Nerve Endings Firing Away

Since I’ve been fiddling around at the backend of this blog in midst of revamping the look, I managed to clean up my plugins directory. Although WordPress by itself is a robust blogging engine,the availability of plugins helps enhance the experience and extend its capabilities. One of the plugins that I installed is PlanetOz’s Who Sees Ads plugin. If you hate ads cluttering your blog yet cannot do away with them because of the trickle of revenue, then this plugin is a must-have for you. It is based on the concept of customizing your blog for the sake of regular and loyal readers so as to make their reading experience on your blog a pleasant one. Although your blog may be getting hundreds or thousands of visits every day, I’m sure people who read your blog regular are a lot fewer in number. Your RSS subscription count may be the closest you’ll get to guessing the number of your actual loyal readers. So it is even more important to spare them the ads because they are also the least likely people to click on your ads so why subject them to all those ads, right?

Currently, I’m only using Adsense to monetize this blog. there are bascially four ad blocks on each single page. The homepage has none; WordPress allows you to do that i.e. show ads only on single post pages and not at all on the homepage. The plugin, Who Sees Ads allows you to set conditions based on which you either choose to display ads or not. For e.g., the three ad blocks – a 200 x 200 square block right at the top of the sidebar, a 336 x 280 large rectangle block below the post, and a 468 x 15 links ad block above the post title are not visible to regular readers. Regular readers are those who have viewed at least 2 pages over the past 5 days. Others with less frequency are either search engine visitors or occasional readers. Search engine visitors are also the most likely to click on your Adsense ads because they are looking for something specific and the Ads may display those options for them.

The most productive ad block of all – the 336 x 280 large rectangle embedded within the post usually just below the post title floating to the left of the first paragraph – proved to be a bit dicey regarding display options. Typically I would’ve liked to use the same decision rules as above but the way excerpts work on the front page, only the post titles show up if this ad block is embedded within the post; even for regular readers. This not only makes it look ungainly but also provides no reference to the context of the post below the title. So I had to move to the next best option i.e. displaying the ads when the post is more than 5 days old (also customizable). This ensures that the most regular and loyal readers reading the post within 5 days of its published data will see no ads and likewise for early birds. Google takes at least couple of days to index your pages (although some posts have been indexed in a matter of hours) so displaying your ads prematurely doesn’t really help since that post is not attracting any visitors from the search engines yet. So if you are a regular reader or read my posts within five days of being published, chances are that you will never seen any ads on this blog. How’s that for reader experience?

The plugin I mention has far more options (even PHP coding using if-then rules) than I use and if used with the right combination of display rules, you can really customize the viewing of your ads. After all, isn’t targeting the entire basis of effective advertising? If you want to maintain your ad revenue yet want to keep your loyal readers from seeing the ads then this plugin does the job for you.