eBay, in a startling, unforeseen move, pulled their entire advertising budget from Google’s U.S. network. eBay ads will no longer be shown in Google’s AdSense program. It us unknown how this will effect AdSense publisher earnings.
The removal of all eBay advertising from Google began when Google attempted to crash eBay’s user conference, in Boston, this week. eBay is holding their annual user conference, this week, in Boston. Google, in an effort to promote their Google Checkout program, unveiled plans for the Google Checkout Freedom Party. The event was intended to try to convince eBay – via lobby from eBay users – to start accepting Google’s Checkout, a direct rival of eBay-owned PayPal (eBay has banned Google Checkout from their system, stating that it has yet to prove itself in fraud protection). All attendees of eBay’s user conference were given special invitations to attend Google’s Checkout Freedom Party, for free food, free drinks, and free massages.
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Looking to cater to a more international audience in your advertising? You might want to do post-by-post targetting of key search terms from other countries. The Google International Zeitgeist presents popular queries by major country (right now, they’re running a bit behind, and are showing August’s data). My suggestion? If you’re intending to cater to an international audience that does not speak English, natively, then prepare to provide a translation in your article. Place an anchor at the translation, and then place the line “This article, translated into language“, at the top of the article, linking to the translation anchor. Then, place the English translation first.
Go check out the Google International Zeitgeist for information on who is searching for what, from where. You’ll be surprised.
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I posted before about my first single page ’site’ on Halogen Desk Lamps. I’ve had a bit of success, so far, with it. It’s indexed in Google, and while it’s not all that high in the SERPs, it’s usually within the first page for “Halogen Desk Lamps” and “Full Spectrum Desk Lamps”. I’m converting around 2/3 of my visitors on average. Some days I convert 100%, and some I convert only about 25%. It just depends
on the day.
Recently, I had a spare $18 in my paypal account, so I decided to engage in a little adsense arbitrage. Essentially, that is where you check your average CPC (on the low end of the scale) for your main keywords, and create adwords ads, bidding less than the average CPC on the site. For example:
Let’s say that I’m using the keywords “foo” and “bar”. “Foo”, in the lower amounts, has an average CPC of around thirty cents ($0.30). “Bar” has an average CPC of around twenty-five cents ($0.25). In this case, I would create an adwords campaign with those two keywords, and set my maximum CPC bid for each keyword to be less than $0.25. I’d likely go with $0.20 at the very most, and more than likely around $0.15 or so.
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Recently, I posted about how Commission Junction was introducing their new javascript link types on June 23rd, 2006. Across the blogosphere, webmasters have been getting ready to undertake a massive update to all of their websites showing CJ affiliate links. Many were grumbling about the fact that they would have to change over many – sometimes several hundred – links.
Thankfully, Commission Junction has seen fit to give ample time:
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Unless you’re brand new, or have been hiding under a rock, you know that Google’s AdSense program allows you to track your ad unit performance by using channels. In other words, you can assign specific names to specific ad units, so that you know where on your site they are, and which are getting the best CTR (Click-Through Rates). Unfortunately a lot of people aren’t very intuitive in their channel naming scheme, and often forget what they’re calling a particular channel, or have so many channels
they don’t know what to do with them.
Welcome to a brief primer on my version of a channel naming scheme…
Where I come from: I use AdSense… a lot. I run four blogs, one forum site, a few single-page AdSense pages, and a website specifically designed to make money via AdSense and affiliate links. I’ve been with AdSense since early 2005, most of that in the blogging arena. I’ve learned a lot since I started, and have spent a lot of time playing around to get the most out of what AdSense offers.
How I do things: My naming scheme is very, very simple (yet the explanation is a bit complex, heh)…
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Commission Junction – everyone’s favorite affiliate system – has announced today that they will be updating all of their affiliate links to be javascript links, in the future. These links will display the same as the current link types, however they will be in javascript format, only.
This presents a couple of major problems. 1) Every person will have to modify each and every single CJ link they have. 2) Affiliate links/ads will not be visible to people who do not have Javascript.
First and foremost, it will be a time consuming, and annoying task to have to change over every single link code you use. I am set with several affiliates, and use multiple link types across fifty or more HTML and PHP pages. I will have to update each and every one by hand.
Secondly, viewers who do not use Javascript will not be able to see the ads.
There are some benefits, however. First and foremost, the Javscript links will auto-update if the image changes. Additionally, it will be a single link format across the system, and the new Javascript links will automatically be able to change with the times – i.e. they will be able to handle rich media, etc…
Secondly, they keep your search engine rank from being degraded by affiliate links (little known fact, affiliate links can degrade your search engine performance, somewhat. We’ll all notice a bit of a jump when it comes to SERPs, once these links are implemented).
Get ready, because they roll out Javascript links on June 23rd. Those of you who have partnered with advertisers prior to June 23rd, will still be able to use “legacy” links (the current style), for a limited time. Get ready to make some changes, folks.
More information, direct form the CJ FAQ, after the jump…
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I’ve been doing some editing of the ad units on this blog, and am attempting to put my BlogAds strip in place of my AdSense skyscraper on the sidebar, instead of displaying PSAs. So, I did what anyone would have done, and inserted the appropriate URL in the google_alternate_ad_url property.
It appears, however, that this is not working. The ad unit does not display the alternate url, however. The unit simply displaying nothing – a transparent area.
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I mentioned, recently, that Google AdSense Support had sent me a compliance warning. The reason was wording of a specific paragraph that encouraged users to click on a specific advertisement. The ad on which I encouraged clicks was a BlogAds advertisement, and was not affiliated with Google’s AdSense in any way.
When I responded to the compliance notice, letting them know I fixed the issue, I asked if it was permissible to single out and mention clicking on specific ads that were not a part of Google’s AdSense program. Google responded:
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Hey, folks. It appears that the AdSense team is doing random compliancy checks. I received an e-mail from them, earlier today:
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It appears that Google finally got around to making it easier to understand the reporting overview.
Previously, when one looked at the overview screen, one was presented with the totals for each type of product (AdSense for Content, AdSense for Search, or Referrals), and a link to “Channels”. Clicking on the “Channels” link revealed all channels, in no particular order, with no way to sort the list.
Now, AdSense reporting overview shows total information for each product, along with a “Top channels” link. Clicking the “Top channels” link, reveals only those channels which have had activity within the specified time frame, making it much easier to see – at a glance – which ad units are performing well, and which are not performing at all.
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