AdMoolah News and Views

MediaWhiz (who owns Text Link Ads) just announced a new product called inLinks. (Sign up with my affiliate link.)

inLinks is a advertising network that places plain text ads within the content of blog pages. This is similar to what services like Kontera do, but with one major difference. These are real HTML text links instead of javascript based links. That means these links will flow PageRank from sites. Much like the original Text Link Ad servce, this is a link buying service, the difference is that these links will be within the content of pages.

Google and other search engines have always frowned upon link buying schemes, and will obviously not like this one either. In fact, Google’s Web Spam Guru, Matt Cutts sent TechCrunch a harshly worded email stating that Google does not approve, saying: “Google has been very clear that selling such links that pass PageRank is a violation of our quality guidelines.”.

With MediaWhiz’s other product, Text Link Ads, it is pretty obvious that the links are paid. The links were put into the sidebar of pages and grouped together. I’m sure Google could pretty easily discount links like these. Since this new service embed the links right into the content of pages, they will be much harder for search engines to detect.

So, although this is a new money making opportunity for bloggers, be warned that Google will be on the lookout for these links.

Google did something yesterday that they rarely do, give us a glimpse into new features that they are working on. They posted an entry on the Inside AdSense blog about ad filtering and mentioned that they were working on better filters:

We’ve heard your feedback about how quickly filters take effect and the ability to block specific categories of ads, and we’re working hard to improve our current controls and provide more powerful ones in the near future. Over the next couple weeks, we plan to improve the speed of your filters, and we’re working towards filters in the future that will take effect in less than an hour. We’ll also continue improving the Ad Review Center, giving you ways to block entire categories of ads in addition to individual ads. We are also working on ways for you to establish guidelines for the type of ads that will be acceptable to your users, so you can “set it and forget it,” while feeling comfortable that users will have a good ad experience.

I’m sure much of their feedback was about Propostion 8, a controversial issue in California that seeks to ban gay marriage. Californians surfing the web before the election on Tuesday saw a lot of ads supporting this proposition. I saw them on my own sites and quickly used the competitive ad filter to stop them.

Many publishers who use AdSense often complain about ads that are inappropriate for their sites, so hopefully these new filtering techniques will help.

Google has announced some major upgrades to its analytics service. They have added:

Advanced Segmentation - allows you to isolate and analyze different sets of visitors
Custom Reports - allows you to create and save specific reports
Motion Charts - allows you to visualize data over time
A New Dashboard - new quick access to more data on the front page
A Data Export API - will allow custom application or websites to do more analysis or visualization of analytics data

And finally the new feature I’m most excited about…
Integrated Reporting with AdSense
This is something I have been hoping they would do for a while. For a while, I have been using a script that attempts to track AdSense clicks, but it was not as accurate or detailed as what will be available from Google. Here are some useful things you will be able to do with this new data.

Track Which Traffic Source Pay the Most. It is nice to know where you good, revenue generating traffic comes from. If you know that search engine traffic bring better revenue then links from other sites, you know to concentrate on SEO. If other types of sites bring in more revenue per visitor, it is a good idea to concentrate on getting links from those sites.

Track Which Pages Bring the Most Revenue. If some pages on your site bring more revenue per page view than others, it is a good idea to get traffic to those pages. Point your own internal links to these pages and get links from other sites to those pages. Also if you notice that certain types of content bring in more revenue per page view (e.g. product reviews versus how-to articles), you know that creating more of that type of content would be a good idea.

There are some more detail in an Inside AdSense blog post.

Google is rolling out the feature over time into publishers AdSense account, so look for it next time you log in. I haven’t gotten it yet, but I can’t wait.

Update: Here is the official Google Support pages about Adsense and Analytics integration

I have dabbled in using PPC advertising to drive traffic to my sites, but now I am getting ready to do it for real. This will be for the main site that makes money for us. 75% of that revenue comes from a single affiliate program. About another 20% comes from AdSense, and the remaining 5% comes from other affiliate programs.

I have been doing some reading about PPC and here is the plan I have come up with.

Set Up Tracking
I currently use Google Analytics for my stats. I am adding goals to keep track of affiliate clicks, AdSense click and email list sign ups. I am also adding code to modify the URLs of the affiliate links when the user has come from a PPC ad so I can see which sales are actually from the PPC campaign.

Keyword Research
I’ll start by creating a keyword list for a single product. (All the product are similar, so it should easy to extend the list to other product.)

Here are some sources for keyword research I have come across. I’ve played with most of these before, but this will be the first time I will use them seriously.

• Analytics search data. What are people actually searching for according to Google Analytics?
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool
• WordTracker
• Nichebot
• Trellian
• Google Suggest
• Thesaurus.com
• Google Sets
• Google Related Keywords

I plan to go mostly for mid to long tail keywords to begin with. Once I have a list I will group them into related keywords. Each group of keywords will be used for a different campaign.

Create Landing Pages
For each group of keywords I want to come up with at least 2 initial landing pages for with significant differences on them to do A/B testing.

Setting up Campaign
I’ll set up the campaigns in AdWords. I’ll need to come up with ad variations for each campaign to test out the effectiveness of the ads.

Monitoring and Tweaking
Now its time to monitor everything. Which campaigns are getting the best ROI? Which specific ads do best? Which landing pages get the best conversions? Based on the results, I’ll start tweaking things.

Repeat
Finally, I can start the whole process over again for each different product.

The Inside AdSense blog today announced that they now have a Known Issues page. This page lists anything that Google is aware of that may cause problems, and possible work arounds.

I’m not sure if this is something that they have been working on for a while and it was just a coincidence that they launched this the day they had a major reporting outage, or if they whipped this together today. My guess is that it’s the former.

This will be a good place to check out if you notice something amiss with AdSense. I’m sure today’s outage caused a lot of publisher to panic (Are my sites down? Did I get banned?) and this should help next time something like this happens.

If the first thing you do in the morning is log into your AdSense control panel, you probably had a little bit of a scare. It looks like the AdSense reports have not been updated since a little after midnight on pacific time. It does look like ads are still displaying normally, so I am assuming impressions and clicks are being counted, just not reported.

AdSense occasionally goes through reporting outages, but this one is much longer than normal.

Update: 3:00pm It looks like things are back to normal now.

Recently, AdSense changed. JenSense has a post detailing all the changes.

One of the major changes is that publishers now must include a privacy policy. The new Terms and Conditions states:

You must have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy that clearly discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your users’ browser, or using web beacons to collect information, in the course of ads being served on your website. Your privacy policy should also include information about user options for cookie management.

I have a feeling that the vast majority of publishers do not have anything like this currently on their sites. I know I don’t. Here is what I am currently considering planning to put on my site. Feel free to use it on your own site. If you have any comments about it please let me know! I’ll try and update this post if I feel any changes are needed.

We have relationships with other companies that we allow to place ads on our Web pages. As a result of your visit to our site, ad server companies may collect information such as your domain type, your IP address and clickstream information and may be placing and reading cookies on your browser. If you wish to disable cookies, you may do so through your browser options.

I have seen a lot of talk lately about Pay Per Play ads. PPP are ads that plays a 5 second audio ad automatically to every visitor who visits you site. I guess the company is offering a pretty aggressive referral program, because everybody seems to be pushing them lately.

I personally would not sign up for the network. I find the ads very annoying and would never subject my visitors to this annoyance. But I guess if you had a site where you didn’t care about return visitors, they might be OK.

I didn’t get as many responses as I hoped for, but here is the data from my AdSense 2007 Christmas Gift Survey. It seems like you need to be making 6 figures to be considered for the gift. This amount is much higher than I expected. Here is the data:

People who responded “No, I didn’t receive a gift” reported earning of:

1. 5,000
2. 5,000
3. 6,000
4. 11,000
5. 12,000
6. 20,000
7. 20,000
8. 23,500
9. 25,000
10. 30,000
11. 30,000
12. 45,000
13. 50,000
14. 50,000
15. 80,000
16. 85,000
17. 175,000

People who did receive a gift reported the following earnings:

1. 168,000
2. 1,500,000

I have started a survey using PollDaddy to see if I can figure out what earnings are need to receive a gift in 2007.

If you were an AdSense publisher and made at least $5,000 dollars this year, please fill out this survey. It simply asks if you received a gift, and what your estimated 2007 AdSense earnings are. Of course, all answers are anonymous. I made quite a bit more than $5,000 and didn’t receive a gift, so I’m wondering where the limit is. (The survey only allows 100 respondents, so I want to make sure that the answers aren’t all low-earning publishers saying “no”).

Take the poll