AdMoolah News and Views

Google is starting an onsite advertiser program soon:

Your content is valuable. And starting within the next two weeks, advertisers will be able to bid for placement on your site right from your web pages. With Onsite Advertiser Sign-up, a new feature of AdSense, your AdSense ad units will display an ‘Advertise on this site’ link that takes interested advertisers to a page which you can tailor for your business. On this page they can see your details about your site and the Google AdWords program. Advertisers who sign up for AdWords through this landing page will create an ad automatically targeted to your site, and your site alone. And more advertisers competing to display ads on your site means more revenue for you.

As I stated earlier when AdSense was first experimenting with this feature, I’m not very happy about it. If advertisers want to place an ad on my site, I want them to come directly to me. I don’t want them to go through Google where I have to split the profit with them. Thankfully, they do provide a way to opt-out of this feature.

For more details see the AdSense support page about onsite advertiser sign-up.

Google Analytics seems to be totally overwhelmed still. Yesterday, about 60 hours after I put the tracking code on my site, I was able to get a brief glimpse of what kinds of statistics they gathered. But today, I can no longer see any data. I get the same message saying “Analytics has been successfully installed and data is being gathered now. Your first reports will be ready within twelve hours.” If this was a company I had not heard of before, I would have already deleted the tracking code and given up, but since its Google I’ll give them a little bit more time.

One of the things I was disappointed with is that there is no way to track advertising click on a web site with Google Analytics. I’m hoping they will change this soon and integrate AdSense, and other advertiser program clicks into the system. Right now when some one leaves the site I have no way of knowing how they left. It would b nice to know which visitors ended up leaving via advertisers links. This way you can compare the value of say, AdWords generated traffic versus organic search traffic.

Shawn at digitalpoint noticed the same thing and came up with a JavaScript hack to partially fix this. The reason I say “partially” is that it only works for visitors using Internet Explorer. I have included this JavaScript on one of my sites, but I have no idea when I will actually be able to see the results.

There has been a lot of talk about smart pricing lately. Many publishers have been complaining about being “hit” by smart pricing and seeing earnings drop. But I’ve come to realize that there is some terminology confusion going on.

Many publishers use the term “smart pricing” to mean any price reduction they think Google is making, regardless of whether or not it has anything to do with smart pricing.

The best definition of smart pricing from Google comes from their news release (remember that this was written from an advertisers perspective):

How smart pricing works
We are constantly analyzing data across our network, and if our data shows that a click is less likely to turn into business results (e.g. online sale, registration, phone call, newsletter sign-up), we may reduce the price you pay for that click. You may notice a reduction in the cost of clicks from content sites.

We take into account many factors such as what keywords or concepts triggered the ad, as well as the type of site on which the ad was served. For example, a click on an ad for digital cameras on a web page about photography tips may be worth less than a click on the same ad appearing next to a review of digital cameras.

Google saves you time and hassle by estimating the value of clicks and adjusting prices on an ongoing basis. With improved smart pricing, you should automatically get greater value for clicks from ad impressions across our network, all with no change in how you bid.

So, Google itself came up with the term “smart pricing” and they use it to mean algorithms that are used to reduce click prices to advertisers due to conversions. Using the term for anything else is confusing.

For example, in a recent WebmasterWorld forum thread, I read the following quote from Max_M:

If your pay per click hasn’t changed much during slow times then it is yet just another indication that smart pricing has nothing to do with conversions at the merchant end.

If it has “nothing to do with conversions” then it is not smart pricing. There are lots of theories about how Google reduces the amount payed to the publisher per click, but if it does not fit Google’s definition of smart pricing, please do not use that term!

Planet Ozh announced a new WordPress theme called Problogger Clean that has some built in AdSense functionality.

This theme is particularly aimed towards bloggers who want to spend more time blogging, and less time installing. From within an admin option panel, you specify your Adsense id and channels. No need to manualy edit files before uploading the theme : install it, modify options in a neat interface, and use it.

Another feature I dig is called “Adsense Safety Click” : when you are viewing your own blog, the Adsense code is modified so that a test account is used instead of your own Adsense id. Benefit ? Any click you would accidentaly make on your own ads will not be counted, and therefore will not be considered as fraudulent (this feature needs your login cookie as “admin” to be active)

However, this is a blatant violation of the AdSense Terms of Service, which states:

Code Modification

Any AdSense ad code, search box code, or referral code must be pasted directly into Web pages without modification. AdSense participants are not allowed to alter any portion of the ad code or change the layout, behavior, targeting, or delivery of ads for any reason

.

Use at your own risk!

AdWords now allows advertisers to set separate prices on ads that show up on search pages versus ads that show up on content pages.

It is hard to predict whether this will be good or bad for publishers. Publishers could see a decrease in the price per click they get because advertisers may decide that content ads are not worth as much. On the other hand this may encourage some advertisers who were previously not advertising on content sites to start doing so, increasing the ad inventory and competition.

YPN has added a feature to allow publishers to put ads in RSS feeds. This feature looks similar to the AdSense RSS ads and is open to all publishers in the YPN beta.

They have a brief description of the new offering:

Ads in RSS allows you to place ad listings within your RSS Feeds. The ad listings may be relevant to the content of your RSS Feed in general or to a particular post.

Ads in RSS enables you to:

* Provide targeted ads that are related to the content of your RSS Feeds.
* Generate additional revenue from your RSS Feed.
* Track the performance of multiple RSS Feeds or Posts.

This last point is particularly interesting. Not being able to get good statistics on how many people are reading feeds is a common complaint from publishers. It will be interesting to see how well this works.

There is now a new tab in the “Ad Setup” section of the YPN site.

This page walks you through the process of, 1. Registering a New RSS Feed or 2. Selecting an Existing RSS Feed; 3. Previewing Your RSS Ad Unit; 4. Copying Your RSS Ad Code; and 5. Updating Your RSS Feed Template.

A few things to note.

• RSS ads are currently only available for WordPress or Movable Type users.
• For WordPress, the ads can only be inserted into full text feeds only, not summary feeds.
• Ads can be generated for RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds

Here is a sample of the ads:

I might try this out on a few blogs I have. I will probably not put the ads on the AdMoolah blog for now.

Google announced today that it is making their Google Analytics (aka Urchin) service available for free. This will be of interest to web site publishers for two reasons:

1) This will be a great package for doing advanced tracking of visitors. You will be able to track where visitors are coming from and what they do on your web pages. Knowing the behavior of visitors to your site allows your to target and keep surfers happy.

2) Th analytics service is integrated with AdWords. This will increase the number of websites reporting conversion information to Google, which means that their smart pricing algorithms will have more information to work with. Hopefully this will improve the accuracy of smart pricing.

I have signed up for an account and placed the code on one of my sites and will be trying it out. I will report more when I have used it for a while.

Right now, when I try to sign in to my account, I get the following message:

We’re upgrading accounts. Please come back later.

Thanks for stopping by. We are currently migrating existing customers to the newly improved Google Analytics service. This process will be completed later this afternoon. Please come back then to sign up for Google Analytics.

A while ago I talked about my disappointing results with the AlternateURL program.

They have recently made improvements that addressed a few of my concern. They now allow customized ad colors, and allow keyword based ads. But, I was very disappointed to see that they only have a single set of color and keyword options per account. That means if you have several websites you still cannot match colors and keywords for all of them. I also have different ad colors depending on the position on the page (header, sidebar, etc), so that won’t work out either.

This is a step in the right direction, but I think they still have some way to go. I may try the customization on one of my website and see how it goes.

Google recently announced the referral program for AdSense. This could be a great new opportunity for publishers, but I think there are some things that could be done better:

1. Allow Text Links – Currently only image ads are provided for referrals. Almost all other programs allow you to have text links for sending referrals. This allows for much more flexible and creative advertising.
2. Allow Customization of Ad Colors – The referral image ads all currently have a white background with white and green foreground. This does not match all sites, and does not allow the opportunity to blend the ads like is done with regular AdSense ads.
3. Allowing Users to Encourage Clicks – Not encouraging users to click ads makes sense in a pay-per-click program. When the ads are pay-per-action, you should be able to talk about the product and encourage people to try it out.

I’m sure I’m missing other things that would be nice to have in this referral program.

OK. After doing to posts on speculation, here is the real scoop. There is a new AdSense Referral program:

Spread the word while increasing your earnings through referrals

With our new referrals feature, you can increase your revenue while increasing your users’ awareness of useful products and services. By adding a referral button to your site, you can direct users to sign up for AdSense and monetize their web content, or to download Firefox with Google Toolbar and improve their web browsing experience.

While your users learn more, you can earn more — US $100 for every new AdSense publisher who earns $100 and up to $1 for every new Firefox user.

You can begin referring users immediately – just visit the Referrals tab within your account, choose the product and the referral button you like best, and add the associated snippet of code to your site. Specific instructions for adding a referral to your site can be found here.

When you log into your AdSense account you will see a new “Referrals” tab where you can get AdSense and Firefox referral buttons. I find it interesting that they only have buttons, and not plain text links as well.

This is a great new addition to the program. I’m sure the forums and blogs will be buzzing with this news for the next few days.

The Firefox referral piece of this is really surprising to me. I think it is great. I’ve been using Firefox for quite some time and I really like it. I’ve added one to the AdSense sidebar.So, here’s my first Firefox referral link: