Maria’s Guides

I put Google Ads back on my sites…reluctantly.

I set up Google AdSense about a year ago, never really expecting to make much use of it. I was completely turned off by sites that were plastered with the advertisements and didn’t want my sites to join the fray. But the lure of easy money gets to all of us and, after a while, I put a few Google Ads on two of my sites, mostly as an experiment.

If you don’t know what Google AdSense ads are, you’re either brand new to the Web or blind. They’re normally boxes of ad text or links (but can be graphics) that advertise products, services, or sites related to content on the page on which they appear. They all say “Ads by Google” somewhere in the box. The site that displays the ads gets paid based on ad appearances or clicks. The payment amount is tiny, but if you have a lot of traffic — I’m talking about thousands of hits a day — you can actually make some decent money.

Some people really go overboard with the placement of these ads. On some sites, ads will appear in page headers, sidebars, and footers. In blogs, ads will appear between each post. It’s so bad on some sites that it’s difficult to find the content among the ads. While I recognize the need for some Webmasters to get income from their sites to pay the bills, let’s get real here. I can build and host a full-featured Web site on GoDaddy.com for only $3.95 a month — or even cheaper if I pay for a year up front. Surely that’s not too costly for someone on a tight budget? There’s obviously a profit motive here.

Worse yet, their visitors are paying to view the site — paying by having to wade through all those ads, including the really annoying and distracting graphic ads that include animation.

Is this what the folks at Google intended? Perhaps. But a Webmaster with any respect for his site’s visitors should use Google ads sparingly.

I personally believe that a preponderance of advertising detracts from the site’s value and appeal. As a result, when I use Google Ads, I tuck them away at the bottom of the page or sidebar, where they’re not in my readers’ faces for the duration of their visits. If they find and click an ad, great. But if they don’t, that’s fine, too. After all, I’m in no hurry to have them leave my site.

Well, this morning I checked the numbers in my Google AdSense account. I’ve earned almost $50 since opening the account. Not bad, considering that I’d only had the ads on my sites for about 3 months total. So I decided to put them back online (they were lost during the great computer crash of February 17, 2006) and see how the numbers would change.

I did wickenburg-az.com first. After experimenting with the ads in a number of locations on the page — in the sidebar of the Home page only, in the sidebar of every page, and in the footer — I decided that the only place I didn’t mind their appearance was in the footer. So that’s where they are now.

Then this site. I really wanted the ads in the sidebar and actually had them there, right at the bottom, for about 10 minutes. But somehow, the idea of placing advertisements right after a quote by Mahatma Gandhi seemed almost sacrilegious. So I pulled the ad out of there and put it in the footer.

Will I make a lot of money with these ads? No. Then why put them there at all?

Well, it’s mostly an experiment. I’m interested in seeing whether I can make a few bucks using my completely innocuous placement of the advertisements. So far, I have. A few bucks. And who’s going to turn down a few bucks when it’s handed over for almost nothing?

And I can always remove them.