Removing ads for your readers
written on January 18, 2009 in Blogging, Make Money, Tutorials
If you are using ads like Google Adsense or BidVertiser to monetize your site, good for you I say. But why not reward your regular visitors by removing them, so they can enjoy your site without ads screaming “BUY ME” left and right. Believe it or not, you can actually MAKE more money with your ads by only displaying them to search engine visitors. Why? Because of a penalty Google has called smart pricing. Basically, you get punished by earning less for having a low click through rate (CTR). How do you increase your CTR? By making sure you show your ads to those who are most likely to click on them: the search engine visitors.
Now that we’ve established having ads (or at least Google Adsense ads) do you or your regular readers no good, why not remove them to make yourself some more money and your readers happy?
Paste the the code below into the functions.php file of your current theme. Remember to change YOURDOMAIN.com into well, your domain name.
$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) {
setcookie("sevisitor", 1, time()+3600, "/", ".YOURDOMAIN.com");
$sevisitor=true;
}
}
function fromasearchengine(){
global $sevisitor;
if ($sevisitor==true || $_COOKIE["sevisitor"]==1) {
return true;
}
return false;
}
When you’re done, simply insert the code below wherever you want your ad to show.
<?php if (function_exists('fromasearchengine')) {
if (fromasearchengine()) { ?>
INSERT YOUR AD CODE HERE
<?php } } ?>
More information on showing ads to search engine visitors: WPRecipes, Scratch99Error processing request
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