adding insult to injury

Perfect Weblog Ads

Or, How to make money off your website without pissing off your weblog reading patrons.

I get a ton of daily traffic from search engines; It’s actually a bulk of my traffic on this site. I wanted to take advantage of this traffic, but didn’t want to muck up my site with ads. I wanted a way to display ads for people who visit my site from search engines, but no one else.

To do this, I modified a script that searches posts on my site for terms that Google referrers are searching for, to include a Google AdSense Ad. Now, the only way people see ads on my site are if they come directly from Google, which is great because it’s likely they werent looking for a weblog anyway.

This is further enhanced because I use Google’s AdSense service, so the ads on my page are based Google results, in effect creating perfect marketing – the ads Google shows on the result are the same ads Google would have put on their own site for the search terms that led the person here.

This little trick was put in place my click through percentage went up 600%.