You may notice a Google Adsense advertisement on the sidebar of this site—how could you not!? Our newest money-making scheme reminds me of some sage blogging advice I received a decade ago: don’t click on your own Google Adsense ads!

First, an acknowledgement that, yes, now we’re really selling out here at Impersonal Finances. Just a week ago, we added Amazon affiliate links. However tastefully we tell ourselves that addition was, it was also a move made in advance of publishing a list of personal finance books. My reasoning is that I would have linked to those books via Amazon anyway. At the same time, I didn’t think a Google Adsense approval was coming my way any time soon. Turns out, if it’s good enough for Amazon, it’s good enough for Google.

Don’t click on your own Google Adsense ads

Now, about clicking on your own advertisements. With Amazon affiliate links, it’s no big deal. You have to make a purchase in order for Jeff Bezos to kick you a percentage of a sale, so simply clicking an affiliate link won’t raise any red flags. But with Google, there is direct compensation from ad clicks. Sounds like free money!

Repeatedly clicking on your own Google ads = profit, right? Incorrect.

This probably goes without saying, but it absolutely needed to be said to my inner circle about a decade ago. In my first foray into the blogosphere, while in college, my roommate and I created a crappy little blogspot site and filled it almost exclusively with nonsense.

A lesson learned

The goal was to make a little beer money off the blog, primarily via Google Adsense. Back then, it was much easier to get approved for Adsense. Rest assured, our site would never pass the quality content phase of inspection nowadays. But we did have some content, and we spammed message boards and posted provocative pictures that had nothing to do with anything and did all of the stuff you shouldn’t do with a blog to get people to stumble upon it. Sure enough, our sketchy tactics led to a few ads being viewed, which led to a view pennies added to our Weekend Beer Fund.

In this arrangement, I was the main content publisher and my roommate was more of the “marketing” guy. Which meant he was responsible for annoying people on message boards until the admin kicked him off. Marketing really hasn’t changed a whole lot since then.

In his role as our CMO, unbeknownst to me, he was also raising our CTR, by clicking on our own Google Adsense ads. Since the posts and log ins for the actual site weren’t coming from his computer, he figured he was just another reader, who happened to wake up every morning and go to some random blogspot site to click an advertisement for Qatar Airways. In the same apartment as the site’s author. On the same IPO address.

Somehow, Google cracked this intricate code and realized that these were illegitimate ad clicks. And, worse yet, that my roommate had no intent on visiting Qatar for the summer. Needless to say, the Adsense folks shut us down, and our brief blogging excursion was no longer profitable.

So for any new or future bloggers out there, I repeat: don’t click on your own Google Adsense ads!

Experimenting with Google Adsense Auto Ads

Mostly, I use this message as a way to introduce the flashy sidebars you’ll be seeing on our site from now on. This largely won’t impact your life, but is worth mentioning in the interest of full disclosure on my part.

Anyway, I’m sure you’re used to them. More than 11 million sites on the internet utilize Google Adsense, according a Google search. They are everywhere, but they don’t have to be everywhere.

Similar to our pledge not to let Amazon affiliate links totally dominate this page, we’ll do our best to keep our Adsense house in order. Google has a new feature that allows for them to automatically place ads on your site. It’s incredibly easy and you don’t have to worry about placement and optimization and all that extra work required of manual ads. But there’s a catch.

I experimented briefly (for about one minute) with this function, and it looked like there was an Impersonal Finances ad somewhere on a Google Adsense blog. The auto ads function absolutely bombarded the look and feel of the site, well beyond a traditional banner ad. To be sure, this is the more profitable way to go about advertising. And of course, turning this blog into a profitable site is a long-term goal. But the auto ads made me feel as if I was clicking on my own ads—simply because I couldn’t avoid them!

Welcoming our Google Adsense Overlords

So, to recap, we now use Amazon Associates and Google Adsense on this site. We are yet to make any money off of either, and are unlikely to in the near future. But in the meantime, we learned something about Amazon’s affiliate program as well as Google Adsense’s auto ad world domination quest. If you’re not making money, learning about making money is a great consolation prize. That’s what personal finance is all about, and for us, what blogging is all about. That, and switching between first person plural and singular forms at completely random intervals.