The front page of Text Link Ads doesn’t have any text link ads, and neither does their blog. The blog has “Auction Ads” adverts there instead.
Matt Cutts warned that sites selling links would be penalised by Google. I wonder if that has anything to do with it?
It would appear that Google stopped displaying the “Go to ….” message in the status bar when someone clicked on Adsense adverts.
What’s the big deal with this? Unfortunately it means that it’s impossible to track what adverts are being clicked, with the aim of removing low paying or MFA adverts using the competitive ad filter.
eCPM is up today, possibly because Google stopped arbitrage accounts. I hope it’s a sign of better things to come and Google will improve their filter to the extent that it would make the competitive ad filter redundant except for filtering out competitive adverts, like it was supposed to!
It’s now easier than ever to use Google Analytics thanks to the interface revamp it’s gone through. Michele had the scoop yesterday and I’m very impressed. From your dashboard you can drill down to various aspects of your website’s traffic.
One of those is a clickable map of the world that eventually led me to the following map of Ireland. That’s a lot of traffic from Dublin, but it’s probably something to do with the way Internet traffic in the country is routed. That, or the fact that a quarter of the population live there. Welcome Dublin people to Holy Shmoly!
A few days ago I listed the keywords people use to visit my site but now it’s easier to find that information and dig deeper into archived traffic stats. Inside the new Analytics interface, go to “Traffic Sources” where you’ll find “Top Traffic Sources”. Click on the keywords for pretty graphs!
Update! Some people aren’t happy with the new upgrade. Chris Silver Smith thinks it’s a downgrade from the old interface.
Would that be the top 10 keywords for a dodgy website, or top 10 dodgy keywords for a website?
It would be the latter actually. Thanks to the Keyword Rreport in Google Analytics I found out what the most searched for terms that brought people to Holy Shmoly! were and it wasn’t a pretty sight.
At least “cgwd” is a Linux word.
There is a positive side to this however. A lot of keywords are used to find this blog. The top ten are only a small slice of the pie so even though those keywords drive a lot of traffic here they are not the main sources it.
I found out about the Google Analytics Keyword Report through this post via James who kindly linked to my previous post!
What are the top ten keywords for your blog?
Did anyone else get this email from Google Adsense?
They’re migrating their Adsense logins to regular Google ones which is a good and bad thing. It’s good because it’s a single sign on for Adsense, Gmail and whatever else you’re having, but it’s bad because Google know so much more about your activities. They even own Double Click now so imagine what else they may gleam about your browsing habits?
Another side effect of the migration is the “remember me” setting. Instead of having to login when the Adsense page times out, the login iframe will still be logged in. It’s slightly worrysome to be honest because the timeout was a useful feature on an application with commercially sensitive data. The only other Google service I use, Analytics, doesn’t auto login unless you bookmark and internal page so maybe I should unckeck the “remember me” box next time I login.
Oh, looks like this is old news. Why do they allow people to signup with a different email address if they’re just going to migrate them later on? I have this big long post written so I’m not going to scrap it just because it’s old hat stuff! 🙂
It also gives me an opportunity to ask if anyone would be interested in an ad click tracker with a built in Competitive ad filter manager?
Baby stuff? See Mother and baby on the street!
I’m a sucker for vouchers, if they’ll really save me money that is. I generally read the small print just in case I have to “subscribe for 12 months to take advantage of this deal” and it’s a good thing I read the ones attached to this offer from Google. They’ll give me a £30 Google Adwords voucher to try out Adwords, but according to the terms and conditions written in dark grey on light grey below the main body of the email:
The promotional credit will be automatically credited to your new Google Adwords account once you have entered your promotional code and billing preferences. If you choose the post-pay payment method, the account activation fee (currently £5) will be deducted from the promotional credit before this is credited to your account. If you choose the pre-pay payment method, you must make an initial minimum payment (from which the account activation fee will be deducted) to activate the account before the promotional credit can be credited to your account. You will be charged for any advertising charges that exceed the promotional credit, and you are solely responsible for the payment of any taxes incurred.
Still, if I was interested in advertising my blog I’d go for it. I may yet advertise one of my other sites as I have a few months to redeem the voucher. They’ll have me hooked then! Damn you Google! (Raises fist to air in theatrical fashion and shakes it in anger at the burning sun)
When you’re adding sites to the Google Adsense “Competitive Ad Filter” please do not do what I just did.
As my filter has the maximum 200 urls I have to delete entries before adding new one, but I had deleted a couple of urls so I thought I’d have space for just one more slightly-dodgy low paying ad site. Unfortunately I didn’t and the familiar “Too many lines” error showed.
Normally I would search out another url to delete but I wanted to be done with it and not bother with my last change so I hit return on the url, this url, https://www.google.com/adsense/filter-save.do – thinking that it would reload the old list. It certainly did. It brought me back to day 1 when I had no entries in the filter! You know that sinking feeling? That moment when something has gone really wrong? That was me a few minutes ago.
Thankfully hitting BACK on my browser and confirming the POST operation restored the list and I quickly removed the offending LCPC site. Phew.
Someone should tell Google, this would be a rather quick and easy way for a malicious someone to mess with a person’s filter. They should check for the existance of some POST variables before overwriting the filter. It’s a bug!
Simply because a blog post isn’t a blog post without a link, here’s where I talk about my competitive ad filter. MFA and LCPC sites galore. The MFA sites listed in this post finally made it into the ad filter this morning.
Michele blogged about a new simple and easy to use Adsense earnings graphing tool this morning that generates nice graphs.
Besides graphing the average earnings per day it also displays two moving averages which are useful as another indicator of growth. Finally, the gold line is a trend line for the future based on the data submitted.
Before you try it, read the blog post with a more detailed explanation and instructions, then give it a whirl for yourself.
What I would love to see are width and height parameters so I could resize the graph before it’s generated. Resizing afterwards antialiases the text and makes it difficult to read.
Yes, as you can see from the graph, December was a good month.
Something strange happened on Monday to my photoblog, In Photos.org. It disappeared off Google’s radar and traffic has dropped like a stone since.
Use Google to search for inurl:/view/index.shtml and spy on people all over the world. I had a bit of fun directing a webcam somewhere in the States that’s watching a building site and busy road. (via)
What’s the most interesting webcam you’ve found?