Tim Flight

I really enjoy fly-fishing. One technique that divides all fishermen is that of “chasing the swirl”. If you are not a fisherman “chasing a swirl” is when you see a fish jump not where you are fishing, but within casting reach. Do you turn around and cast hoping to place your fly directly above where the fish previously jumped? Or do you keep fishing where you are.

Some people argue fish travel so frequently and so fast it isn’t worth your time to chase a swirl. Others will gladly spin around in the canoe and rapidly cast at the swirl.

So what has this got to do with blogging or contextual advertising? With the rise of popular AdSense alternatives such as YPN, Chitika, etc it might be tempting to chase the swirl. This might be especially tempting if you have a good ad-server program setup where you can easily swap out ads from one broker to another.

The question becomes are the reports fast enough, and do the small swings in CPC last long enough to make it worthwhile to chase the swirl? How do you know ads from the other networks didn’t have a bigger surge in CPC just a little later that you could be taking advantage of?

I’ve done it both ways. I’ve spent some time chasing the swirl and I’ve let things be for several days at a time. You will never be able to tell “what could have been”, you can only guess what might have happened.

You can however, learn lots from having extremely detailed statistics to show trends from various networks. A fictions, but representative example is that I know one ad network typically pays me far less on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. So I switch out their ads on those days and only run them 10-20% of the time. I still run them a little bit on the down days to still collect data from those days in case the trend starts to change (which it sometimes does).

But now I feel I have a fairly good, simple schedule in place for my ads from week to week and I no longer feel the urge to chase the swirl quite so much.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 7th, 2006 at 11:42 pm and is filed under My Works. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.