A Stupid Adsense Mistake

It’s the middle of May already without anything posted here since April. I’ve been busy with PPC, OWM and web design, priorities leaving me without an opening for writing anything.

But, today I thought would be a perfect day to write a few lines because I have a root canal scheduled in two hours and I cannot start doing anything serious anyway.

This time I will talk about Google Adsense for the first time in a long long while. Adsense hasn’t been my cup of tea during my time online, but recently I found myself owning a bunch of domains that could potentially become Adsense sites.

So I slapped on some WP themes got niche-targeted content, hooked up Adsense blocks and let them simmer. Sure enough, traffic was slowly starting to trickle. Muhaahaa!

Having other, important, things to do rather than check the stats every day I let it be only to come back after two months…

Following the two months, my Adsense account stats showed I had a load of clicks (All Right!), but no earnings! (WTF!)

WTF!

photo credit: ffi

Googling for a reason I found that it usually happens when

• Public Service Ads displayed – I didn’t have those
• Someone paid for CPM (per thousand impressions, not per click). That could be, but I seriously didn’t think so.
• Invalid clicks

So nearly dismissing this issue, never to touch Adsense again, I almost by accident stumbled on another source that said that there’s an allowed sites functionality in Adsense, where you can restrict your ads to be shown only on specific urls. If you have anything in there, the ads that are displayed on other domains would not generate revenue.

Guess what! For some reason, over a year ago, I set up restrictions to this domain only. Every other domains were not generating revenue… that’s what I call a stupid mistake.

The moral of this story is that you should check stats in the beginning to see everything’s ticking, educate yourself and know the features of the services you use.

-Alex