AdMoolah News and Views

Google announced last week that they have added text links to their referral program. However, these text links are very limited. Unlike most referral programs that give you a referral code and allow you to use any text to drive traffic, AdSense has a limited number of phrases that can be used. In fact, these still aren’t plain HTML text links, the “text links” are still regular AdSense JavaScript blocks that serve up phrase.

One advantage of these new links is that it is possible to change the font, size and color of the text. JenSense points out how this is possible.

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.

Yahoo sent an email today letting publishers know that they had updated the terms and conditions on the weekend. Unfortunately they didn’t let anyone know what the changes were and left everyone scratching their heads, until JenSense did her usual magic and detailed the changes.

The changes were not anything most publishers have to worry about. A “no spyware or adware” clause was added, along with a bit specifying that employees of Yahoo! Search Marketing are not welcome in the program.

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.”

JenSense is reporting that Microsoft has revealed the name of their new contextual advertising program: ContentAds. She found the name in description of a session to be held at the MIX06 conference. Also revealed was that the program will begin this year.

Hot on the heels of finding out about Amazon’s beta test of an AdSense competitor, there is word that another contextual ad network is in the works. This one is called Turn.com and is headed by Jim Barnett, who was CEO of Altavista and was also a top exec at Overture. He is also currently chairman of the board at SideStep, Inc. a travel search engine.

He’s planning to launch a next-gen advertising network called Turn Inc. in the next several months. He has $10 million in venture funding, and some 16 PhDs in-house. The idea is that advanced search will target advertisements to users with a precision we’ve not yet seen.

Normally, if a start-up was trying to compete directly against Google, Yahoo, MSN and Amazon, I would say they were doomed. However, Given Jim Barnett’s history in this space, they might be worth keeping an eye on. Given the fact that we really know nothing about this venture yet, I guess we’ll have to wait and see. If they are quick about getting things going, as start-up tend to be, they may be able to beat Yahoo, MSN and Amazon out of beta though, giving them a little head start on some of the competition.

Found via John Battelle’s SearchBlog.

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.