Colnect, Connecting Collectors: adsense

Showing posts with label adsense. Show all posts

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Google Analytics Asynchronous Tracking

As Colnect is using Google Analytics to measure our traffic, we're happy to learn about the change to their tracking script. Announced 2 days ago and now implemented on Colnect, the script will now be loaded asynchronously and thus not block other page elements from loading. This should results is slightly faster load times and improve user experience on the site.

So now the question is when such asynchronous code be available for AdSense? I see no reason why the ads shouldn't load only when the page has been rendered.

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

AdSense Revenues vs. Traffic

Should more traffic bring more revenues on AdSense? Read on and you might be surprised.

Colnect is a content-rich website for collectors of stamps, coins, banknotes, Phone Cards, Bottle Caps and Tea Bags.

We use Google Analytics to measure our traffic and it's connected to the AdSense account. A comparison of Colnect's statistics for September-October 2009 reveal that in comparison to the 61 days before them, there has been a rise of 31% in AdSense Page Impressions, 36% in AdSense Unit Impressions but ONLY 3.3% in AdSense Revenues!!!

Yes, you are reading these statistics correctly. Correlation between the rise in traffic and in revenues is almost non-existent. A few reasons come to mind but let's start with your comments on the subject. What do you think?

Thursday, February 19, 2009

BE CAREFUL when using both AdSense + AdWords by Google

Do you have a website and using both AdSense and AdWords? If so, this post will interest you. You may start by looking at the attached picture.

AdWords and AdSense are the different sides of the same coin and Google is in the middle, biting on the metal. AdSense allows website owners to show different ads from different advertisers on their website and receive revenues for it. AdWords allow you to advertise your website on many other websites running AdSense. Google takes its commission for providing both these services. Though many other competing programs exist on the web, Google's generally have good reputation.

Advertising my site on my site?!?!?!

This morning, I was amazed to see an ad to my website for collectors on the same site! Had I clicked this ad, my AdWords account would have been billed for the click while my AdSense account would have received some revenue. Obviously the latter would be lesser since Google get their cut. This is, of course, ridiculous and should be automatically prevented by Google. Apparently, it isn't. Just to ensure you that I'm not an idiot, the ad is for colnect.com and the website is on the same domain - colnect.com

I usually view my own site with ads disabled so I don't accidentally click an ad and violate the terms of service. This time I was at a friend's house and am quite happy to have stumbled upon the aforementioned bug/feature.

Quick Remedy

Both accounts allow you to use filters and I've now added "competition filters" for my AdSense account that will prevent showing ads for any of my domain. It's also possible to filter out sites on AdWords but this can seemingly be done only on the campaign level so if you're running many different campaigns, it'll become tedious. See the attached pictures.

Monday, May 5, 2008

Google's AdSense for an international website

This is a technical post explaining how to use Google's AdSense on a multiple languages website.

The problem: having a dynamic website that is available in many languages is great but there has to be a way to let AdSense know which languages the user is currently using so relevant ads would appear in that user's language.

Solution: as I've researched the issue for colnect.com (available in 25 languages), it seems the only way to let AdSense know the page's language is by using different URIs for each language. There's currently no way to pass the language as a parameter to the JavaScript responsible for showing the ads.

The following pictures show the same page in different languages. Note that the AdSense ads match the language of the page.

On colnect.com, each link is now prefixed by two letters which signal which language is used. Thus:

http://telecards.colnect.com/fr/browse.php

Refers to a French-language (fr) page while:

http://telecards.colnect.com/es/browse.php

refers to a Spanish-language (es) page.

Calling the relevant PHP script and converting the language prefix to a parameter is easily done using Apache's mod_rewrite.

An important issue I had to address is what happens when one user sends a link or publishes a link. Let's say I know both Spanish and English and prefer to view colnect.com in Spanish. However, perhaps some of my contacts know Hebrew and English but not Spanish. Thus if I send a Spanish-language link to a Hebrew-speaking user, it would be a shame if the site would show up in Spanish and confuse the other person.

To address this issue the language information is saved in the session and the user is redirected to the appropriate link according to his session language. If no session information is found, the language referred to in the link is used. The language is also saved in the user's account so if one logs in using a page in any language, upon a successful log in the language is changed to the previously chosen one

Here's the example (the two letters note the language: es = Spanish, en = English):

If you're visiting the site for the first time, this link will show a Spanish page:

http://telecards.colnect.com/es/browsecoll.php?filter_country=y

Now, if you change the language to English (on the bottom of the side menu - there's a combo-box), you will be redirected to:

http://telecards.colnect.com/en/browsecoll.php?filter_country=y

So now, if you try a Spanish link such as:

http://telecards.colnect.com/es/browsecoll.php?filter_country=y&country=105

You'll automatically be redirected to:

http://telecards.colnect.com/en/browsecoll.php?filter_country=y&country=105