Besting Adwords

AdSense Referrals is Dead

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:05:41 GMT

You heard it right. I just got an email telling me that AdSense Referrals is no more, as of the end of August. It didn't work anyway. I got hundreds of click-thrus on the Firefox referral link and very few conversions. It appears that Google wasn't able to track conversions properly. Unsure why.

Small Font Didn't Help

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 05:50:02 GMT

This week, I tried shrinking the font on my best website. The theory is that CTR (click-thru-rate) increases if you reduce the size of the font for the main content. This should draw the attention of the user from the main content to the ads. It didn't work. My CTR remained constant. I'm surprised with the result, as almost any change has led to higher CTRs. Quite often the higher CTR is temporary, which indicates that change itself led to the higher CTR and not the specific change. But I should note that the change in font, led to very little actual change in the layout of the webpage.

Google Image Referrers in Analytics

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:42:55 GMT

I asked Google today why they categorize images.google.com referrers as Referrer Sites and not Search Engines. Because of this mis-categorization, you can't find out the keywords used in Google Image Search that hit your website. images.google.com has always been my biggest site referrer. I'll report back if they answer, but of late, I rarely get an answer from them.

Firefox Referrals Broken?

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 23:47:13 GMT

Of late, I've notice that Firefox AdSense referrals are not converting. Since March, I've had 370,000 impressions, 517 clicks and only 2 conversions. This is a very low click to conversion ratio considering that my previous 700 clicks resulted in 55 conversions. Note that most all of my impressions and clicks are for Safari users who are not able to use my website because I don't support that browser. I've analyzed my website stats and I appear to have lots of users that are using Safari, leave the site and comeback in 5-30 minutes with Firefox. It's impossible for me to know if they are installing Firefox or simply switching browsers, but I hardly doubt it's the later almost all th time. I've sent Google an email on this issue and they informed me that they have escalated the issue, but I never heard back from them. Anybody else notice anything? Check your Firefox referral stats.

Bye BlogAds!

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 17:02:30 GMT

Today, I gave up on BlogAds, once gain. I tried it for a few months and I made <$100. Consider that I gave it millions of impressions, that's a rather small CPM. There problem is their website only works in Firefox and not in Internet Explorer. I filed a bug with them and they responded that their website was best viewed in Firefox. I responded that most of my potential advertisers would be using IE. In the end, they didn't bother fixing the bugs. Considering that 70% of potential advertisers are using IE, that's quite stupid of BlogAds. They are throwing away those advertisers. But further, I found that many of the publishers are deceiving their advertisers. One advertiser claimed almost a million impressions per week. I was already familiar with the site and knew they practiced deceptive tactics, so I investigated. It turned out that most all of the impressions were on other off-topic blogs in the network. An advertiser might think he's getting one million impressions on a sports blog, but the truth is that only a small fraction (possibly 1/10th or lower) are on the sport blog and most all are not.

Translation Sites

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 16:13:38 GMT

I'm currently translating a website to French. I tried to get a friend to help, but although they expressed interest, they didn't move on it. Now, I've decided to do it myself. I am French (mostly lost). Google translate and Yahoo! Babelfish are great resource, but I found Reverso has additional context that helps me make the correct translations.

http://dictionary.reverso.net/

Alexa Failing

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 02:55:04 GMT

Alexa website data has been failing to update for the last two weeks (since May 19th). I'm not the only person who has notice. Anything from Alexa?