Google just announced the AdSense API on the Inside AdSense blog. The API uses SOAP and WSDL to create and manage AdSense accounts and generate ad code and reports.

http://code.google.com/apis/adsense/developer/index.html

The blogosphere is buzzing about the new AdSense API. Wait! Just one problem. It's not new. It's been around for at least 6 months and is used by many larger publishers already. Google simply doesn't publicize the API. Yet!

History
Seven months ago, a friend, who worked for a local very large Canadian Web publisher, told me about the API. They were looking to use the Google ads, but didn't like the restricted customization options of AdSense. Google gave them the API guide, so that they could customize their own ads. The friend emailed me the API guide.

Last week, I said anybody could make good money blogging and I challenged my readers to setup blogs and make some money. And if you had any questions, then simply send me an email. Sterling Camden of Chip's Quip took my challenge and forwarded me the following question.

An offer I couldn't refuse. I'll admit that my Adsense campaign has yielded a grand total of $4.57 since March 1. I started out with the ads in the right sidebar (yellow on the heat map). I recently moved them to just above my content (orange), but haven't gotten any boost from that. Do you have any suggestions about placement on my site (http://www.chipsquips.com). Should I use multiple ad units? Any other suggestions?

Let me start with the easiest answer and move onto some suggestions.

1. Yes, use multiple ad units. Three ad units and one link unit. Put one leaderboard at the very bottom of the blog. Try the other two ad unit and the link unit in different positions with at least one ad unit in a hot area.  Make certain the ad unit in the hot area is the first ad encountered when reading the raw HTML. This one will pay the best.
2. Next, remove the borders around the ad units and try to match the ad unit fonts, sizes, colors with your blog text.
3. Try a horizontal ad link unit directly above or below your tag space links or a vertical ad link unit in the right sidebar.
4. Whitespace is for starving artist. Replace white space with an ad unit or move content up.
5. Content is gold. Never place an ad unit that drops your content down more than one EM-space.

Let me add that $4.57 since March 1st is not bad for a blog that started less than 6 months ago and doesn't yet receive significant traffic. At this point, Sterling should be worrying more about traffic than money.

1. I know Sterling uses sitemaps, which is a great tool for getting indexed by Google.
2. One thing that Sterling isn't doing is making it easy for his users to subscribe to his blog. Try finding Sterling's RSS feed? It's not easy. Move your RSS chicklet to the top of your right sidebar.
3. Consider using the chicklet generator to make it easy for mundane users to subscribe. This should also be near the top of the right sidebar.
4. Also, he's gotta get an email subscription widget like Rmail. This should also be near the top of the right sidebar.

I could go one forever, but I'll stop here. Chip can implement whatever he wants above and when he's finished, I encourage him and others to drop me some more questions or just simply ask for random advice. Email is randy@kbcafe.com or leave a post in the comments.

http://www.chipsquips.com/

I created a little application (sorry but it had to be native) that given a Google Sitemap XML file, I check whether each URL is included in the Google index and report which are not. I had to make it native, as it would otherwise look like my querying-the-hell out of the Google index (that wouldn't be nice of me). I zipped up the EXE, so you have to open the ZIP file first, then the EXE. And you need .NET 2.0 to run the application. I also added some product ads via the Amazon API. It's all pretty cool! If you use it and find it helpful and you want to contribute to more of the same, then a link would be most helpful. Thanks!

http://www.r-mail.org/downloads/SitemapAnalyer.zip

Every few months, I like to run the Amazon Associate site report on all my websites. It's pretty good, not great, but free. It'll tell you about 404 errors on your site and gives details on your Amazon product links (out-of-stock, no longer exists, hard to find).

http://pages.alexa.com/associates/sitereport.html

It's now been over a month since we found out about Big Daddy. Big Daddy was a major infrastructure change introduced by Google. In the month since, webmasters from spammers to sploggers and even legit websites have been finding themselves slowly de-indexed by Google. Today, I came across what appears to be another.

I added AdSense for search to my site http://www.theveggietable.com a  few weeks ago and submitted a sitemap with the +/-700 pages on the site to Google. However, only a small percentage of my pages are indexed. In fact, it was about 100 a few days ago, now it's down to 63, so it's getting worse.

This reveals a new major flaw in the Google algorithm. Sites can no longer depend on Google site search, because Google isn't indexing your entire site anymore. This doesn't mean that Google search is broken. The change made should improve overall search, but obviously Google site search is no longer adequate to the task.

I've never liked the links that Amazon provides by default. For example, here's the standard link to Joel Comm's The AdSense Code. If I have a product page for Joel's book, then clicking on such links bring you from one product page to another. That really doesn't move the user in the direction of making the purchase. Yesterday, I found an Add-to-Cart button that bypasses this unnecessary step and moves the buyer in the right direction. This button places the item in the user's shopping cart, which means even if he doesn't buy that product today, he'll find it there next time he goes to buy something else at Amazon. This should increase conversions. A sample button follows (for Joel's book).

You signup 10 friends and he signs up 10 friends and.... You got that? JotSpot now has an affiliate program for their affiliate program. So, sign and and send your JotSpot MLM URL to all your friends. You'll be rich tomorrow. My JotSpot MLM ULR follows. Click on this link to sign-up for JotSpot's affiliate program and I'll get an additional 20% on top of your earnings. Way cool!

http://www.jot.com/wiki/free-wiki-trial.html?L=20&ID=randymorin

You know you've won, when the competition uses your product to catch up.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sbisson/153274118/

Christine Lee: There are no guarantees that click-to-play video ads will appear on your site; however, to increase the chances make sure to:

1. Opt into image ads.
2. Use one of the three ad formats that support video ads: 300x250 Medium Rectangle, 336x280 Large Rectangle, or 250x250 Square.

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/05/introducing-video-ads.html

Randy: I'll have to change a few more banners to rectangles and squares :-)

I got an email this morning from Google saying they are going to change the default AdSense color palette. The only change is to remove the border. Excerpt from the email follows.

Your ads currently display the default Google color palette, Seaside (formerly known as Mother Earth). In the near future, we plan to update the default palette to Open Air, a new palette containing the same set of colors, but without the blue border.

Let's say you ran an Amazon associate shopping website. You can go to reports and download an XML report of your orders or earnings. Then, you could transform that XML into another XML using XSLT. Then, you could inject that XML into Google sitemap. This might be too challenging for the average shopping website owner, but otherwise, this is 19 lines of beautiful code. If you run a shop and don't understand how to follow these instructions, then ping me and I'll try to elaborate in a further blog entry.

http://www.webvertization.com/amazon2sitemap.xml

In my continued experiment with Bidvertiser, I previously reporter that CTR/CPC were very low and much lower than advertised. Funny enough, the CTR/CPCs have actually decreased with time and are now below anything I've seen before. I'm now going to end the experiment as I've made $0.06 in the last 3 days on near 10,000 impressions (all impressions were skyscrapers located on the top-left of the page), even though advertisers have multiple bids above $2 per click and a dozen or more above $1 per click. I'm convinced that Bidvertiser is publishing false data in order to attract publishers.

http://www.bidvertiser.com/

Here's a screenshot of a Mission Impossible video ad from Google. The Flickr users says You Idiot! Google video+AdSense has been going on for a long while....

http://www.flickr.com/photos/judxapp/151888220/

WARNING! If you read this, then please don't click on my ads. That would be click-fraud. Go somewhere else and click. Please!

Have you ever wanted to open an AdSense ad in a New Window? You can simply hold the control (CTRL) key when clicking and TADA! Google thinks of everything.

Please do no try this on my ads. Experiment somewhere else. Try google.com. Search for something you are genuinely interested in and find an ad you are genuinely interested in. Thanks!

Michael Liedtke: Google Inc. will begin distributing online video ads for the first time later this week. [cut] Google isn't allowing the video ads to appear on its own Web site.

Randy: Here's the announcement on the AdWords blog.
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2006/05/click-to-play-video-ads-for-adwords.html

Today, I got to thinking how many pageviews I get per month. According to analytics, my pageviews for the month of April is...

• kbcafe.com - 742,630
• r-mail.org - 101,440

Wow, that's cool! Doesn't look like I'll break 1,000,000 in May, maybe June. That's a pretty cool thing about analytics. It's not tracking page hits, which is more often a bot and not a person, it's tracking actual human pageviews.

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

Two weeks ago, Dave Winer blogged...

When bloggers get together, the topic of every session drifts into "How do we make money doing this" no matter what the original topic was. [cut] No matter how you try, the discussion never actually uncovers any ways to make money.

http://www.scripting.com/2006/04/30.html#theUtterFutilityOfGeekness

Today, Dave is frustrated that Feedpass and FeedBurner are trying to monetize RSS.

http://www.scripting.com/2006/05/21.html

That's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Discourage anybody that tries to make money doing this and when they do try to make money bash them. Then get your friend Michael Arrington to back you up and the whole blogosphere piles on until another start up fails. Then Dave basically begs an unknown competitor of Feedpass and FeedBurner to work with him. That sounds too much like "Nobody is allowed to make money from this except if Dave is involved." Dave can sell his not-for-profit weblogs.com for millions, but nobody else is allowed to put ads in their feeds or try to make money from this.

On February 13th, 2001, Dave wrote about How to Make Money on the Internet V2.0.

http://davenet.scripting.com/2001/02/13/howToMakeMoneyOnTheInternetV20

He talked about blogging and the new journalism. He was correct. He told us exactly how to make money from this. But, now he's telling us that you can't make money. That it's futile. What changed?

Nothing change. I'm making a decent living blogging part-time. I've told Dave this, in person, face-to-face. Now, I'm not saying that everybody can become a millionaire by starting a blog and putting up ads. I'm telling you that with one half hour of work per day, you can make money blogging and the more effort you put, the more money you'll make. I'm not saying either than this is a get rich quick scheme. It's not. You'll make $0 that first day. Maybe even $0 that first week. You might not see $1 that first month. But, if you train yourself to write one blog entry per day, then after a few months, you'll build up readers, you'll build up Google juice and you'll start to make money. And if you do that for years, then you'll be rewarded.

I'm not promising you anything, nor am I selling anything. I'm just telling you that you can make money blogging. It's easy. Try it. Start a blog. Add AdSense. It's not a secret formula. And if you need some help, then drop me an email [randy@kbcafe.com], a question and your blog address and I'll answer your questions publicly on the Besting AdWords blog. I'll even link to you and give you a bit of my Google juice.

• site: queries where you type in a trailing slash (such as site:www.example.com/)
• site: queries for a domain with punctuation (such as site: www.example-site.com)

http://sitemaps.blogspot.com/2006/05/issues-with-site-operator-query.html

Randy: That's a relief. I thought I was slowly being de-indexed.

JenSense: YPN launches direct deposit, tax withholding and faster payment turnaround.

http://www.jensense.com/archives/2006/05/ypn_launches_di.html

I've always thought that Google AdSense was not allowed on websites that were blatantly violating copyright laws. A while back, after reporting one such website, I received the following response from the AdSense team.

Google is a provider of information, not a mediator. We serve ads targeted to certain web pages, but we don't control the content of these pages. For these kinds of questions or comments, it is best to directly address the webmaster of the page in question.

Yesterday, I mentionned that I'd be trying out Bidvertiser again. After one day, the results are pretty much the same as my previous attempts. Although you have tons of bids in the $2 range, the impressions are the $0.10-$0.20 ads and the earnings per click is even lower. I'll keep the experiment going for a bit, just in case the money takes time to kick-in.

http://www.bidvertiser.com/

Eric Giguere has written his interpretation of the Google AdSense Patent.

http://www.memwg.com/reports/

This would be very interesting for you AdSense experts. It's the secret formula. Courtesy the U.S. patent office.

JotSpot, the Wiki hosting service, has an affiliate program. They pay anywhere between $10 and $200 per conversion. You also get $30 for the first person that you sign-up to JotSpot and $1 for every lead.

http://affiliates.jot.com/

Sample banner

I'm trying Bidvertiser on one blog again. The other day, I received an automated email from them telling me I had bids in the $2 range. I wanna find out if it's paying any better. My earnings per click with Bidvertiser was $0.03 in my last attempt. Not much.

http://www.bidvertiser.com/

I'm unsure why, but Google has added an option called accelerated delivery that blows your budget as quickly as possible during the day, rather than spreading out the clicks thru the day.

You can likely take advantage of this option, if you find that conversions at any point in the day are best. Simply turn on accelerated delivery, pause your campaign every morning and unpause at that best hour.

https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=37611

Pamela Parker: RSS advertising and metrics player FeedBurner is moving beyond feeds with its latest initiative. The company seeks to expand the volume and type of inventory it offers advertisers by enticing publishers, especially bloggers, to display its ads on their Web sites.

http://blogs.feedburner.com/feedburner/archives/002441.html

Randy: The new FeedBurner offering looks a lot like AdGenta, but doesn't seem to require the same amount of work to enable.

Rohit Dhawan: We are happy to announce the release of the AdWords API Version 4.

http://adwordsapi.blogspot.com/2006/05/api-version-4-now-available.html

Of late, I've recognized that a lot of advertisers run online campaigns that simply have no chance of succeeding. Here are some classic mistakes.

1. Many of you may have heard the story about WKPA, where they put the wrong phone number (sex phone line) instead of their client's (Maine tourism) in the online ads.
2. I've had one direct ad submitted to my site via Expoactive that has the title Ad Headline, the body Description Line One\n Description Line Two and pays 60 cents per click. I've made over $30 over the many months that it has been running.
3. It's not rare that I click on an ad and get a 404 page not found error. In fact, this happened to me the other day. I knew a couple people that worked for the company, so I sent them an email telling them of the problem. At first, they couldn't reproduce the error. I had to send them a video screen capture, just to prove to them that the error exists. Two days later, the problem persists. The ad runs 24x7 on a very popular keyword and they rank very high (2) for ads on that keyword. They must be paying $5+ per click and getting 100s, if not 1000s of clicks per day. Do the math!

Wow, this is pretty cool! It shows you the PageRank of all the links on a webpage.

http://www.iwebtool.com/visual_pagerank

Pud: We're about to launch a bunch of new stuff. One of the first of these launches will be "Inline Ads". These are ads that appear within the text of your site. Certain words will be double-underlined, and when the user rolls their mouse over one of these words, a targeted ad will magically appear.

http://www.adbrite.com/mb/blog.php#post69

Google has released yet another amazing SEO/SERP tool called Google Trends. This Website allows you to plot the popularity of various Google searches. BTW, MySpace is actually catching up to sex. Check it out!

Of course, you'll never find sex in the Google Zeitgeist.

http://www.google.com/trends

Margaret Holland: From a click-through standpoint, most publishers get the best results when they place a ‘leaderboard’ above the fold between the top nav and their rich content.

Michael Mattis:  Eye tracking studies (like this one and this one) have shown that people tend to look at the top-center or top-left of a site first, then track to the right and down the right side, slanting back up across the page to just below the upper-left corner and down the left side – all in an instant.

http://ypnblog.com/blog/2006/05/10/location-location-location/

Randy: YPN has some good advice and a couple good pointers (links) for increasing your CTR. Should apply equally to AdSense.

Update: Google has also blogged anew about their heat map and ad positioning.

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/05/get-site-targeted-with-quality.html

The last two months have been my first two profitable months with Amazon Associates. In March, I finally broke the $1,000 in Amazon sales for one month. In April, I broke $10,000. My biggest seller is Quickbooks, which accounts for more than 40% of my sales. Here's my top 20 selling products ranked by April earnings. This should give you an idea of what sells (software).

1. QuickBooks Premier 2006 - 5 User
2. Microsoft Visual Studio Pro w/MSDN Prem 2005
3. QuickBooks Pro 2006 Value Pack - 5 Users
4. QuickBooks Premier 2006
5. Ultimate Employer 1.4
6. Peachtree Complete Accounting 2006 Multi-User
7. QuickBooks Pro 2006 Financial Software for Small Business
8. QuickBooks Premier Professional Services 2006
9. Intego Virusbarrier x4 10.4 for Mac OS X-Single User
10. Pantone Eye-One Display 2
11. Norton Save & Restore [Backup Your Important Digital Files]
12. QuickBooks Pro 2006 for Mac
13. King Kong Skull Island Playset
14. Thru the Bible 1-5 (5 Volume Set)
15. COLORVISION Spyder 2 Suite
16. Little Tikes Roadster Toddler Bed - Blue
17. Microsoft SQL Server Developer Edition 2005 CD/DVD
18. Norton Antivirus 2006 Protection Pack - 5 User
19. Better Homes and Gardens Home Designer Deluxe
20. NeatReceipts Professional Mobile Scanner & Software Combination for Business Cards, Expense Management and Reporting 

http://associates.amazon.com

Search Engine Journal: Long Island Politician Jeffrey Toback, of the Nassau County Legislature, has gone and sued Google in the New York State Supreme Court alleging that Google and its Google AdWords advertising network is profiting over child pornography.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=3376

Randy: Wait! Isn't the Internet for porn? OK, maybe not child porn. Some are suggesting this is hard to prevent. I don't know, I think it's pretty easy. When an ad contains the words sex (or porn), then you raise the red flag and get someone to review it before it runs. This aien't rocket science.

PR: At the seventh annual MSN Strategic Account Summit, Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer will announce the launch of Microsoft adCenter, the company’s online advertising platform now serving 100 percent of paid search traffic on Microsoft online properties in the U.S. market.

Randy: There doesn't seem to be anything in adCenter for small publishers, like AdSense.

Yahoo! maintains two lists of the top overal searches and top movers. Check 'em out! Today's top searches are...

1. American Idol
2. Wikipedia
3. Paris Hilton
4. NBA
5. Oprah Winfry
6. Youtube
7. Jessica Alba (she's been in the top-20 222 days in-a-row)
8. WWE
9. Shakira
10. Chris Brown

http://buzz.yahoo.com/overall/

Inside AdSense: We're happy to announce that, in addition to AdSense, AdWords, and Firefox with Google Toolbar, you can now refer your users to Google Pack and Picasa.

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/05/new-referrals-for-google-pack-and.html

Every once in awhile, I find the following question in my inbox or in a webvertising forum.

On one of my sites I get adverts for Google Adsense that link to google.com/adsense or adverts for adwords. Do I get paid for them?

And if you read AdSense terms, it clearly states.

Google shall not be liable for any payment based on: Google advertisements for its own products and/or services

This even made me wonder if those Google product ads in AdSense were generating revenues. Until about a week ago when AdSensePro wrote the following.

To clarify, occasionally Google runs AdWords campaigns to get the word out about a product or feature. Ads for Google products compete in the same auction as all other AdWords ads.
This means that if an ad for a Google product appears on your site, rest assured that it represents the highest revenue potential for that page at that time -- you'll be paid for all valid clicks and impressions.

I feel better now.

Jonathan Thaw: Microsoft Corp.'s new Web advertising software, three years in the making, may fail to crack Google Inc.'s dominance of the Internet ad market.

Randy: Let me get this straight. Microsoft's vapourware, called AdCenter, may fail to topple Google's dominance. What a statement!

I was reading thru the Google AdSense forums today, when I stumbled upon a new AdSense/AdBrite scam. This scammer posted code that he claims disables the shift key that launches AdSense ads in a new window. It appears that the code might actually do this, but I didn't test it to determine if it's true or not. But digging into the code, I found the code also replaces your alternate Google ads with this user's own AdBrite ads. The user is also intercepting other events and replacing your AdSense ads with his own AdBrite ads. Quite a scam. I'm sure there's enough AdSense novices reading these forums that he's hooked a couple guppies.

I've compiled all the data and forwarded it to AdBrite, asking them to respond. Hopefully, his account will be terminated quickly.

Brian Krebs: The [law]suit claims that Yahoo displayed these advertisers' online ads via spyware and adware products and on so-called "typosquatter" Web sites that capitalize on misspellings of popular trademarks or company names.

Ben Edelman: On a test PC with 180solutions (among other unwanted software) (widely installed without consent), I browsed Nashbar.com, a popular bicycling retailer. I received a popup that immediately forwarded traffic to a Yahoo Overture PPC link -- faking a click on that link, and charging an advertiser as if a user had clicked on that link, even though I had not actually done so.

Randy: Yahoo!'s ad network is under attack by lawyers and spyware vendors. Sounds like Yahoo! is having more difficulty of recent with click-fraud than Google.

Of late, I've been extremely impressed with ExpoActive. There seems to be some bugs around getting your check, but it eventually arrived and cashed. But even better, my CPC (cost per click) is on the rise and much higher than AdSense. The quality of the ads is quite awful, resulting in a low CTR (click thru rate). But the high CPC more than compensates and the CPM (cost per thousand impressions) is great. I even had a direct ad (fixed cost, not CPC), which proved very profitable. Unfortunately, according to Google, I'm not allowed to put ExpoActive and AdSense together on the same page. Too bad!

http://www.expoactive.com/