AdMoolah News and Views

In a strange coincidence, both YPN and AdSense are doing maintenance tonight and will be offline briefly. AdSense is going down at 20:00 PST and will be down for “a few hours”, and YPN is “performing a routine update to our system that may limit access to the YPN portal between 7:00 PM and 9:00 PM PST. This update will not impact your account or the serving of ads on your site.” People who have a stats addiction may be going through withdrawal.

It will be interesting to see if any significant changes are made.

It looks like Google has quietly added an official “AdSense Help” Google Group.

According to the welcome message dated March 7th,:

Welcome to the AdSense Help group! We hope this forum will become an
important part of the AdSense community, and provide another outlet for
you to search for answers, ask questions about AdSense, find tips to
optimize your account, and make good use of your own AdSense expertise
to assist others.

Google will have an official representative on the group named AdSensePro.

This seems like direct competition for the very active Digital Point’s AdSense forum and WebmasterWorld’s AdSense forum. There is no word on whether or no AdSenseAdvisor will continue to post to these forums, or if Google will make the new Google group the only forum with an official AdSense representative.

There are currently only 28 members of the group and about 18 message, it will be interesting to see how quickly it grows.

Digger has a good post about experimenting with ad placement and number of ads on Digger’s Realm. He found that running three ads instead of two increased his revenue by 34%.

Here’s my favorite quote from the story:

My real revenue increase over what I’ve been seeing the past couple of months is up nearly 100%. Also, since I really started paying attention to revenue and ad placement 6 months ago in September, 2005, my AdSense revenue alone is up over 1,057%! That’s right, over a 10 times increase!

This is a good reminder to keep experimenting, and not to make any assumptions.

AdSense has announced two more reporting feature and some changes to code generation.

One reporting change allows you to see reports split out by CPM ads and contextual ads. This is the first time publishers can get any idea of how many CPM ads are being run on their site and how much they are earning. Unfortunately there is still no way to control whether or not a site displays CPM ads or not, so this could be frustrating if a publisher sees that CPM ads earn less than contextual ads.

The other reporting change is advanced reports for referrals. Publishers can now choose date ranges to report referral impressions, clicks and conversions.

The last change is what they call “streamlining” of the code generation of AdSense for Content ads. The code generation has been split up into three steps. I think new users may find this a little easier to use, but I personally think it will be a little annoying to flip back and forth between different pages instead of having everything on a single page.

Found via ProBlogger.

In late January, Google has updated their referral program to have a 90 day time limit. They have now changed that to an 180 day time limit. Like last time, no announcement was made, they have just changed the text at the bottom of the AdSense account referral page. It now reads:

A Google AdSense referral is counted when a publisher, who has never previously enrolled in Google AdSense, creates an account and earns at least $100.00 within 180 days of sign-up. The referred publisher must be eligible for payment to qualify as a successful referral.

There was a thread on Digital Point Forums about this, but it was previously unconfirmed. In that thread AdSenseAdvisor said that “If you’ve already been using referrals, the 180 days will be applied retroactively.”

Something that is a frequent source of speculation on forums is why Google sometime uses “Ads by Goooooogle” instead of “Ads by Google”. They have now answered that question on the Inside AdSense blog.

[W]e thought “Ads by Goooooogle” would be a fun alternate version of “Ads by Google” for our AdSense ad units. They are both branding features we’ve tested, and we found that “Ads by Goooooogle” is often more memorable for users than “Ads by Google”, so you may notice either label appearing beside your ads at any given time.

So, there really is no reason for it.

There is a new site, AdSenseBits, that is cataloguing emailed questions and answers from AdSense support. There is some discussion as to whether or not this violates the AdSense TOS on a Digital Point Forum thread. Hopefully everything will work out and this will become a valuable resource for AdSense publishers.

Update: AdSenseBits got an email from Google OKing the publishing of emails.

John Battelle thinks that it will be at least a year until MSN builds a syndicated ad network to compete with YPN and AdSense. John knows this space very well and he guess is probably as good as anyone’s. I am a little disappointed with this, I was hoping MSN would bring some more competition to YPN and AdSense sooner rather than later.

Update: The Blog Herald wonders if MSN has given up completely on an AdSense alternative.

I recently saw an announcement from a website that was starting an AdSense revenue sharing program. At these sites users can enter their AdSense publisher IDs into their profiles, and the site will display AdSense ads with the users id under certain conditions.

I knew Digital Point Forums was an AdSense revenue sharing site, but I wasn’t sure how many others were out there. I started searching and to my surprise there were quite a few of them! So I decided to put together a list of them here: AdSense Revenue Sharing Sites.

I’m sure there are many more that I missed. Feel free to email me at tlainevool [at] admoolah.com with any additions to the list and I’ll do my best to keep it update.

JenSense has noticed that the AdSense control panel reporting has changed slightly. There used to be two Advanced Reports links in the “Reports” section of the control panel, one for AdSense for Content and one for AdSense for Search. This has been changed to just one single Advanced Report page with a drop down to choose between Search and Content reports.

I suspect that this change was made because they are about to introduce an advanced report page for referrals. So, instead of going to three links for Search, Content and Referrals, they are trying to reduce the clutter a by have a single page with three drop downs. Let’s hope I’m right and they introduce this soon.