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Google AdSense – No Dollars for Clicks!

October 27, 2009 By 2 Comments

A reader of this blog, who uses Google AdSense to monetize his blog, emailed me the following question:

I’ve had 3 clicks and yet zero dollars. Is that normal? My IT guy tells me that Google takes a while to evaluate things before allocating money but I just want to confirm.

Here’s my answer to this question.

There are 2 reasons why you may have a zero dollar value against your clicks.

(1). Google thinks the clicks are invalid.

If you happen to click you own ads or if someone clicked from a computer on a Local Area Network (example at work) where you have logged in to check your AdSense revenue, then Google will consider the click invalid. The reader also mentioned that he did not click his own ads. This leads us to the second reason.

(2). CPC vs CPM

The AdSense program has two types of ads. CPC ads that are paid on a per click basis (thus the name Cost Per Click) and CPM adds that are paid based on 1000 page impressions. CPM stands for Cost Per Millie. Millie is the Latin word for thousand. For CPM ads the publisher is paid each time the ad is displayed on a page. This means when a user clicks on a CPM ad there is no payment made to you, even though Google reports that click. There are CPM ads that are priced at very low rates, for example 50 cents for 1000 page impressions. This means when an ad is displayed on a page you earn 50/1000 = .05 cents. Google does not report any earnings under 1 cent. Google will keep track of these earning and will display them once the accumulated earnings reaches a cent.

Therefore it is perfectly normal to have Clicks and no dollars against the click.

Filed Under: Misc Tagged With:

Preventing irrelevant Google Ads from showing up on your web page

February 10, 2009 By 1 Comment

If you do not want to show specific Google ads from your blog you could use the “Competitive Ad Filter” that can be used to block ads from specific URLs. For example, you could specify to block ads from example.com or blog.example.com.

While this feature is handy it may cause problems if you have multiple sites. For example, in my blog (TechThinker.com) I would like to see Google ads related to the topic of blogging. But in my wife’s new blog I do not want to see any Google ads related to blogging. My wife’s blog is called “BabyTipsBlog” and on the front page of this blog Google ads relating to the topic of blogging are displayed. I think this is happening because the word “blog” is part of the domain name as well as the blog name.

If I try to block blogging related ads from my wife’s blog (using the Competitive Ads Filter) I will end up blocking these ads on my blog as well because both the blogs share the same Adsense publisher Id.

From the above example, you can see that using the Competitive Ad Filter could cause conflicts if you have multiple websites or blogs.

The remedy to the above problem is to use section targeting. Using section targeting you can specify which sections in your page should be given importance by Google. You can also specify which sections should be ignored.

Here’s a code snippet that shows you how to use section targeted Google ads.

<html>
<head>
…
</head>
<body>

…

<!– google_ad_section_start –>
Adsense will consider this ection to be very important.
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

…

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>
Adsense will ignore this section.
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

…

</body>
</html>

Using section targeting you can show more relevant ads on your webpage. Showing relevant ads will naturally increase your click through rate resulting in higher revenue.

Filed Under: Misc Tagged With:

How to prevent displaying Adsense Ads while you are logged into WordPress.

January 3, 2009 By 3 Comments

Displaying Google Adsense ads while you are logged in to your WordPress blog can be problematic for 2 reasons:

1. Your page impressions stats are skewed.

Each time when you preview your own post the Google Ads are displayed. As a result your page impressions stats are skewed. You do not know how many of those page impressions came from actual visitors and how many are from post previews.

2. Displaying ads on post previews can lead to your Adsense account being terminated by Google.

When you preview a post (that is currently in draft mode), WordPress creates a temporary URL for the post. When the Adsense ad is displayed in the preview post the Google Adsense bot will try to access this URL. Since the page is no longer available, your web server will return a 404 Page Not Found error message. Displaying Adsense ads on 404 pages is strictly prohibited by Google. Therefore, if you preview your post multiple times before publishing it your Adsense account may be banned by Google.

Because of the above mentioned reasons, it is a good practice to tun off Google Ads when you are logged into your WordPress blog or previewing posts.

If you are using an Adsense plugin it might contain a setting to turn off ads when a user is logged in or previewing a post. But, if you did not use any Adsense plugin and manually placed Adsense code you can prevent the ads from appearing using the following php code:

Note: You have to find the php file that calls the Adsense code and add the following checks.

Example PHP Code Snippets:

Code to block ads when the user is logged-in.

<?php
if (” == $user_ID) {
// user id is null, user not logged in
// call to display Adsense Ad
}
?>

Code to prevent ads from displaying during post previews.

<?php if (!is_preview()): ?>
// Code to display Adsense Ad //
<?php endif; ?>

Filed Under: Misc Tagged With: ,