Posts Tagged ‘socialmedia’

Experimenting with AdSense on Facebook

Friday, April 18th, 2008

Monetizing Facebook applications is a difficult job. First, there’s no dominant ad network for Facebook. I’ve started experimenting with AdSense on some pages of my Indian Premier League application. Here are some things I’ve learn so far:

  1. AdSense provides relevant content if the web-page can be crawled. That’s why I built my app in such a way that certain pages can be crawled and others not. There are ways of getting around this such as nesting the ad code in iFrames with dummy text, but that probably borders right on the edge of Google’s TOS. Point is, if your page is open to crawlers, you will get relevant ads.
  2. Selectively use require_login() and require_add(). This comes from the point above. The index.php file on my application uses require_add() so 92% of people using my app have added it. Most of the other pages are open to the web.
  3. AdSense = CPC + CPM. Most Facebook ad networks such as Cubics or Adblade are exclusively CPC or exclusively CPM. AdSense is a combination of both, and the publisher cannot control the ratio in which these ads are shown, so you have to trust Google to deliver. Here are the facts about AdSense’s CPM.
  4. You will get less clicks on Facebook as compared to a website. Most people on Facebook stick on Facebook and aren’t easily interested in going away. Pray to God for more CPM ads.

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Posted in Facebook, OpenSocial, Social Media | 1 Comment »

Optimizing Advertising for Social Networks

Thursday, April 17th, 2008

This comes from an interesting post by Jesse Farmer. There is no clear winner amongst ad networks for social applications on Facebook, MySpace, etc. The only real way to know is to find out for yourself.

Using PHP, you can randomly show ad codes from multiple ad networks with equal probability. Check the cash and find out which works best for you!

function get_random_ad_code() {
    $ad_codes = array(
        'lookery'     => 'Your Lookery ad code',
        'adblade'     => 'Your AdBlade ad code',
        'socialmedia' => 'Your SocialMedia ad code',
        'rockyou'     => 'Your RockYou ad code'
    );

    return $ad_codes[array_rand($ad_codes)];
}

echo get_random_ad_code();

If you want to take it to the next level, you can write more complex algorithms to weigh the ads in favor of the network that works best for you, but that’s outside the scope of this article (for now.)

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Posted in Facebook, OpenSocial, Social Media | 4 Comments »