Google Ads

[Jeremy]

For the last 6 1/2 years, Geocaching.com has been relatively ad-free. With the exception of the ever present banner ad on the left-hand navigation bar, and the occasional promotion (like Jeep!) we have concentrated more on the creation of Premium Member content to help cover the ongoing costs of site maintenance , upgrades, and ever growing hardware and network costs.

 

As we have been moving into an extensive re-architecture of Geocaching.com to keep up with the ongoing traffic increases we have been faced with the reality that we need to raise more money. This will help us to create a permanent solution to the site slowdowns that have plagued us for so many years - aka our V.2 version of the web site.

 

We've been doing testing with the Guide to Purchasing a GPS unit page and have found that Google's ad serving technology is extremely well done. Of course! They're Google! And we feel that placing two unobtrusive (and surprisingly helpful) ads on the page will actually be something that folks wouldn't mind. The current plan is to only show them to users who aren't logged in or are not Premium Members - though once we add a feature for PMs to turn them off we'll add them for everyone (except, of course, those PMs that don't want them). The thought is that the ads will actually be useful on the page and not something that won't fit there.

 

In lieu of raising Premium Member fees we felt that the advertising would be a much easier "burden" on the geocaching community - and we hope - a beneficial one. So expect tweaks and changes to the ad campaigns as we test out new ways to display these ads to be the most effective - and least irritating.

[Jeremy]

Here's an update on the first (partial) week of Google Ads.

 

First, the site wasn't really designed for ads, so the display of the ad isn't the optimal location. Our positioning of the ad was to have it visible within the content. We'll continue to try out different locations.

 

The second part is that Google doesn't do a very good job creating ads for the site. There are some really odd ads that come up for some areas. I have heard that Google "learns" from the pages it indexes but after several days it hasn't really learned a lot.

 

We switched to graphical ads to see what happens to the banner views, and we also removed the left hand navigation ads to see what happens. We'll probably do this for at least the next week.

 

We'll also consider Yahoo for banner ads to see if we can get better (and more appropriate) banners for the site. They also do local advertising which, for the community, seems more appropriate. I was surprised that there was no one out there specializing in local ads (based on coordinates).

[Jeremy]

More updates today (and yesterday)

 

Lots of folks didn't care for the advertising in the middle of the cache listing, so instead I increased the width of the right-hand navigation to 206 pixels wide and put a 200x200 advertisement on the right-hand side of the screen directly below the attributes for a cache. The result is that the attributes can be 6 wide instead of the original 5. That gives us room to allow 2 additional attributes per cache listing without mucking up the page.

 

I also added an advertisement here in the forums. It seemed to fit in the place where I put it.

 

Additionally I'm trying out a product placement on the front page of the web site as well as a google ad. Neither of these are filtered for Premium Members. The reason is I felt that the front page would be an interesting test to see how it responded if everyone saw it (which does far better than, say, the cache details page). Also it is one of those pages that most hardcore (Premium) members don't really look at anyway.

[Jeremy]

Last update until the weekend...

 

I added one more advertisement on the nearest cache page after the 5th returned result. I think it fits fine within the context of the page and really isn't in the way. I do think, however, that the location being searched should be included as part of the search results (however companies don't have this functionality). We'll see whether this will remain or not after the weekend.

[Jeremy]

Well. I messed up yesterday when adding the ads to the nearest cache page.

 

The intent was to put one block of ads but due to some blundering in the code I ended up adding a new ad after each of the top three results. The code actually requested an ad after *every* result but thankfully Google Adsense only allows 3 maximum ads per page or it would have been really, really bad.

 

I fixed it today and moved the ad up to the place after the 3rd result. Additionally we'll be adding an advertisement before the last 3 results on the page and see what that does.

 

This has been an interesting experiment all around. I can understand the desire not to have ads but as Google learns the site it constructs better ads for the pages. I have read it can take more than 2 weeks for Google to "learn" the site so I expect that they'll get better over time.

[Jeremy]

Another update:

 

Over the weekend the overwhelming data shows that the nearest cache page ads are very successful so I expect they'll remain there in one capacity or another.

 

We're now doing some AB testing on the front page with image only and text only ads on the right hand side. Since you may be on one or the other web servers at any given time you may or may not see the image banners.

 

Also we've been playing a bit with product placement on the site. Since the Getting Started section is generally viewed by newbies we've added a Shopzilla ad to that page as well as a larger banner on the guide to purchasing a GPS unit.

 

Again we're still playing around with how ads should be displayed and their effectiveness. Thanks to everyone for their patience while we determine the best approach for this.

[Jeremy]

As it turns out, the images on the front page were getting better click thrus, but the amount per click was far less - under half the text clicks! So I think that Google just doesn't do a fantastic job selling image ads (most likely because they are known for text ones). I switched back to only text ads on the front page. So the AB testing shows that the current method is the best.