Besting Adwords

AdBrite Broken

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 01:25:22 GMT

Today, I noticed that AdBrite is running ads on my site that I have not approved, nor am I getting paid for them. Unpleased!

Blogads Sponsor

Tue, 31 Jan 2006 17:00:25 GMT

I've always wanted to try out Blogads. Unfortunately, it's invitation only. So, how do I get an existing blogger in the network to sponsor me?

http://www.blogads.com

Blogtimize!

Tue, 31 Jan 2006 16:27:34 GMT

The Inside AdSense Team has provided a set of blogtimization (blog optimization) tips for bloggers.

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/01/blogtimize.html

Marketing is not Evil

Tue, 31 Jan 2006 15:47:34 GMT

The latest blogosphere marketing blitz by NBC has a BlogAds employee emailing bloggers who have NBC BlogAds ads running on their blogs asking them to link to a blog run by NBC on the subject of child predators. I think this is a great idea! Now, add "MSNBC is spending about a $1 million dollars in advertising on the following: [cut] 800 blogs (largest blogad buy in history)" and you have a company that is serious about using the blogosphere to create buzz!

http://www.perverted-justice.com/

cross-posted

I Am A Google Adsense Millionaire

Mon, 30 Jan 2006 00:01:03 GMT

Andrew Teman: Every day there seems to be another toolbox that pops up out of nowhere and spins wild tales of AdSense riches. [cut] I am calling bullshit on guys like this. I don’t buy it. Call me jealous, call me skeptic, call me whatever…but I am not going for it.

http://andrewteman.org/blog/2005/07/18/i-am-a-google-adsense-millionaire/

Randy: Hehe, I thought Andrew's entry was pretty funny. Read Andrew's entire blog entry for the whole joke. I'm not saying anything about Darren, but it does seem like there's a new Darren every week. Darren has a few subscribers, but I've seen others claiming the same with 5 subscribers. I've also validated their claimed CPM against their Alexa stats. Sure, that's all wild math, but none of it makes any sense. Remember Monolo's Shoe Blog? A six-figure blogger with 49 subscribers? It's four months later and he still has 49 subscribers. Too funny!

AdSense Revenue Sharing Sites

Sun, 29 Jan 2006 20:42:00 GMT

Toivo Lainevool: This is a list of sites where AdSense publisher can use their own AdSense IDs to earn money.

http://www.admoolah.com/blog/index.php/adsense-revenue-sharing-sites/

Chinese New Year themed ad units

Sat, 28 Jan 2006 15:08:26 GMT

JenSense: AdSense has decided to celebrate Chinese New Year, and the Year of the Dog, with a dog doodle in the AdSense ad units.

http://www.jensense.com/archives/2006/01/chinese_new_yea.html

Chitika W-8/W-9 Request

Sat, 28 Jan 2006 00:12:24 GMT

Chitika is asking all publishers who made more than $600 in 2005 to fax them W-8 or W-9 U.S. tax forms.

Kanoodle on MSN Spaces

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 14:52:34 GMT

MSN Spaces: You can earn money by allowing Kanoodle ads to run in your space.

Google offers fee-based online ad analytics

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 14:47:32 GMT

Elinor Mills: Google is partnering with Seattle-based Zaaz to offer a fee-based service for advertisers who need more support, consulting and training than they can get from the search giant's free analytics service.

http://www.zaaz.com/

Google AdSense begins rich media beta test

Thu, 26 Jan 2006 22:38:24 GMT

JenSense: Google AdSense is moving beyond the traditional text and graphical advertising to rich media, including interstitials, expanding ads and floating ads. [cut] Floating ads are ads that either stay on top as the page is scrolled, or ones that "float in" from the side of the page to the center of the page. Expanding ads are those that require user interaction to expand, either with a mouseover or a click. Interstitials [cut] appear when you click through to read a page, and before they will show you the page, you are bypassed through to a full page ad that you must view before seeing the actual content you were wanting, often by having to click a link on the interstitial ad page.

http://www.jensense.com/archives/2006/01/google_adsense_8.html

New referrals adsense ruls?

Thu, 26 Jan 2006 19:48:53 GMT

JenSense: A thread over at DigitalPoint points out that Google AdSense has quietly added a new term to all AdSense referrals generated by a publisher. They have now instituted a 90-day time limit on that referral, meaning a referred publisher must earn the $100 within the first 90 days, before the referring publisher is eligible to earn that $100 for a completed AdSense referral.

http://www.jensense.com/archives/2006/01/adsense_silentl.html

Dynamic URLs in Analytics

Thu, 26 Jan 2006 05:38:35 GMT

One thing that has always bothered me about Google Analytics is that most of my key pages have query parameters (those parameters in the URL after the question mark). Turns out you change the way Analytics reports on them with the a filter.

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=27258&hl=en

I also engaged an exclude filter for my home and work IP address.

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=26913&hl=en

System Maintenance - January 27

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 20:56:05 GMT

Patrick Chanezon: We will be performing routine AdWords system maintenance starting at 8pm PDT on Friday, January 27, 2006, and ending at approximately 2am PDT on Saturday, January 28.

http://adwordsapi.blogspot.com/2006/01/system-maintenance-january-27.html

Randy: I only found this note on the AdWords API blog, not anywhere else. I'm not sure if this is affecting only the AdWords API or the AdWords Website. Either way, I'm not taking any chances. I'll likely suspend all my AdWords campaigns Friday afternoon until Monday morning. My campaigns don't perform as well on the weekends regardless. Of couse, I won't be reducing my AdSense impressions.

Update: Confirmed on the Inside AdWords blog, the AdWords Website will also be unavailable during the maintenance period.

Yahoo Answers to integrate YPN for contributors

Mon, 23 Jan 2006 20:27:58 GMT

JenSense: Yahoo Answer accounts have something new in the control panel, namely a section for contributors to include their YPN login information, which is currently labelled as coming soon.

http://www.jensense.com/archives/2006/01/yahoo_answers_t.html

Randy: This will be interesting to follow. If you Yahoo! Answers contributes enough back to its members, then I could see this as a viable marketing ploy going forward. Comment on my blog, enter your YPN or AdSense and you make money.

Pick your Sites

Mon, 23 Jan 2006 19:22:55 GMT

Philip Kaplan: What better describes AdBrite's "pick your sites" model for advertisers?

http://www.adbrite.com/mb/blog.php#post55

Randy: AdBrite is definitely the best site targeting advertising platform. Maybe not for publishers, but definitely for advertisers.

adverlicio.us

Mon, 23 Jan 2006 19:09:34 GMT

adverlicio.us is to ads as del.icio.us is to Webpages.

http://adverlicio.us/

Google Analytics and Feedburner Reports

Mon, 23 Jan 2006 18:15:26 GMT

Joe Tan: If you want to know how many people visited your site, which pages they viewed, or where they came from, you’ll need to either rely on your raw web logs or use an online tracking service provided by a third party. There are many different third party web tracking services out there, but the two free and popular third party solutions that I highly recommend are Google Analytics (for web traffic) and Feedburner (for syndicated traffic).

http://tantannoodles.com/toolkit/wordpress-reports/

Randy: This is exactly how I track my feed and Website usage and recommend to everybody who need such information.

SEO Advice: Spell-check your web site

Mon, 23 Jan 2006 15:33:46 GMT

Matt Cutts: Here’s some quick advice. If you’re going to ask people to give you money, spell-check your site. For example, here’s a banner from an SEO site I heard about:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-spell-check-your-web-site/

Randy: You can always count on Matt finding the funniest Web content. This is likely my biggest issue. Even though I try to spellcheck each article, I often forget and often it's a grammar check that I really need.

AdGenta didn't Respond

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 12:32:21 GMT

Before the holidays, I sent an email to AdSense about using AdGenta and AdSense together, they responded on boxing day. Talk about dedication. At the same time, I sent an email to AdGenta (Dec 23rd) and they never responded. I then sent another email (Jan 12) and they didn't respond to that one either. Oh well, there's lots of Web advertising alternatives.

Update: I got an email not long after I posted this entry. The blogosphere works!

Nielsen Web Search Ratings

Wed, 18 Jan 2006 20:03:53 GMT

A.C. Nielsen: Leading the top 10 most popular search terms for November was “ebay” with 13.9 million requests.

“ebay” 13,871
“google” 13,301
“yahoo” 7,997
“mapquest” 7,431
“yahoo.com” 6,528
“pogo.com” 4,062
“walmart” 3,688
“ask jeeves” 3,389
“msn” 3,166
”ebay.com” 3,125

Nielsen//NetRatings today also released the top 10 search engines for November 2005.

Google Search 2,365,998 46.3%
Yahoo! Search 1,194,519 23.4%
MSN Search 583,304 11.4%
AOL Search 350,899 6.9%
My Way Search 129,555 2.5%
Ask Jeeves Search 119,679 2.3%
EarthLink Search 32,172 0.6%
Dogpile.com Search 31,563 0.6%
Netscape Search 30,434 0.6%
iWon Search 27,670 0.5%

http://www.netratings.com/pr/pr_060118.pdf

Google to Acquire dMarc Broadcasting

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 23:11:00 GMT

PR: dMarc connects advertisers directly to radio stations through its automated advertising platform. The platform simplifies the sales process, scheduling, delivery and reporting of radio advertising, enabling advertisers to more efficiently purchase and track their campaigns.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/dmarc.html

Randy: dMarc was the AdWords of the Radio. Sounds like an awesome marriage. Can't wait till my $0.01 per click campaigns hit the radio waves.

eMiniMalls CPC Falls

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 21:53:30 GMT

About one week ago, there was a sudden drop in my CPC from Chitika eMinimalls. It's now at about 1/3 of my average from only 2 months ago. Adding this to the 75% drop in CTR over those 2 months and you have an eight fold drop in CPM. Just information!

AdSense pay 78.5%

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 15:08:15 GMT

NY Times: Google.com and the company's foreign search sites contribute more to Google's bottom line than AdSense, because for every dollar the company brings in through AdSense and other places that distribute its ads, it pays roughly 78.5 cents back to sites like Digital Point that display the ads.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/16/technology/16ecom.html

Randy: That's the first time, I've seen someone quote a figure. The NY Times doesn't link the number to a source, but since the article is about Shawn Hogan and largely quotes from Shawn, I can only speculate that it was from him.

Top Paying AdWense Keywords

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 03:17:57 GMT

Every once in awhile, I'm looking for top AdSense/AdWords keywords. Now, if you try to search for that on Yahoo! or Google search, you get a lot of crap. And I keep finding my way back to the same Website. I don't know how good the information is, but it's free and interesting.

http://www.top-adsense-keywords.com/

Windows Live Expo

Sat, 14 Jan 2006 01:03:03 GMT

Microsoft has an online marketplace that claims "Free ads that are easy to post". I'm unsure what that means, but it sounds a lot like Google Base. I signed up. They have a blog. Subscribed

Microsoft hopes to cash in with click-on ads

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 21:50:53 GMT

John Cook: [Microsoft] announced Thursday that it would release the first components of its adCenter technology in the United States by June.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/255538_msftads13.html

Jenn Sterger SERP SPAM

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 20:01:39 GMT

Wow, yesterday, I got my most hits ever. Half of them came from Yahoo! search result referrers for various queries on the term Jenn Sterger. You see, yesterday, I was #2 for that search term and variations there-of. I quickly took myself out of the results for one obvious reason. This is the first instance of SERP referrer SPAM I've seen. The thousands of hits coming from this referrer generated very few pageviews and never one goal click. What could that mean? It was a bot script that navigates to Yahoo! search, queries Jenn Sterger, then navigates forward to one of the top results. The spike in activity started at 9AM and ended at 5PM PST. Like it was programmed. I assume this is a marketing campaign to elevate the stature of Jenn Sterger. Since I was getting zero goal hits for thousands of referrers, I simply modified to the page to reduce my presence in the results, thus removing a resource consumer that doesn't pay.

Chitika eMiniMalls cash for November

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 08:00:14 GMT

Chitika Blog: November and December final earnings reports are ready. Please log in to your accounts to see the final audited reports for both November and December.

Randy: And I got my money for November via PayPal. One thing I noticed, even though invalid clicks were filtered real-time in December, my audited earnings still dropped 6% from the unaudited earnings. Overall, my CPM was about half in December that it was in November. The early numbers in January indicate that my CPM will again drop in half from the already reduced half, that is, January CPM will be about one quarter of Novembers.

Google: The Bear Case

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 21:06:11 GMT

Henry Blodget: The company has dozens of cool products, but with the exception of AdWords, none of them generate meaningful revenue. From an intermediate-term financial perspective, therefore, they are irrelevant. So, the question is, what could happen to AdWords, and what will happen to the company (and stock) if it does? The first thing that could happen is that, for a variety of reasons, AdWords revenue growth could slow. [cut] And then there are the disaster scenarios. Chief among them: click fraud.

Randy: It's amazing how many scare articles around Google are based on click fraud. Now follow all the links about click-fraud and his entire research is based on one article by Wired magazine. And as we already know, that article was written on hearsay and no real research or data. Ooooo! I'm scared.

300 Clicks, 0 Chick-Thrus

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 16:47:19 GMT

I woke up this morning to the nightmare of 200+ clicks on my AdWords account and 0 hits on my landing page. Yikes! I'm not the only person who has noticed the problem. Google confirmed they had system problems. I've paused my AdWords campaigns until Google figures out what is wrong. I also sent them a note.

Search Engine Ads Garner $5.75 Billion

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 06:57:05 GMT

EcommerceTimes: North American advertisers spent US$5.75 billion on search engine marketing in 2005, a 44 percent increase over the previous year.

http://www.ecommercetimes.com/rsstory/48209.html

Judgment Day for Chitika

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 20:16:14 GMT

Eric Giguere: Yes, it's almost "C-day", judgment day for Chitika. In a posting made on the very last day of 2005 and widely reported elsewhere, the folks at Chitika indicated that audited earnings for November and December would be available by January 15, which is next Sunday, with payments to follow thereafter.

Learn to Fail

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 18:00:37 GMT

In working with various AdWords and AdSense techniques, I'm amazed just how many times I have to fail before I succeed. Every technique needs to be tweaked before the money flow starts. I'm still working on a technique called Content Bid Experiment and everyday I'm finding new ways of making it more profitable. The reporting I'm getting from Analytics is telling me that I'm making money and I'm creating new metrics to find out exactly how much I'm making before I scale this to a point where I risk losing real money. All along this path, I'm learning to fail (not failing to learn).

Google Print Classifieds

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 02:03:40 GMT

Chicago Business: In a quiet and small-scale experiment, Google is running classified-like ads in the pages of the Sun-Times, which so far is the only newspaper participating in the Web-search behemoth's test.

http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=19053

Chitika eMinimalls CPC

Sun, 08 Jan 2006 23:13:52 GMT

Chitika eMinimalls seems to continue to get worse by the week. Two of the last three days, I've had CPC below $0.10. I've never had CPCs that low before. I then graphed my eMinimalls CPCs and the trend-line is quickly approaching zero. And I'm not the only person who has noticed this. I can't believe how quickly Chitika has gone from Web advertising darling to complete nightmare. Bye-bye!

How can I track search and content network clicks?

Sat, 07 Jan 2006 16:57:30 GMT

Google Adwords: The ValueTrack tag is a simple tag that you can add to your Destination URLs. It will allow you to distinguish the clicks you receive from search and content sites in the Google Network. [cut] For example, if your URL is www.yoursiteinfo.com, you can use the following tag for your Destination URL:

www.yoursiteinfo.com?type={ifsearch:GoogleAdWordsSearch}{ifcontent:GoogleAdWordsContent

When using this code, your third party tracking will be able to identify how many of your visitors enter your site via your Google AdWords ad.

https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=14816

Randy: Of course, if you use Google Analytics, this all comes for free. I can even track the performance of various ad text.

Phone Numbers in AdSense

Sat, 07 Jan 2006 03:03:11 GMT

Here's something I found very disturbing on the Game Certainty blog. Notice in the ads to the immediate left that two of the three CPC ads have phone numbers on them. The whole point of CPC is to pay for leads when the user clicks on the ads. Allowing phone numbers in the ad text is simply wrong and Google must disallow this practice, if they don't already.

Note: Please don't mistake the ads with the red highlight as real AdSense ads, they are simply screen dumps from my browser that I marked up by hand.

AdWords Invoices

Fri, 06 Jan 2006 21:14:32 GMT

It's just about time for your tax accountant to ask you where your AdWords invoices are. You can print them from the AdWords Website. Here's how.

Go to My Account
Click on the links Payment received for receipts
Click on the links after Invoices for invoices

https://adwords.google.com/select/ReviewInvoices

Google Analytics still off limits to new users

Fri, 06 Jan 2006 18:21:29 GMT

Search Engine Watch: Google is not offering a timeline (except saying that they hope it's by midyear) when new users will be able to register and use the free service that launched in November.

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060105-183906

Randy: That's too bad. Analytics is quite amazing. The amount of information I'm pulling with Analytics is really helping me manage my AdSense and AdWords campaigns.

AdSense Resolutions

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 02:36:21 GMT

The Google AdSense team has some 10 suggestions for 2006 resolutions. I enjoyed two of them especially.

1. No more clicking on my own Google ads (tempting though they may be!).
...
10. Quadruple my revenue, retire at a young age, and buy an island in Tahiti.

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/01/lets-start-resolution.html

URL canonicalization

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 19:07:57 GMT

Matt Cutts explains URL canonicalization and why it's important in SEO.

Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

www.example.com

www.example.com/

example.com

example.com/

www.example.com/index.html

example.com/home.asp

But technically all of these urls are different.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/

Chitika Monthly Audits Update

Mon, 02 Jan 2006 03:44:17 GMT

Chitika: We are currently running into unexpected delays in our monthly audits for November. [cut] We are trying to complete both November and December audits by January 15th.

http://chitika.com/blog/?p=32

Randy: Chitika's PR nightmare continues. Not only did Chitika miss their 30-day November payments, but announced only after the deadline that it would be delayed 15 days. The good news is that they will clear December payments in 15 days, rather than the usual 30. I assume we'll find out in 15 days if Chitika is gonna sink or swim. I've already reduced my Chitika impressions by 60+% because of existing problems with Chitika. I'll likely continue to reduce them further. Chitika has now become the joke of online advertising. At what point do we begin referring to them as a scam?