Posting a follow up to Nicole Simon’s Ads: You can post them later! I thought I would mention a common practice used by membership sites or other types of sites that require registration, such as message boards. You can easily show ads just to those who are not logged in, leaving those who are regular members without any ads at all.
Many publishers running AdSense on phpBB message boards use this technique, since you can use variables or different templates to give one set of users (ie. Guests) AdSense or other affiliate ads. Then you can specify that registered or logged in users (or even a specific group of registered users) do not see any ads at all. Or while guests might see 3 ad units and an Ad Link unit, registered users only see a single ad unit or an Ad Link unit.
You can also set up custom channels and track what registered users and guests are bringing in to your AdSense account. You might find guests are responsible for 85-90% of your AdSense income from that site, so it would make a great “feel good” community gesture to remove AdSense from those who are registered. And you can use an ad free environment as an incentive to encourage users to register, if you are striving for increased numbers of registrations.
*lol* I was just in horror if I had posted double – yes, that is a great additional possibility! Even if you do not remove them, you should defenetly track those numbers
I found another use while writing my ‘more technical’ addition, which I did not want to post here: Distinguish Amazon IDs. If you know the language or even the country a visitor is coming from, you can present an according affiliate link for the visitor.
Are you talking about being able to recognise traffic from search engines or just first visitors. I think this is probably beyond most webmasters ability.
Allan, it’s as simple as knowing whether someone is logged in or not (and tools like phpBB make that easy.)
I’ve been planning to do this for a while on some of my sites, and from my observations the percentage of income from guests (search traffic, mostly) is well over 90%. Definitely worth a try.
Good web site!!! Thank you for your job!!! I will recommend you to all my friends… Visit my site and add your comments :)