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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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/

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/

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