John Ibanez

I have read an article about visitors who click and dont click on ads at Yahoo! Shine. And the article states that It’s a proven fact that visitors who click on ads are most of the time the visitors who come from search engines.

I’ve also read that Google AdSense uses “Smart Pricing”. That means that the click-through rate (CTR) is low and your earnings per click is divided by from 2 to 10, depending on your stats. For Instance, a click would normally give you $0.50, with smart pricing your earning on that specific click could give you a very low $0.05 at the lowest. Harsh, Right? Dont worry, You’ve come to the right place. I’ve found a perfect solution for this problem at Smashing Magazine . What is it? Show the Ads ONLY to Search Engine referred visitors ONLY. This way, you can increase your CTR.

How to do it:

1. Copy and paste the following code on the functions.php file on your theme.

function showads_fromse(){
$ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
$SE = array(‘/search?’, ‘images.google.’, ‘web.info.com’, ‘search.’, ‘del.icio.us/search’, ‘soso.com’, ‘/search/’, ‘.yahoo.’);
foreach ($SE as $source) {
if (strpos($ref,$source)!==false) return true;
}
return false;
}

2. Save and close your functions.php file. Now copy, paste and save this code to anywhere you dont want your ads to show to your regular readers.

if (function_exists(‘showads_fromse’)) {
if (showads_fromse()) {
INSERT YOUR CODE HERE
}
}

Here’s a little explanation. This kicks off with the creation of a function called showads_fromse(). This contains a $SE array variable in which you can specify search engines. You can add new search engines by adding new elements to the array as you like.

The showads_fromse() then returns true if the visitor comes from one of the search engines containing the $SE array variable.

Thats it! Easy as 1-2-3! Hope you increase your CTR!

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 20th, 2009 at 2:14 am and is filed under Wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.