Last month I decided to upgrade my WordPress plan to the premium Explorer plan with the intent to begin monetizing my site through ad placements using the WordAds service.

The Cost

I purchased my upgrade on March 16th. The final price tag of the plan was $222 for three years of service. When I went to make the upgrade there was a discount being offered for a full three-year registration.

The domain was free for the first year, included in all plans, and then $12 annually afterward.

I certainly wasn’t going to pass up such a good deal.

This brought my annual hosting cost down to $74. So this is the magic number that I will need to reach in advertising dollars to break even each year.

The Wait

I had some initial difficulties getting up and running with WordAds. After submitting an application for inclusion in the program I did not receive any responses other than a canned email.

After waiting four days (March 20), I returned to the application page. I was surprised to find a notice saying that my site was ineligible for WordAds. I contacted support right away.

I did eventually manage to get connected to a live representative, they call themselves “Happiness Engineers.” The conversation was quite long but I eventually was told that they could not tell me what the problem was and that someone would contact me.

The Problem

After 3 days of waiting I sent a follow-up email asking if they were close to finding an answer. I was worried because the 14-day time limit on cancellations was close approaching. All I got was silence.

After another six days (March 29), I received a response to my follow-up. A whole 13 days since I purchased the upgrade and applied for WordAds, and just 1 day left to be able to get a refund on the purchase.

The Answer

So it seems the bot that crawls the pages had made a mistake and flagged my site as not being family-friendly. The Happiness Engineer directed me to reapply to the program with a supplied link.

I returned to the email exchange with support staff and requested further assistance. The staff member eventually had to manually add me into the program.

The Conclusion

On March 29th, I was finally accepted into the WordAds program.

For March I had three days (29, 30, and 31) of advertising on my site before the ledger rolled over to April.

I have read that it usually takes around three months to get a clear idea of the revenues a site will generate as the advertisers get a feel for your site’s content and the types of visitors who frequent it.

I can see a direct correlation between the days where I have high traffic and the greater CPM levels. This is still the early testing phase but I did see some $0.50 and higher CPM levels on the more busy days.

The next quarterly posting of my WordAds experience should be sometime in June.

If you have any questions about my experience that I did not cover here then please leave me a comment below.

Thanks for reading and have a great day!

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