years. A couple of them deserved it (asking for clicks to support etc) but some of them not so much.
Like one guy getting banned because there was a thread talking about guns in his forum. His forum was definitely G-Rated, which is a requirement for adsense, but this one thread got him booted, and all his earnings yanked. Had they warned him (which they do more of now) he would have just deleted the thread but instead it was shut down with no appeal.
Stuff like that needs to be addressed more and looked at. After all what's the business sense in having LESS advertisers? I can see weeding out obvious offenders but as of now it seems they are a little to quick with the ban button.
Google does not provide a list of words, phrases, or topics to check for and filter out if you want to stay with AdSense. You just have to guess.
It's not fair for Google to keep the specifics surrounding their content enforcement rules on AdSense secret. The only time a publisher catches a glimpse of what those rules might actually be is when they are already on the verge of being banned for violating them.
This is Google we're talking about. Why can't Google have AdSense analyze the scraped data they already extract from your site on a daily basis, or inject a text content analyzer into the AdSense javascript payload 0.5% of the time to make those browsers report back with a locally-calculated percentage estimation as to whether that page should really be displaying ads at that particular moment, or anything else to programmatically detect that a given page is violating their secret rules, and then automatically disable ads on that page?
Does Google really expect every single one of their human publishers using AdSense on a site with user-generated content (such as articles with comment sections, link aggregator sites with submission queues, forums, interactive drawing boards, chat rooms, etc.) to hire extra hands to monitor all of that user-generated content 24/7, and to only manually whitelist ads on a per-page basis, and to stay forever vigilant and rush to disable the ads as soon as another comment has been posted which might now render the entire page inappropriate?
What I find most ridiculous of all and completely fail to understand is how Google will exert such strong pressure on publishers to censor user-generated content on websites utilizing AdSense, while simultaneously being perfectly happy with placing unskippable 15-second ads on nearly any given YouTube video, ranging from webcam rants containing no less than 20 F-bombs to things so disgusting that I'm concerned articulating them here even euphemistically will result in me being automatically banned from HN. Even if a video contains nothing foul, the comments underneath certainly will most of the time. If anyone tried that with AdSense, they'd be banned within days. How are AdSense publishers supposed to rely on their intuition regarding what they think Google will find acceptable, when the current state of YouTube clearly demonstrates that Google considers almost anything to be acceptable?
It scares me that Google does not have the common sense to treat small(?) publishers decently.
Given how I was treated over petty amounts on a website sideproject. Why would I use you guys as a payment processor or to sell software I had invested years in?
Could you guys publish square ads with dimensions that instagram images and videos have, i.e. ad units that are 612 px square, 306 px Square and 150 px square, so the 1000s of Instagram client apps that use their API can monetize their apps and sites?
These ad sizes would be really awesome because we can then blend the ads with the Instagram posts and it would all be very frictionless and seamless from the end user perspective and monetization might increase for google and the ad sense publishers.
One way to optimize Adsense earnings is to look at Google Analytics data (you have to link the two but that is trivial to do). For example, look at eCPM by screen resolution to see if your ad placements are working correctly on all screen sizes. Or look at eCPM by Content Group, which will help you figure out how lucrative certain sectors are. I also keep an eye on eCPM by browser. Used to be that Internet Explorer had the highest eCPMs. Now it's Chrome.
Monetization has nothing to do with good or evil. Being part of the web has costs and this is a discussion of a way to cover or create more value than those costs.
It may be sad that advertising is the main means of monetization, but I still find google's ads to sometimes be helpful and rarely be annoying.
No, monetization is, like the rest of capitalism, intrinsically evil. As a counterpoint there are plenty (actually, significantly beyond the bounds of "plenty") of websites and tech companies that operate entirely without revenue. I think you'd find, in fact, that these collectives are the ones with real creativity and humanitarian interest. When you're beholden to investors, users become second-class citizens. Showing them advertisements or having board meetings to talk about how best to exploit them is very far from ethical.
How you monetize[1] has a lot to do with good and evil. Certainly the web has costs, but the honest and pro-free market thing to do is transparently make users pay those costs, not dishonestly tell them something is free and when in fact you are making them pay all the costs and much more[2].
Free markets only work in so far as consumers make informed purchase decisions, weighing benefits against costs. Advertising obfuscates and increases costs in the most insidious way.
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[1] Does a baker speak of "monetizing" bread? No, because a baker uses a straightforward and honest business model: Make bread that people need or desire, price it right, and they will buy it. Yes, the baker is technically monetizing bread, water and yeast, but to actively think in those terms puts one into the mindset of "How do I unload this bread, water and yeast onto people and somehow get them to pay me?" which in turn makes it easy to slip on the addendum, "get them to pay me no matter the means."
It points out the vast discrepancy between what Google recommends people do and what they actually do, suggesting that they are either ignorant of best practices, or are lying about best practices.
The short comment was indeed lacking of usefulness but this one makes sense, talking about discrepancy between what they recommend and what they do for example: "Let Users Explore Before They Commit", I never asked for a Google Plus account, I opened my Gmail and "free gift for you" a G+ account and we will set many actions, shares and notifications ON by default so we can improve our network metrics. This definitely goes against letting me explore before committing.
What other options do I have to get an ad placed onto the landing page?