Multiple URLs Per Account

I just had an email exchange with a user of the site and came to the realization that I hadn’t been giving people the ability to report multiple websites per AdSense account. That is, I was assuming people would report their earnings for each website individually.

I guess I have a couple of options here:

  1. Allow people to enter multiple URLs for a single submission. This also bring complicates the category slection. Should each website be tied to a different category? (And I’ll need to figure out how to show this in the query results view).
  2. Force people to split out there earnings by website. This would provide more accurate results, but it would be a little more work for the users of the site to do.

I would love your comments and suggestion on this.

7 Comments

  1. Sascha J. Said,

    May 1, 2005 @ 12:11 pm

    Hmmm, probably you could add an input field at the top of the add earnings page, where you can enter the amount of pages you want to add (if it’s more than one) plus some checkboxes if you have to enter
    several categories,
    different languages,
    different months.
    Then the users enters the number of sites he wants to add, checks the boxes which fit and clicks on submit (or whatever ^^).

    Then, according to the amount of sites and according to the checkboxes he checked, you can display the input fields. I would arrange them like a table… Umh, hard to explain. I think pictures say more than a thousand words, so I quickly painted an image. I hope you get to know, what I mean :D
    picture: http://sjuengling.xetronet.de/files/admoolah.jpg

    Well, if the user, for example, doesn’t check the box “Multiple categories” you can remove that column, put it above the “input-table” and let the user select the category for all sites once. According to this, the same applies for the other two checkboxes, of course.

    Hm, now two things came to my mind:
    First, I forgot the submit button in the picture ;D
    Second, probably you should not call it “Number of sites”, rather “Number of datasets” or something similar. If someone wants to enter the earnings of the last 5 months, but all for the same sites (which could be possible), it would be better to have “amount of datasets”, rather than “sites”.

    Okay, I hope I helped :D
    Good luck!

  2. Toivo Lainevool Said,

    May 1, 2005 @ 11:24 pm

    Thanks Sascha! It looks like you put quite a bit of thought and work into this. I really appreciate it. This does look like a good way to go.

    I’ll give this a few more days of thought and see if I get any more comments on it before I make any decisions.

    Again, thanks for your input!

  3. Sascha J. Said,

    May 2, 2005 @ 1:22 pm

    No problem, you’r welcome :)

  4. Sascha J. Said,

    May 2, 2005 @ 1:27 pm

    Sorry for double-post, but there’s another thing:

    Probably there should be a checkbox for “Multiple sites?”, too. Like I already pointed out in the first post, a user might want to add the earnings of several months for the same site. So… :)

  5. Toivo Lainevool Said,

    May 2, 2005 @ 2:04 pm

    Yes, I think that’s what I’m going to implement right away. I’ll have a “Number of sites” entry in the submission form. This will be needed if people cannot separate their earning by websites if they do not have channels for that set up. It would be better to get earnings information on each individual site, but thats not always possible.

    In the query view, to show which data entries have multiple websites, any earnings number that is for more than one site will show the number in brackets beside the earnings figure.

    Thanks!

  6. Sascha J. Said,

    May 3, 2005 @ 6:57 am

    Hmmm, no matter what kind of query I try, I always get an error. Here an example one:

    Invalid query: Unknown column ‘NUMSITES’ in ‘field list’ Whole query: SELECT MONTHSINCE2000, EARNINGSINPENNIES, MAINCATEGORY, SUBCATEGORY, LANGUAGE, PAGERANK, VISITORS, PAGES, URL, USERNAME, NUMSITES FROM EARNINGS WHERE MONTHSINCE2000 >= 36 AND MONTHSINCE2000

  7. Toivo Lainevool Said,

    May 3, 2005 @ 8:52 am

    Thanks for letting us know, Sascha. I have fixed the problem.

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