AdMoolah News and Views

Another recent improvement to AdSense.

We’ve optimized the landing page users reach when they click on a topic in any link unit. By providing users with more relevant ads and topics, we’ve seen improved link unit performance – and you’ll see improved monetization.

They didn’t specifiy what the changes are, but anything that improves performance sounds good to me. I’ll have to try to remember to check the revenue from my link units in a week or two to see if I notice any difference.

Another new feature just announced by Google is themed, seasonal ad units.

We’re always striving to provide designs for text and image ads that will have the best results for advertisers and publishers. As part of this effort, we’re now offering themed ad units. These ad units will display themed colors and graphics during holidays and special events – you can view examples on our Ad Formats page.

You can enable or disable themed ad units on an account-wide basis by visiting the Account Settings page, or by following the instructions in our FAQ.

I really don’t like these account-wide features. Themed ads might be nice on some of my sites, but not all of them. It would be nice to be able to turn these on or off on a site-by-site basis, or even better, on an ad-by-ad basis.

It would be interesting to see the CTR differences between themed and non-themed ads. If you do any experimentation with this, let us know!

Google has rolled out Christmas presents for publishers. I’ll post each of these individually.

Now, new emailable reports offer you even more freedom: the ability to have your AdSense earnings reports sent straight to you. You select where and when you want your reports sent. Up to ten custom reports can be delivered daily, weekly, or monthly to the inbox of your choice.

To set up an emailable report today, visit the new ‘Report Manager’ page, under your Reports tab. Or, visit our AdSense Help Center for step-by-step instructions to guide you through the set-up process.

This will be great for all those statistic obsessed publishers out there.

DoubleClick has published their Search Trend Report for Q3 2005 (PDF). The report shows some good news for web publishers, the average Cost Per Click rose during the third quarter.

I think the most interesting data in the report was contained in this chart:

As it says in the report: “We see here that the relative proportion of keywords priced at more than $1.00 has nearly doubled in Q3 over Q2.” This is great for publisher, more higher paying keywords are always good!

Found via ProBlogger and eMarketer.

I have not been able to blog for the past two weeks for a variety of reason: a crashed hard drive, a vacation and some business travel. This post will highlight some of the interesting things that happened in the AdSense world and beyond.

Some animated backgrounds were spotted on AdSense ads. These ads had some animated arrows on them. See JenSense and ProBlogger for more coverage.

The AdSense Firefox referral program is now available to international publishers. See JenSense and ProBlogger for more coverage.

Google is testing Click-To-Call ads. Ads are appearing in search results that have a small phone icon beside them. When you click it you can enter your phone number and be directly connected to the advertiser. The feature is not available to publishers yet, but it will be interesting to see the payouts for this when they do. See ProBlogger for more coverage.

Chitika made some publishers very unhappy by slashing revenue in audited reports. Chitika seemed to be on their way to becoming a major player in the small publisher advertising space, but this knocked a lot of wind out of their sails. People were very upset that the revenue they will actually receive is much less than they thought it was going to be. See JenSense, Eric Giguere and ProBlogger for more coverage.

New background colors for Firefox referral buttons were released. Some of the buttons are now available with blue and orange backgrounds. See JenSense for more coverage.

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.