A Return To AdSense – Sort Of

I am bringing AdSense back to this blog.

Most readers should never see them!

One of the many features of the Semiologic Pro theme is that is comes with the Who Sees Ads plugin built in. I am setting it up so AdSense only shows for readers who come from search engines. I'll first show you a bit about the Who Sees Ads pluging then I will explain why, after no AdSense ads for over a year, I would bring them back.

Here is a screenshot of the Who Sees Ads plugin in the Semiologic theme.

The Who Sees Ads plugin allows you to control when an ad shows and who it shows to.

You can set an ad to show to a reader only the first time they visit or show for a particular number of times a visitor visits and then not again. The plugin allows you to have an ad not show until a post is older.

One other feature of the Semiologic Pro theme is that nearly everything on the blog is widgetized.

This makes arranging just about everything related to your blog as easy as arranging the widgets in your sidebar. It's pretty cool.

Here is a screenshot of the widget admin screen in Semiologic Pro

Now, about the return of AdSense.

First, I do not feel that AdSense is something that would be appropriate for most of my readers. Let's face it, most bloggers that would regularly read this blog avoid clicking AdSense ads out of habit. Also, for social network visitors, an AdSense block right at the top is a bit of a turn off.

AdSense does have an advantage for search engine visitors.

Often, a vistor from a search engine is looking for something related to what is on a page, but the information is not quite what they are looking for. These are the types of vistors that AdSense is good for. AdSense will serve up ads related to the post that may be closer to what the visitor is really looking for. I have posts that get search engine traffic that is probably not related to the main theme of this blog (making money, in case it is not too obvious). The normal ads that I have on this blog are not related to many of the searches that I get.

I am hoping that AdSense will monetize some of this traffic.

Otherwise, it is wasted traffic. At the same time, I want to keep the number of ads for my regular readers to a minimum. I also like to keep some control over ads to regular readers since there is an implied endorsment since they are on my site.

So, if you are a regular reader, no AdSense for you.