Adsense campaign on your blog - the critical timing
So I recently started putting some Adsense advertisements from Google on my blog a few days ago. Not that I have enough traffic to make any significant amount of money, but nonetheless, it’s not bad to have a head start. Besides, I wanted to experiment with the Adsense Deluxe Plug-in anyhow, so it was all good.
I learned something very very critical about the timing when you put Adsense ads on your blog, so here it goes.
The day when I signed up for the Google Adsense campaign and put my first advertisement up, the most recent and top-most blog entry was the one comparing Starbucks and Blenz. And when I put my first Adsense blocks in, within hours, it picked up the foremost keywords on the site, and started displaying coffee related ads for Coffee makers, online coffee wholesalers, Van Houette, etc.
Now. Google’s robots are busy little things and naturally they are not indexing pages every single day. So for the next few days (even until this moment when I’m writing this very entry) it shows the Coffee ads on the front page, although that coffee shop post was just a one-time thing! Since Google’s Adsense database hasn’t crawled my website again, it thinks this is a coffee-related website right now.
Here is a screenshot :
And another one :
So there it is folks. Even 2~3 days later, when there are new posts that are more relevant in terms of keywords to the topic of my blog, it still shows the coffee ads.
So here’s a tip - Google will index your page within 48 hours (but usually a lot sooner) upon sign-up for your Adsense account. And when you do this, and if you want really relevant ads that really do help, you want to make sure that your first 2 or 3 posts at the top are very relevant to the keywords you and your visitors are looking for. Pick a good timing to start the Adsense, otherwise you may lose a few days of valuable advertising revenue opportunities!
This didn’t affect me very much as I only have about 300 unique visitors a day and a little over 1,000 pageviews on my blog. But for any larger websites that are more popular, this mistake could lose you a few bucks! Learn from the mistakes of others!
haha tahts quite interesting.. i thought a lot of the ad content was generated on the fly, so if you have a few more recent posts with different keywords it would change accordingly…
it seems that the ads in each individual posts often appear to be correctly geared towards the page. and even the first page shows better results after you hit the refresh button
yes, I think it’s a bit of a hybrid.. sometimes it picks up the current page but it also relies on the cache that the Robots created a few days ago. I’m just waiting for it to update again.
been there done that. yea it takes tiem to index. google’s faster than some other ad networks though.
Very nice observation Jeff, I have noticed this when I started seeing difference between my PPC rates when my last 2-3 posts would focus on higher paying keywords.
Allen.H
Ya that’s another factor for us to consider… the PPC rate!