Tim Flight

Most people who have been able to compare YPN and AdSense on the same site have reached a similar conclusion; earnings per click (EPC) are much higher on YPN however click through rate (CTR) is lower resulting in similar revenues. I’ve experienced this as well so I set out to see how I might be able to raise my YPN CTR.

My YPN ads were not targeted as well towards the content on the site. I was getting lots of ads for Comcast, LendingTree, and Vonage. So I added these three sites to my Ad Blocking list and waited the two days recommended by the FAQs… however the ads still remained.

So I called YPN (yes, listen up Google there is actually a number you can call to talk to someone!). Lisa at YPN told me she would look into the problem for me and someone would either call or email back.

Lisa did call back and said the reason Ad Blocking wasn’t working as I anticipated was that the ads I was blocking were PSAs. I thought this was a little strange since those ads don’t fall into what I would call a “Public Service Announcement”. Lisa agreed with my inquisition however she said they were in fact PSAs.

So the next logical question was why am I getting PSAs on YPN? After having a few of the YPN engineers look at my site they figured out the reason it was getting PSAs was because I was rotating pageviews between YPN ads and AdSense ads. Basically the YPN bot that crawls pages to determine the content was getting confused because the page content was constantly changing and the YPN ads were there one second and gone the next. So each time a YPN ad was displayed it triggered a new “content review” and PSAs would be displayed.

I didn’t buy this answer at first, however Lisa suggested that rather than rotating AdSense and YPN ads by pageview that I rotate them by day or at least every few hours.

I had written a WordPress Plugin to rotate ads between Chitika, AdSense and YPN so I updated a setting so that it ran only YPN ads. Sure enough within a few minutes almost all of the “PSAs” (Comcast, Vonage, etc) ads were gone!

The bottom line is that if you are having a problem getting relevant ads with YPN and you are rotating ads between YPN and something else, try reducing how often you rotate to once every few hours or more. This has worked for me and I hope my CTR will increase as a result.

One final observation about YPN CTR, it seems that the YPN ads themselves are not written as well (less enticing) as they are on AdSense. I’m not sure how to explain this yet….

Update

I’ve exchanged quite a few emails recently with YPN regarding this issue and I’m happy to report it has been solved. As we all know now I wasn’t seeing PSAs, but RON (run of network) ads. It turns out there was apparently a temporary problem that was influencing how many RON ads I was being served on my site. And the issue was coincidentally cleared up at about the same time I turned off the rotation.

In addition a problem was discovered with blocking RON ads. I had many of them in my Ad Block list, however this was not being honored. This has since been fixed as well.

Some people have asked what I was using to rotate ads, both from a curiosity perspective and because they wanted to know if that might have anything to do with the YPN problem. We now know that it wasn’t a problem with how the rotation was happening because of the other findings above, and because since those problems have been cleared up on YPN’s end the script is now working just fine.

I was using a WordPress plugin I developed myself. The plugin created a WordPress ‘option’ that stored a num of the last ad vendor used. When a page was loaded the value of that option was retrieved, and the next vendor in a list was picked to serve ads on that page. When the page was being loaded an an ad was to be served the script looked at what vendor was supposed to be used for that pageview and then used a php include to grab the ad for the appropriate vendor and ad layout. Then when the page was finished loading the custom option was updated to reflect the last vendor used.

So all is well now and the ads are rotating between AdSense, YPN, and others without trouble thanks to the YPN engineers squashing a few bugs.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 13th, 2005 at 10:25 am and is filed under Misc, My Works. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.