Today is quite the milestone. We decided to greet March with our first experiment in advertising. We’re giving Google Adsense a test drive first, though we also opened an account with Amazon Associates.
So far, we’ve learned:
- It takes a day or two to get approved for an Adsense account, but after that it’s about 30 min (of your active time) to get ads live on your site. It’s another 30 min or hour to get them looking okay :)
- Out of the gate, the relevance of the ads looks pretty good on the question pages (see this baby shower question for example). We’ve been using Google Analytics for quite some time now, and been crawled a number of times, so maybe this help the out-of-the-gate relevancy, but still I’m impressed.
- We tried including ads on the Question List pages, but wow did they suck! The majority seemed to be keying off “Guild” in the name of the site and coming up with World of Warcraft-type results. I don’t know, perhaps y’all are interested in that? In any case, we dropped that placement.
- We included Section tags as Google recommends to indicate content areas we want the ads to trigger off of and content areas to ignore. We chose to trigger off of Questions & Answers, and ignore Content. Hopefully this will help the relevancy of #3 above, but it’ll be weeks before we get crawled again (so Google sees the tags) and can re-experiment.
In any case, as always, let us know what you think! Notice them? Bad, good, other?
