Workaround for the AdSense “top channels” reporting problem

December 31, 2007

If you are still being annoyed by the sorting issue that Google is having with their “top channels” on the reporting overview page, there is a workaround that some publishers may not have thought of. You can save a custom report, and then click on it from your control panel.

Simply go into Advance Reports, and select the date range of “Today”, then click Show Channel Data. Select “All”, unless you prefer to select your most important channels, then select Group by Channel. Click the display report button and once the data is showing, click the “Earnings” link to sort by earnings, with the top earning channels first. Then, after you have sorted by earnings (not before!) go to the “Save as Custom Report” and enter in your report name, then press Save.

Now, when you login, simply scroll down to the custom reports listing on the overview page, and you can see all your top earning channels with one click, and it will stay sorted with the highest earning channels first. You may also want to do a second one for “yesterday” as well.

There is still no end in sight to this problem being fixed, so this is a quick and easy workaround in the meantime.

Also, don’t forget to vote for JenSense for the Best Contextual Blog over at Search Engine Journal! You can view all the nominees for all the awards, so be sure to vote for all your favorites!

Posted in Google AdSense, Tips & Techniques 1 Comment »

Ooops! Google AdSense inverts currency conversions for Australian webmasters

December 31, 2007

Google sent November earnings payments to AdSense publishers in Australia amd New Zealand with one major error… the currency exchange rate was inverted. So publishers ended up with less earnings that they should have, although fortunately because of the exchange rate, most were only shorted by a few hundred dollars, instead of the potential for thousands of dollars for other currencies with exchange rates not nearly as close to par.

AdSenseAdvisor posted on the issue at WebmasterWorld:

Hi all,
Our payments team asked me to let you know that they’re aware of this conversion issue with AU currency payments, and will be contacting affected publishers shortly.

Thanks for your patience, and we apologize for the confusion.

-ASA

For those receiving payments in AU currency, the conversion shows in the AdSense account as 0.867 : 1 when it should be somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.15 : 1.

With any luck, Google will get on top of this and issue the difference to all affected publishers within the next few days (taking into account that it is a stat holiday in the US on Tuesday) and not making publishers wait until the following month’s payment for the difference.

Discussion at DigitalPoint & WebmasterWorld.

Also, don’t forget to vote for JenSense for the Best Contextual Blog over at Search Engine Journal! You can view all the nominees for all the awards, so be sure to vote for all your favorites!

Posted in Google AdSense 1 Comment »

AdSense report sorting issue may not be resolved for weeks

December 18, 2007

As any AdSense stat junkie knows, when you login to your AdSense account and click the “top channels” link, it automatically brings up your top earning channels for the day, or whichever view you choose, such as today, yesterday, last seven days, and a couple different month options. But since yesterday, the reports haven’t been bringing up the top earning channels.

Instead, when viewing the top channels, it seems to be pulling random channels for showing the data. There does not seem to be any rhyme or reason for pulling the specific channels, since they aren’t the top (or bottom) of the list even when looking at the other column data.

AdSensePro Ashley commented on Google Groups, and the news isn’t good for frequent stats checkers. The issue may not be resolved for weeks, with a fix coming sometime “in the coming weeks”.

Hi all,

Thanks again for reporting this issue. Please be assured that it will
be resolved in the coming weeks.
We apologise for any inconvenience it causes you, and appreciate your
patience in the meantime.

Ashley

Granted, we are a week away from Christmas, but it seems that the fix is going to take much longer than would normally be expected, especially since this is definitely the most commonly used reporting selection in the entire control panel, not to mention the most convenient to publishers looking to keep an eye on things. And Christmas is when many publishers keep an extra-close eye on earnings, since they can wildly fluctuate based on market area and traffic over the weeks leading up to and following the holiday season.

Right now, the only way to sort channels by earnings is to go into advance reporting, click to show channel data, then select the “All” link to automatically check all the channels. Then Select group by Channel, then click display report. Then once the report has displayed, in the right hand column, click the “Earnings” link to sort the column by earnings. Not exactly as quick and easy as the old single-click “top channels” way, but at least the multiple-click way does show accurate sorting by earnings once all the clicking is done.

I suspect that it is a new Advanced Reports feature that broke the old sorting… The Inside AdSense blog announced a new feature for generating large reports that is also being added to publisher accounts in the next few weeks.

It will be interesting to see just how long “coming weeks” turns out to be. AdSense has some new features being rolled out or that are expected to be launched over the next couple of months, but it would be a shame if one of the most popular and well-used features is unusable because of these changes.

Posted in Google AdSense 5 Comments »

Changes to AdSense ad clickable areas means likely lower CTR & eCPM

November 14, 2007

While it doesn’t seem to be publicly detailed yet, some publishers have received an email from Google AdSense regarding a change in the way the text ads are formatted, and yes, it is a legitimate email (I received one from an account rep, and I have received many copies of this letter from people who received this as well, and it seems to have been sent to those with account reps).

What is the change? AdSense has just changed where a visitor can click on an ad and actually end up truly clicking the ad to visit that advertiser’s site.

This screenshot of an ad unit details the way you used to be able to click on an AdSense ad, and the new areas where a visitor can click on the ad. As you can see, they have dropped the clickable area down by well over half, and with many ad units, it is just a fraction of the original clickable area.

This is already live on publisher’s ad units, although it appears to be rolling out as not all ad units are behaving this way yet, so some ad units on your site could be using the new clickable areas while others are not (including the same ad unit sizes on the same site). There is the possibility that Google is also using the rollout to do some A/B testing between the new clickable areas and the old ones, so perhaps the change isn’t as certain as the email leads publishers to believe.

It is also worth noting that several smaller ad formats do not have a URL displayed when you use them. Those without a URL appear to have the ad text clickable as well, although this could be a part of the rollout. If this change is permanent, it could make sense for publishers to switch to the smaller ad units if they see a huge drop in CTR and earnings.

The two ad unit sizes without URLs are:

• Banner (468×60)

• Half Banner (234×60)

The official reason is to reduce the number of accidental clicks, and I suspect it is to help combat the prevalence of “Made for AdSense” sites. But Google is acknowledging that publishers will likely see a decrease in the CTR rate, which means that users will also end up seeing a loss of income. However, Google speculates that as this is making a change good for advertisers, since they are reducing the chance of accidental clicks, that they will also see a trend of more advertisers opting into the content network or increasing their ad spend.

I suspect many publishers will not be happy with this change, especially coming right at the beginning of the hard-core holiday shopping season. While I agree that reducing the ad click area was a good idea, I think they reduced it by far too much. If they wanted to reduce the clickable areas, I do believe they should have kept the ad text area (even if just the specific text area that has text on it) as a clickable area instead of only having the title and URL clickable. In other words, make all the text clickable (Title, Description, URL) and the white space non-clickable, as I am also fairly certain there were clicks made on white space areas that should not have been counted as a legitimate click.

What should you do if you see a drop in income or as a preventative measure to avoid the income drop? First and foremost, change your titles to hyperlink blue, as visitors are used to seeing links in blue. And if your site design doesn’t include other on-page links in blue, you might consider a slight style change.

Other things to try include perhaps try mixing some image-only ad units (which remain fully clickable) or try some of the non-URL ad units. And yes, I believe publishers will see a drop in income due to this change, meaning some publishers will have less Christmas spending money than expected.

I am seeing some slight initial CTR drops, but I will continue to monitor it as the rollout becomes more complete (not all of my ad units have the new clickable areas) and post followups, including what happens with the non-URL ad units.

What do you think of the changes? Are you happy with them or not-so-happy?

Posted in Google AdSense 17 Comments »

Problems with Chitika’s non-existant support and uncashable check payments

November 1, 2007

Publishers probably remember the Chitika audited payments scandal which saw many publishers earnings drop by about half, with some losing as much as 90% of the earnings. I was one of the victims, and ended up removing Chitika off the majority of my sites. I do earn enough with referral earnings and the limited pages I still run it on for test purposes to get a check a month. Isn’t much, but meets the minimum check requirement and supports my Starbucks addiction
However, when my check arrived at the end of September, my bank would not accept it. Why? Because they had also printed someone else’s check on the back of mine… complete with their name and earning amount (no, I am not going to say whose check I received printed on the back of mine). But whoever did the Chitika checks thought it would be fine to just simply use a pen and cross out the other check printed on the back of my check and then send it off to me. Well, funny, but banks don’t seem to like a second check printed and scratched out on the back of a check I am trying to deposit!

So, fine, everyone makes mistakes, it should be simple to clear it up, right? Fire off a support ticket and get the check re-issued either immediately or at the very least, when the next payment for me is processed at the end of the month. Apparently not, it is definitely easier said than done. I submit a support request on October 4th, mark it as priority urgent and explain the situation. And get no response. So I follow up again two weeks later, on the 19th, again tagging it as urgent. And no response. So now here we are, one day short of two weeks after my last support request, and nearly a month after my initial support contact and my support ticket is still sitting as “Open” without a single response from Chitika. I can’t imagine they have so many support requests that mine could possible go nearly a month without a single person looking at it or even sending a simple “Hey, I need to check this out, but I’m on it” response.

And aside from the fact I can’t get a support response, then there is the privacy issue. I know I certainly wouldn’t be happy if it had been my check on the wrong side, and this other person saw my payment amount and details printed on the check and check stub. But here I am with Mr. K’s check printed on the back, knowing exactly how much he made.

And what about Joe Publisher who might really need that money for rent, mortgage or food? Not cool for Chitika to not even respond, even if the issue couldn’t be dealt with immediately. Any response is better than complete silence. And Chitika’s competitor’s fix their payment issues when they pop up.

I did see my check for September earnings has just been sent, but no, the amount of the August earnings was not added to that, because I also had wondered if maybe someone had dealt with it but a response back to me was never made. No such luck.

Now, someone blogged today (and many times over the past month while I have been waiting for a response) from Chitika, so somebody is home. But it seems getting a support request answered is impossible. With no way to get a response from Chitika, I am basically writing off this amount since I can’t get a response and will be removing the last of my Chitika from my pages, something I do know many publishers have done for their own reasons. But this entire situation is definitely a disappointment from someone who lived through the audit fiasco and lost a substantial amount of money because of that too. I know others have had issues with Chitika as well, and now no longer use them or recommend them.

Perhaps I should have challenged them to a Team Slayer match so I could have finally gotten a response from them, and gotten 4000 MS points to boot.

Update: I have not received any communication from Chitika other than the comments some Chitika people made to this blog entry, and a blog post they made. No emails or phone calls whatsoever, and my support request online simply vanished from my account, instead of Chitika posting something on it as a followup or the ticket being listed as closed. Ryan Travis of Chitika posted that the check was being sent Fed-Ex, but it just finally showed up today having been sent regular USPS snail mail.

Posted in Chitika eMiniMalls 16 Comments »

Microsoft ContentAds showing up on publisher sites

October 11, 2007

Looks like Microsoft ContentAds have started showing up in the wild, meaning it is getting a step closer to potential publishers. I just spotted some ads served by Microsoft on Digg. As you remember, Microsoft and Digg signed an agreement back in July that Microsoft would sell and serve advertisements on Digg.

Not surprisingly, these ads are only showing up for users if Internet Explorer (didn’t they learn their lesson from the whole adCenter brouhaha when they failed to support Firefox for advertsers at all?) so I hope they do make the ads viewable in Firefox before launching a wider beta, because I know many webmasters won’t touch them with a five foot pole if the ads are only seen by IE users.

But that also means that Google AdSense ads are being displayed to non-IE users, which means either Microsoft’s ad serving doesn’t work for non-IE or they don’t have the inventory needed to supply Digg at this time. Or perhaps it is still in roll-out phase.

First off, here is an example of their text ad units (they are running both text and image currently).

The ads appear to be coming from adCenter’s inventory. But the targeting appears to have some issues and strikes me as being very YPN-ish. But this is a homepage which covers a mass of topics, so I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to targeting, until I can see the ads on individual pages.

Here is an example of the javascript code used:

<script type="text/javascript">
dapMgr.enableACB("top_ad_msft", false);
dapMgr.renderAd("top_ad_msft", "&PG=DIG728&AP=1390",
728, 90);
</script >
</div><div class="permalink-wrap"><div id="contents">
<div id="wrapper">
<div class="sidebar-short"><div id="item_ad_msft"
class="item_ad_image">
<script type="text/javascript">
dapMgr.enableACB("item_ad_msft", false);
dapMgr.renderAd("item_ad_msft", "&PG=DIG300&AP=1089",
300, 250);
</script >

And here is where the click on an ad goes:
http://0.r.msn.com/?ld=2vjaQLTbvSCsi7GlJaZNkak8uz6g1HBEVyKHnXY/
QPa0uO6pNLlqIi8EQNAJmc0OiLfKxWWxZym+DlUQ4PWCc3o9jiaYJYqKPlMOQuqEkSlo8LNq3
+XtW74VwlZJUEikKiwDt0XcaFKUEaCm3LIY3FjWwn5sLGoJVwAq2JzvyhLtVnljJyFUpWLoieRJqt0RNvJkGLFLMh45BAK4JGIgs=

What sort of image ads have I seen? Mostly tech (especially phone or wireless related) and business ads, with a few requisite screensaver/cursor/smiley ads, the typical kind of image based ads you see on any site. And yes, I did see some ads for Windows products They are primarily Flash, however, and not gif or jpg. There does seem to be a slight delay waiting on the ads being served.

They are also running additional text ads using Kanoodle’s ad inventory. I am not sure if this is simply backfill or if they are being displayed in a specific rotation. First, here is what the Kanoodle version of the ad units look like from the Digg home page:

The ad serving code used is:
<script type="text/javascript">
dapMgr.enableACB("hottest_ad_msft", false);
dapMgr.renderAd("hottest_ad_msft", "&PG=DIG16B&SEG=90&AP=1090",
160, 600);
</script >

But the ads are also being served using Kanoodle’s ad inventory rather than ContentAds, with tracking links similar to
http://context3.kanoodle.com/cgi-bin/context.cgi?
id=xxxxxxx&db=context&cgroup=90&format=digg160×600if&
newtarget=1&numresults=5&signup=1
(I xxxx what appeared to be the specific ad number).

Here is an example of the Kanoodle ad units, which look different than the one with Microsoft’s own text ads.

I am only seeing text ads (either adCenter or Kanoodle) when viewing the home pages (ie. the pages that show the listings of what has been Dugg), all the internal pages with the comments seem to be all Flash ads.

I am also surprised they are not branding these ad units with “Ads by Microsoft” or “Ads by ContentAds” to get all us potential publishers excited… unless they were hoping we wouldn’t notice they are running ContentAds on publisher sites yet
I checked with Microsoft adCenter on the ads. Natala Menezes, Product Manager at adCenter said, “We are doing testing across our network as explore the best ways to distribute ads that benefit users, publishers and advertisers.”

Additionally, Microsoft has begun serving ads on Facebook as well, although I have only seen the image versions of the ads, and no text ad versions.

Which of the two ad styles do you prefer? I was surprised at how different they look from each other. The Microsoft one reminds me very much of the early version of the YPN ad units, while the Kanoodle reminds me more of the premium publisher AdSense.

And I know what everyone wants to know… how can you get in the ContentAds beta? Well, unless you are Digg or Facebook sized and sign a special deal, there are no plans to offer a version for smaller publishers yet, althogh it is safe to assume there will be one… sometime. I am still guessing “sometime” in 2008, but since this is already out of the gate, if it goes well, perhaps we will see something limited prior to then for selected publishers. Are people still interested in testing out ContentAds or are you mostly going to wait and here the feedback from other publishers before testing it out personally?

I will keep you posted when I hear more dates or when it hits beta!

Added: You can Digg it here

Posted in MSN Contextual Ads 6 Comments »

AdSense Policies updated for AdSense for Mobile

October 7, 2007

It’s that time again, there’s been yet another update to the AdSense Policies. Don’t forget, like always, the terms of service we all agreed to says we must comply with the policies whenever they are updated. Fortunately for publishers, the only change was the addition of the AdSense for Mobile program policies, which include additional polocies separate from the regular AdSense program policies and are found here.

The new AdSense for Mobile policies are pretty straight forward… now if only they will add a date to that page, so we will know when they change

Posted in Google AdSense 3 Comments »

Google launches AdSense for Mobile… but only for certain countries

September 17, 2007

So I knew AdSense would be launching an AdSense for Mobile product sometime this fall, so I did what any good publisher would do… I researched how make mobile-friendly versions of some of my sites that I knew got mobile traffic, and started transitioning some to recognize the many mobile browsers and forward those visitors off to a mobile.example.com. That way I would be ready to get them AdSensed-up once the new product was released.

But alas, when i got the word they launched it, I log in and am greeted with “* We do not currently offer AdSense for Mobile in Canada. ” Although I do have to give them credit for at least alerting me to the fact that they won’t give it to me, rather than me wondering why it didn’t show up.

So who does get AdSense for Mobile? US, England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Russia, Netherlands, Australia, India, China, and Japan are all on the list, either as having it already or will in the next few weeks.

I am starting to wonder what Google has against Canadians… first I had a whole fiasco with trying to be a qualified company in the Google AdWords Professionals program when they included just about every country in the world except Canada… and now this. I can see testing some things in the US only first, but that is a pretty large list of countries they are allowing, while excluding Canada. So I am pretty peeved, especially since their own Google Analytics tool tells me the vast majority of my traffic is US based.

So I am disappointed to say I don’t have any cool screenshots of AdSense for Mobile in action on my Blackberry to show you like I had planned.

AdSense hasn’t actually said too much about AdSense for Mobile, as they haven’t actually added anything about the new product to their help files yet when I searched for “mobile”… (”Your search — mobile — did not match any answers in the AdSense Help Center. Please edit your search terms and try again.”) They do have a press release as well as a blog entry. There are some documents available on compliancy (such as using a mobile markup language & having server-side scripting) once you click the “Get started” for AdSense for Mobile.

One can assume that smart pricing will still be applied to AdSense for Mobile, with the same/similar revenue share as is in place for standard AdSense.

There are two ad sizes available - single (one ad) and double (two ads stacked). The ads are text only right now, although one could expect they might move to image ads as well, for some of the newer mobile products. And yes, they are branded with Ads by Google
To start using it, you will find it on your AdSense products page in your control panel… if it is available in your country, that is!

Posted in Google AdSense 5 Comments »

My Google AdSense Referrals Wishlist

September 10, 2007

I have been playing around with the Google AdSense referrals the past week or so as I have been doing some updating and some client work. And I have definitely discovered some serious pain points with the referrals program. So here is my wishlist for AdSense Referrals
Let me set a location & keep it there

Everytime I search for a new referral, I have to keep changing my location from Canada… even though somewhere in the neighborhood of 95% of my traffic is US based, and I am not even sure 1% of the overall traffic to all my sites is Canadian. So obviously, showing Canadian ads wouldn’t be in my best financial interest So please give me the option to set US as my preference… and then remember it, whether with a cookie or an option to set it in the control panel. This is my number one pain point with AdSense Referrals and is so annoying to change each time.

Being anti-back button

I can’t count the number of times I hit the back button after viewing the specifics for a referral, then being hit with the AdSense Setup Product Landing Page. So then I have to click Referrals once again to get to the referrals product page… and you guessed it, have to go through the process of changing the location from Canada to US. Please take me back to the listing page showing the various referrals in the category, and not back to the product landing page.

Image versus text referrals

I have done enough testing that I know some placements or page/content styles (such as forums) tend to do better when the ad is an image one instead of a regular AdSense text ad. But there isn’t a way to easily search only image ads, I have to click each individual referral to see if image ads are available. This could easily be added to the ad size drop down menu.

Empty categories

If you don’t have any referrals available in a certain subcategory, don’t show me that category as a selection to click. It is very annoying to click down to a subcategory, only to find there are no referral listings in it once I view it.

Subscribe to certain categories for new referral alerts

I know AdSense wants publishers to use more referrals. Why not give publishers the option to subscribe to certain categories, and let us know via email or on the AdSense account dashboard that there are new referrals available, what companies they are for, with a link to take us directly to the referral’s “Get referral code” page. Yes, I know publishers can select a category instead of specific product referrals and AdSense will automatically update them. But I am one of those who wants more control, and I like to pick and chose my referrals, so why not let me know that you have something new in a category I am watching.

Show me the money

Either show the referral amount in the general referral listing page, or give publishers the option to add the column alongside the “Performance on Network” column. It is annoying having to select each one individually to see what the payout terms are. As an added bonus for Google, this might encourage some advertisers to up their payouts, if a competitor is paying more money for the lead/purchase, and it is easy to view them from the “Choose Referrals page”

Let’s get searching

When I am viewing a list of referrals within a category or after a product search, and nothing strikes my fancy for a particular website I am working on, why not have that product search box on those pages too? It would make searching for new referrals so much quicker, without having to click the “Find more products” link to go back, or if you are like me, accidentally hitting the back button and having to start all over again.

My wish list actually turned out to be much longer than I anticipated, I am not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing! Any guesses on how many of these things will actually turn into reality at some point in the Google Referrals evolution?

Posted in Google AdSense 9 Comments »

Allowed sites now an option in AdSense

September 3, 2007

When I did my presentation at SES San Jose a few weeks ago, I added a new section on protecting your AdSense account. And one of the things I mentioned was the potential for someone to take your AdSense code and place it on an inappropriate website in order to damage the entire AdSense account. And I suggested that anyone who finds their account suspended to confirm with Google that their own list of domains matches what Google has as well, especially if it is an issue with one specific site.

And it isn’t farfetched… this did happen to at least one person, but his account was reinstated after proving the site with his code actually wasn’t his. And because AdSense does not offer an option to list sites running AdSense or a setting that would allow you to run adds only on your chosen sites, publishers were out of luck.

Well, Google was listening this time around (although I have mentioned this repeatedly to Google over the past couple of years) and publishers now have a new tab in the AdSense account called “Allowed Sites”. It actually showed up in accounts on August 28th for about half a day, before being re-added on August 31st. Under AdSense Setup tab, click the “Allowed Sites” link.

And Google is acknowledging that this is a concern for publishers. From their help center:

We’ve added the Allowed Sites feature because we’ve learned that some AdSense publishers are concerned about potentially malicious behavior from others on the web, such as stealing their ad code and placing it on an inappropriate site. By offering this feature, we allow AdSense publishers more control over which sites or URLs can have their AdSense code.

The two selections in the account are “Allow any site to show ads for my account” or “Only allow certain sites to show ads for my account”. Then you get the option of adding domains or subdomains to your approve list.

If you belong to any revenue sharing forums or blogs, be sure to include those URLs in the allowed list. But do be aware that your ads will no longer show on cached copy pages or archive.org unless you add those URLs as well (including all the Google cache IP addresses).

However, there is one VERY odd thing about this new feature. If your AdSense code is on a site that is not on your approved list, ads will still show. Which means while your ads are displayed, you won’t get any revenue from the clicks (or show impressions either). I think a better option would have been to show PSAs or alternate ads if one is specified, although I suppose that might not be the best option for user experience, although it might mean we get to see some new PSAs other than the Katrina fund one.

I wonder how many people will actually use this feature though. I know I have sites that I have left dormant for some time now but are still earning a tidy sum each day. I could easily forget about one or two of them when using this feature.

Posted in Google AdSense No Comments »