Setting Google AdSense Alternate Ad URL

08.20.2007 | 7:47 pm | AdSense, Google, Income, PPC, Statistics and Reports, Tips

Are you monetizing your website with Google AdSense? LOL

If you are you’re going to want to take a moment to set up alternate or default ads for your AdSense Ads. Alternate ads would be an ad that would replace the AdSense Ad when there are no available ads and instead a lovely PSA (Public Service Announcement) appears that when clicked will not result in any revenue for you (Example of a PSA RedCross.org). These ads, while helpful to communities and/or non for profit organizations, will instead lower your CTR (click through rate) as well as ePCM (Page View Value per 1000). I personally had no idea how simple it was to set up a default ad until fairly recently and wanted to take a moment to pass this valuable information on as it did increase my overall CTR and ePCM as well as created an additional source of revenue.

First, you will need an alternate advertiser and/or affiliate program. There are many to choose from like Chitika, Amazon ect. but I suggest a non contextual affiliate program since you are probably running more than one AdSense ad block on a page and you want to stay within the rules of the AdSense program.

Second, you will need to create a basic template page. You can use Note Pad or HTML-Kit or a similar text editor. You will need to make this page a .html, .shtml, .php or what ever page type you want. I prefer .php myself so I will create a page called google-default.php. I suggest keeping your HTML in this page simple but you will want to at least a 0 left margin in the BODY Tag.

google alternate ad jpg

Then in the BODY area of the page you place the code for your alternate affiliate source. Upload to your site in a location you can easily remember. You can use this text as your initial AdSense alternate ad HTML code if needed. (To save code : Right click the link and “Save Target As”)

Third, you will need to update your AdSense code. The best way to do this is to login to your AdSense account and visit the create code area. When updating ad settings for your pages ad you will need to place your default ads URL, or web address location at your site, in the box for the “Alternate Ad” and it will automatically ad the proper code. It will ad a line in the code that looks similar to this

google_alternate_ad_url = "http://mysite.com/google-default.php";

You will need to repeat this process for various sized ads so the alternate ad that appears is the same size as the original AdSense ad would be so the alternate ad will appear correctly on your page.

Origanilally posted (12-08-05) by me at another blog.

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Chitika’s Recent Updates and Bonus

11.25.2005 | 3:12 pm | Beginners, General, Payments, Statistics and Reports, Tips

Chitika, which is still in beta, has mad a few changes recently that have affected some publishers. While some report an increase or no change at all in CTR many publishers have reported a large CTR drop which, of coarse, affects the publishers overall income or revenue. In my opinion, …

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Chitika Reports Late to Update

11.14.2005 | 2:29 pm | General, Statistics and Reports

It is now 3:30 PM EST and I as well as several others have noted that their Chitika reports have not yet updated with yesterdays (November 13th) stats. No official word yet on why but I bet it has something to do with all the new channels :)
Update: Stats were …

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Tracking Channels using Keyword

11.13.2005 | 1:59 pm | Beginners, General, Statistics and Reports, Tips

Looking for a simple hack to determine the top paying keywords for your site that is using Chitika eMinimalls? Well look no more! This hack extends your existing channel name(s) to include the name of prduct that was clicked. This will still give you statistics to track an interactive …

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Set up Ad Tracking with Chitika Channels

11.10.2005 | 5:16 pm | Beginners, General, Payments, Statistics and Reports, Tips

Now that channels have been implemented in the reports area at Chitika tracking ad performance is now a big priority for me as well as many other publishers. Being able to track performance is very important to your overall success as a publisher so the fact that Chitika has this …

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Chitika Custom Channels have been implemented

11.7.2005 | 2:11 pm | Ad Networks, Chitika, Keywords, Statistics and Reports

Great news! I just made my daily check of my Chitika statistics and guess what the reports have been updated and now include channel reporting.

Finally a way to track your individual pages, ads, and keywords. I am really looking forward to looking into more detailed reports and see which ads are converting and which ones are not.

If you have not added the channel to your Chitikacode this is what you will need to add. Replace “XXXX” with your unique channel ID name

ch_sid = 'XXXX';

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