Besting Adwords

AdSense Custom Channels Broken

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 15:05:18 GMT

This morning, I noticed that the reporting for AdSense custom channels are broken across all my sites. Only a fraction of the channel impessions and clicks are getting counted. The aggregates stats and URL channels do not seem to be affected.

Amazon Suspicions

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 19:50:00 GMT

I honestly believe that Amazon is not reporting all sales to its affiliates. I have some sites that haven't change in a long-time. They continue to get similar amounts of pageviews and click thrus to Amazon, but my Amazon conversion rate drops and drops and drops. It's only a suspicion. I'm sure some affiliate networks under-report sales. In the end, I focus on revenue channels that work, so I've spent zero effort writing new Amazon code for most of the last year, because the conversions are ridiculously (unbelievably) low. Ad networks have to realize that making affiliates happy is important. If they are happy, then they will write more websites using their ad model and they will evangelize their ad platform. I don't think most ad networks understand that this is one of the most important ingredients in their success.

FAN in Holding Pattern

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 19:41:11 GMT

I use to make $100-400 per month with FeedBurner's Ad Network (FAN). Since Google's takeover, my earnings have dropped considerably and bottomed at $31. I suspect this ad network is currently getting merged with AdSense and that it is suffering in the transition.

Shawn Hogan's AdSense Tracker

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 01:19:01 GMT

I returned to using Shawn Hogan's AdSense tracker. I tried another script, as it looked more complete. Turns out the other script was just more complex and didn't work; counting 4-5 times the actual clicks. Shawn's code is a dozen lines of code. It might not be perfect, but from what I can tell it's reasonably accurate, which is lot more accurate than the other script.

SEOBook AdSense Tracker

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 12:47:17 GMT

I've been playing w/ the SEOBook AdSense tracker. I reviewed the data this morning and its clearly 5x higher than reality. Several other people have reported the same on the blog. The author is trying to write-this-off as click fraud or browser issues. Avoid this script.

http://www.seobook.com/archives/001370.shtml

Update: Reviewing the data, it appears the script works in IE and not most other browsers. It's reporting 30% CTRs on some browsers, one of which is Firefox.

AdWords Editor B0rked

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 18:02:21 GMT

After finding that the AdWords API is b0rked, I stumbled into the AdWords Editor and decided to see if it fit the bill for my current task. The installation failed. Google use to have great quality in all their software. Of late, I'm seeing that quality disappear. Likely the result of rapid growth and rapid hiring leading to bad hires. Today, I'm official frustrated with Google.

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

AdWords API B0rked

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 17:21:00 GMT

Back in September 2005, I test drove the AdWords API and liked it. Today, I finally got around to using it for a purpose other than testing. I tried to login to the AdWords API test site and it told me I didn't have permission. I'd used the API before and I have a developer token. Maybe my account was deactivate from lack of use, but it didn't tell me how to re-activate it or that I could. I then start reading the API documentation hoping the find something about re-activating my account and I found this.

Usage of the AdWords API is fee-based. Charges accrue at a rate of US$0.25 (or local currency equivalent) per 1000 API units consumed, where an operation is the smallest unit of work, for example, setting the bid on a single keyword.

Google is now charging to use the API. WOW! I guess that's the end of the line for me.

AdSense Link Unit Font

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 04:56:48 GMT

Ever wonder what the font is for the AdSense link unit? The font of the Ads by Google title is font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:12px; and the actual links are font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:11px;. I figured this out by right-clicking on the ad unit and viewing source.

I then matched up my own header links to match the font-size and font-family. This should increase CTR on the unit. See the result in the header of this webpage.

Update: The title is also bolded.

Please Spam Me

Sat, 13 Oct 2007 04:10:52 GMT

On one of my website talk-sports, I have 180 registered users. When the user registers, he has the option to click "Allow Talk-Sports partners to email me". Twenty people checked this option as it was disabled by default and eight of those confirmed their email address. I'm going to set that option to enabled and see what other data I get. I'm surprised that so many were interested in extra spam.

Don't Mess w/ Success

Sat, 13 Oct 2007 02:32:36 GMT

Here's a new rule #1 for anybody using AdWords. If a campaign is working, never change anything about it. Yesterday and for the last month, I had a really amazing campaign that was generating 300 visitors per day for one of my websites. The revenues from the additional visitors was more than paying the cost. Last night, I increased the budget and added a new Ad Group. I didn't mess with the winning Ad Group. My impressions went from 300,000 yesterday to 15,000 today. I've increased the budget of that campaign before, so I can only guess that adding the additional AdGroup caused this problem. I'm deleting the new Ad Group, but it may already be too late.

Analytics Data from AdSense?

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 06:28:01 GMT

It's amazing what you can find out with Google's Analytics. Today, I discovered that returning visitors to my talk-sports.net website are 28% more likely to click on ads, then first time visitors. Conventional thinking is that returning users, especially on forums, are less likely, not more likely to click on ads.

Even better, AdWords passes it's data to Analytics as well. This allows me to know that 92% of the AdWord clicks are new visitors. Further, those AdWords visitors visit almost 2 pages on average and the bounce rate is only 80%. Not bad for advertising. But even better, 7% of those click on my ads.

Now, there is only one missing piece of the puzzle. I know exactly how much I'm paying Google for those referrals, but AdSense doesn't pass the click data, so I don't know how much I'm actually making on those users. They could be clicking on high-value or low-value ads and I have no idea. I simply set my average earnings per click to get a guestimate. But that doesn't account for CPM ads.

The big missing piece is AdSense passing its data to Analytics. That can't be too far off. Once that is in place, then I know for certain what my ROI is and if it's positive, then I should be scalling up much faster. Right now, I scale up slowly because I don't really know if its working, as I'm missing that one piece and substituting guesswork.

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Quantcast

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 17:53:21 GMT

Today, I stumbled across Quantcast, which gives stats and demographics about website visitors. The stats across the board were very low, even though my sites were ranked quite high. For instance, talk-sports.net they estimate has 8k+ uniques per month and rank it 163,602, whereas Analytics is reporting that I'm getting almost 5k daily. They also estimate 33k+ uniques per month for kbcafe.com and rank it 54,145, whereas Analytics is reporting several times more uniques. A site with only 33k uniques per month could not possibly be in the top 60k. The demographic information looked accurate and I don't get any w/ Analytics, so there is value in there.

http://www.quantcast.com/

AdWords Test

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 14:46:29 GMT

I wonder how much money is lost on AdWords via simple laziness. This ad was so compelling I had to click it.