AdMoolah News and Views

According to Seeking Alpha, Google’s AdSense has started to test CPA (Cost-Per-Action) ads, in addition to the CPC (Cost-Per-Click) and CPM (Cost-Per-Thousand-Impressions) they already offer.

Publishers are able to choose which ads they want to show on their site, and the ads will not compete with regular AdSense for Content ads.

Some interesting quote from the letter Google sent to select publishers:

How can I promote the CPA ad unit?

Since this is a test and these CPA ads are not regular ad units, we are giving you more flexibility in saying things like “I recommend this product” or “Try JetBlue today” next to the CPA ad unit. However, you should still not incite someone to click on the ad, so saying “Click Here” is not ok.

Google has never allowed this type of promotion with referral ads, so it will be interesting to see if this is allowed when the CPA ads come out of beta.

Will I be able to see reports within my account?

When the test begins, you will receive weekly email reports of conversions you have accrued and your total revenue within the CPA test.

Google already has reporting features for their own referral products, so I’m surprised that they won’t have online reporting. This means people testing the ads will have to wait at least a full week between changes to see what works.

This is a major addition to the AdSense offering and puts them in direct competition with networks such as Commission Junction. This could be a huge new revenue stream for Google and its publishers.

Found via John Battelle’s Searchblog

Yahoo has introduced some new features to publishers.

First, they replaced the old “Content Setup” tab with a “Publisher Services” tab. It is subdivided into three sub-tabs – “Drive Traffic”, “Enhance Your Site” and “Build Your Site”. Each sub-tab has forms and links for various Yahoo! offerings that might be of interest to publishers. The “Drive Traffic” sub-tab has forms for site submission, RSS feed submission and site suggestion. It also has links to Yahoo! services such as podcast and video submission pages, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Search Submit Express. The “Enhance Your Site” sub-tab aggregates many Yahoo service that you can add to your site such as search boxes, Flickr badges, and Yahoo videos. The last sub-tab “Build Your Site” includes links to Yahoo! domain registration and hosting services, and Yahoo! Small Business.

I can see why Yahoo! added the Publisher Services tab. It promotes their own services by making it easier for publisher to find out about them and use them. It will be a convenience for publisher who regularly use these features.

The next change is a new help center. Yahoo! has started creating how-to guides for setting up and managing accounts. Several FAQs are included as well.

My favorite change is a new column on the reports – Revenue Per Click. This shows total revenue divided by number of clicks. I’m not sure why Yahoo! or AdSense have not included this column on their reports before. I’m sure its something that most publishers calculate on a regular basis.

The final change is bulk URL Reporting upload. Instead of adding reporting URLs one at a time, you can now cut and past up to 100 URLs into the form at once. The maximum number of active reporting URLs allowed is still 100.

It’s good to see Yahoo! adding features and helping to raise the bar. Now I hope AdSense follows suite and adds a Revenue-Per-Click column into their reports!

Last week Google added a new Site Diagnostics page to the AdSense console. It has since disappeared. Darren over at ProBlogger wrote to the AdSense team to find out what was going on, and Google wrote back that it was just a temporary test.

This seems a little strange to me. My guess is that this was put onto publishers pages by mistake, and Google quickly realized that it wasn’t supposed to be there and removed it.

eBay is going to launch their own contextual ad network, which means they will be competing with AdSense, YPN, Chitika, and eventually MSN’s adCenter. Their “AdContext” product will offer publishers a chance to put ads to eBay auctions on their sites. Much like AdSense, an eBay robot will scan pages for context and then display relevant ads. Publishers will get 35 percent to 60 percent of sales, depending on volumes. One major difference between AdContext and AdSense is that AdContext will pay the publisher only when an actual sale takes place, not on a per-impression or per-click basis.

Because this is a contextual program, AdContext ads will not be able to be placed on the same page as AdSense or YPN ads. They can however, be placed on the same site.

I have a feeling that this will be a good program for certain types of websites that deal with consumer goods. Because of this, the program might be a bigger threat to Chitika then AdSense.

The AdSense control panel has a new page – “Site Diagnostics”. This page lists URLs on your sites that the AdSense crawler was not able to access. All AdSense publishers should check this page to make sure that all of their pages are being fully monetized.

The reasons listed for the crawler not being able to access pages are:

• Robots.txt file
• Authentication
• URL not found
• Redirect

Found via ProBlogger