I’ve been running Google AdSense on both my main blog and my mobile website list for almost 4 years now. I don’t get enough traffic to earn anything significant, but it does cover my hosting costs each year.
With the recent increase in traffic to my mobile site, I decided to give Admob a try and so far it’s going great. Two weeks into the switch, everything is up, including clicks, click rate and revenue.
Previously I was using traditional Google Adsense with the 125×125 button. Because it was so big (for a mobile page), I positioned it at the bottom, after all the content. Now with Admob I’m using just a simple text link ad, so it’s positioned right at the top (but still clearly shown as an ad). The position change itself is probably the biggest help on the click rate.
I did run into one problem installing the Admob PHP code. Their standard boilerplate code uses an fopen() call to fetch the ad contents, but on my hosting provider, the allow_url_fopen setting is turned off for security reasons. I modified the code to use curl instead and it works fine now.