Google AdSense is one of the biggest revenue generator for small and medium traffic websites. The AdSense team have been revamping their reporting interface which makes it easier for publisher to see their earnings and other related reports.

As a publisher I have always been comfortable using desktop reporting software to keep an eye on my AdSense earnings. However, of late most of the software have stopped working.

Also Read: Useful Tips and Tricks To Grow Your AdSense Income

This means that I have to constantly login into the AdSense web interface to check on my earnings every now and then. However, thanks to Google that will now be a thing of the past. Google has released a extension for Google Chrome which will allow AdSense publishers to view basic details of their earnings in Google Chrome.

The AdSense Publisher Toolbar extension (Download) allows you to view your current days earnings, yesterday’s earnings, current months earnings and last months earnings. In addition to that it also displays the top custom channels and lifetime earnings.

Once you have installed the extension, you will have to click on the extension icon and then authorize your Google account. If you use different account for AdSense and Gmail, you can easily sign in to another account thanks to Google’s multiple account sign in.

The AdSense Publisher extension is definitely a nice way to keep an eye on your AdSense earnings without having to constantly login to the actual AdSense website. I would highly recommend this extension if you are in a habit of checking your earnings multiple times through a day.

Of course, it is always a healthy habit to login to the actual AdSense reporting interface to check on detailed reports and performance of your channels and other data from time to time to increase your performance.

Don’t Forget to Read Other AdSense Tips and Tricks

• One Tricky AdSense Policy That Might Get You into Trouble
• View Google AdSense Earnings for Different Geo-locations/Countries
• Best Google AdSense Placements for Blogs/Websites
• Best Google AdSense Placements for Forums

Link units from Google Adsense are an additional way to earn revenue from the smaller spaces and corners of your site. There are certain areas in your site’s HTML template where an ad unit might not fit, so you should use Adsense link units to utilize that space and monetize it accordingly.

The problem with Adsense link units is that for the desired conversion to happen, you need two clicks from the user. One click on the ad link unit and the final click on the resulting ad pages; which is why link units tend not to perform well, when compared with regular Adsense ads. Furthermore, Adsense link units sometimes have very low CPC which is one of the reasons why some webmasters prefer not to use Adsense link units at all.

There is some good news. Google has decided to revamp the design of Adsense link units by making the fonts and layouts slightly bigger. Furthermore, Google is reducing the number of topics in all link units to four for horizontal orientations and three for vertical orientations. This is self explanatory, as Adsense link units perform much better when you use the lesser topics format.

We’ve head feedback from publishers that it isn’t clear why they should choose to show four versus five terms in their link units. Most people pick one of these options by guessing the expected performance. We’ve actually found that link units with four terms almost always perform better than five, says Google.

Here is how the revised link units are supposed to look like

Additionally, the landing page for advertisements will also mimic the look and feel of a regular Google search result page. The Adchoices banner will stay, of course.

If you are using Adsense link units on your website, there is no need to create new units. The changes will be reflected automatically in a couple of weeks from now.

Improve The Performance Of Adsense Link Units on Your Website

If you use Google Adsense to monetize your website, you might know that link units do not perform as good as regular ad units does. But a proper placement and a few optimizations can produce very different results. Here are a few tips you might want to implement:

1. Less is more: According to Google Adsense program policies, every publisher is allowed to use up to 3 Adsense link units on the different pages of his website, along with the regular Adsense ad units and 2 Adsense for search box. From personal experiments, I have observed that when you clutter up your page with the maximum number of Adsense ads and link units, the performance of every unit is affected. All the advertisements contribute to the visual noise and the click through rates for each unit is reduced considerably.

For best results, I recommend using one link unit at a time and track which position and layout produces maximum revenue. Next, work out on a combination of two link units and check whether the total revenue is actually worth the visual clutter. Do not forget to track the regular ad units as well, because their performance might also be affected when you add 2 or 3 link units on your webpages.

2. Do not reuse colors: When you create a link unit from your Google Adsense account, remember to check off the option Reuse colors.

Most Adsense publishers ignore this option and keep the reuse colorsoption checked, which is a mistake. Why? Let’s say the background color of your Adsense link unit is grey while the link color is black, you have chosen this palette to ensure that the link unit completely blends with your website’s design. Fair enough, but when you keep the Reuse colorsoption checked, the same color combination is shown on Ad pages. When a user clicks one of the ad link units, he sees advertisements over a grey background and they are most likely to close the page right that instant.

When you uncheck the option reuse colors, the resulting ad pages will house the ads with blue links over a white background, which is by far one of the best color combinations for maximum click through rate.

3. Do not place Link units adjacent to each other:   I don’t understand why some webmasters place 2 or 3 vertical link units adjacent to each other, which never produces a good user or advertiser experience. You should place the link units on different areas of your site’s template, this ensures that each link unit gets the attention it deserves.

The link units on your site are not competitors and you should give each of them a fair chance to prove their worth.

4. Power of Site Navigation:   Leverage the power of your site’s navigation area and use a horizontal link unit at the top. This is one of those areas where a horizontal link unit fits fine, while a horizontal ad unit is too heavy for the space it demands. A proper placement of a horizontal link unit can work wonders.

5. 4 is greater than 5:   Use the 4 ad links format over the 5 ad links format, as the former has a higher click through rate and it feels good to the eyes. You can take my word on this, the 4 ad links format is usually better than its louder counterpart.

6. Never assume! Test and see what works for you: Never go blind over the advice and theories of fellow bloggers or webmasters. Seek lessons from experts but most importantly, learn from your experiments. Me saying that this works and that doesn’t, might be disastrous for your site.

Remember that every website is different and you will arrive to the best conclusion through rigorous testing and personal analysis.

Also read: New application procedure for Google Adsense

I knew this was long coming.

They captured the lower front in July and now the army is all set to march on. Starting October, Google will integrate the plus one button over Adsense advertisements and other display ads that are delivered from Google Display ad network.   The +1 button will begin to appear on AdSense for content and AdSense for mobile display ad formats, which includes image, animated gif and Flash ads.

Users will now be able to recommend or endorse advertisements to their social connections and Google is confident regarding the fact that this move will help both users and website owners.

Here is how the display advertisements will house the plus one button and people recommendations at the bottom:

Mr X, Miss Y and 200 other people have plus one’d this ad. So there must be something in here or why would they recommend this to YOU. Enough said!

Google says that plus one activity on advertisements is a really strong signal towards it’s relevancy. If John finds a particular ad very useful and he hits the Plus one button, John’s friends will see the recommendation on other websites and Google search results, provided they are searching for something similar.

But I am concerned over something else how will users use the plus one button on advertisements? Let’s take the example of a generaluser.

The user searches for cheap shoesand goes to a website from Google search results. He likes the content of the page but is attracted by the headline of an Adsense ad, placed above the fold. He clicks the ad and goes to the advertiser’s website. There he finds some more deals, signs up for an account, browses their store and performs other meaningful actions.

Now how is he going to plus one that ad which he thinks is very useful and his friends would love using it?

• Is he going to remember the URL and landing page for the ad?
• Is he going to hit the back button over and over again, come back to the publisher’s site and hit the plus one button?
• Is he going to use the same search query again, go to the publishers website from search result page, find the ad and then plus one it?

The short answer to all of the above questions is NO. Web users have a short attention span, remember?

The other side of the coin is when people click the plus one button before clicking the advertisement. This defeats the sole purpose of the plus one button because if a user didn’t clicked the ad in the first place, how on earth can he recommend the target site to his friends? Of course, he can but then its useless for what it is intended for.

I am not sure how useful the user and advertiser experience will be after the plus one layer is spread over ads. In my opinion, this plus one thing has gone too far and it’s more like Attract the eyeballs.

The Ad Auction

The number of plus ones on a given advertisement will of course have an impact on the ad auction. If a given number of users hit the plus one button on an ad that’s served from Google display network, the same ad will have a higher chance of appearing on search result pages and other websites. This is true only when the host user is searching for something very similar and all the targeting conditions of the advertiser is met.

Result – some advertisers might experience a higher click through rate for specific keywords, which directly affects the ad auctions.

Google says

All eligible ads will continue to compete in the ad auction, and we’ll continue to show the ones that will generate the most revenue for you. +1 button clicks are not counted as clicks on ads. Although you won’t receive any revenue for +1 button clicks, +1′s will help AdSense to deliver more useful ads to your users, which we think will result in higher returns over time.

Opt Out Of Plus One Features And Social Annotations On Your Website

Thankfully, the social annotations feature is not forced and webmasters who would prefer not to use them over their Adsense ads, can completely opt out from ad annotations. Here are the steps:

1. Login to your Google Adsense account, switch to the new Adsense interface and click the Allow & block adstab.

2. Click Advanced settingson the left sidebar and choose Blockunder Social Ads Preference

From the webmasters perspective, I would rather choose Allowover Block. This is obvious I would first smell the water and check how the plus one activity affects my click through rate / revenue and then decide whether I should use the social annotations feature of Google Plus one button over Adsense ads used on my website.

If you are a Google Adsense publisher, my advice would be to first test and track both the scenarios and then arrive at a decision.

Remember – whenever your website makes money, Google makes money too. On top of that, they are testing these things on YOUR advertising space!

To this day, Google Adsense remains one of the most profitable and easiest way to monetize a website. Web publishers don’t have to hunt for Advertisers, manage the ad inventory and handle the technical aspects involved in serving advertisements to their visitors. If you have a legitimate site and your site offers value to users, Google Adsense is certainly one of the most feasible way to generate organic revenue.

The biggest advantage of Google Adsense over other advertising programs is that their ad inventory never goes out of stock. So it doesn’t matter where your visitors are coming from. And since these ads are contextually targeted and match closely with the content of your webpage, the conversion ratios are much higher than other CPC or CPM ads, available through other advertising networks.

Click Fraud And Make Money From Adsense Scene in India, Pakistan And China

Sadly, some people are always abusing a system and trying to get rich online as fast as possible.

Worst thing is that some people have created a business out of this and are luring innocent people into make money online scams, in the name of Google Adsense which still remains one of the most trusted   advertising programs on the web.

Check this newspaper clipping and you will understand the saga:

There are basically two ways people from third world countries like India, Pakistan and China are abusing this system.

Case A: You have no idea how to make money online and you see one of these advertisements which come on the Classifiedssection of any Indian newspaper. You call them up and they tell you to contact one of their office executives. When you reach their office, they tell you that you have to register an account with them and pay a one time membership fee. In return, they will create a free website for you and register your account into Google Adsense. Next, they will supply you a huge list of other Adsense members (with email address and contact details), so that you can start working with them and generate cash.

The so called work is nothing but clicking ads on the sites of other members while they click ads on yours. This is nothing but CLICK FRAUD!

Real life example: I have seen these click fraud scams in front of my eyes. People spend 1-2 hours daily on Yahoo messenger (because someone told them that Gmail chat can be traced) and request clicks from other members. This madness continues   until they find that their account has been banned.

They go to the executive but he shows proof that they have received money from Google and this program is genuine. With a heavy heart, victims leave but they don’t forget blaming Google because they think that Google cheated their money. Actually, they have been seasoned to think like that.

Case B:   You see one of these newspaper clippings and call them up. They tell you to join a free seminar and 3 hour workshop on Online revenue generation. You go to the workshop where you are told to register for a one time membership fee. In return, the company will create a free website for you and show you how to generate income within a period of 2-3 months.

Once your site is up and running, you are given a training on how to spam forums and social networking sites in order to generate free traffic to your website. In the eyes of a newbie, these methods are not at all spam because he can’t differentiate between the correct and wrong methods.

The result is that customers sometimes manage to get one or two payments but sooner or later, they are also kicked out from Google Adsense. Why? Because their site is not at all high quality and the content is written by stupid content farms who have specialist writers for every other topic on earth. They can jot down 30 to 40 500 word articles a day, so you can imagine what   a horrible mess is happening out here.

And it’s not that Google is unaware of these things and as a legitimate Adsense publisher, we are lucky that they haven’t imposed a country specific restriction yet.

Upcoming Changes To Adsense Application Process

Google is getting really serious regarding the quality of sites that get accepted into the Google Adsense program. Google has announced in an official blog post that newer Adsense applications will undergo a two step review process. Here is the synopsis:

1. Starting today, newer applications will fall under the new 2 tier review process and Google will perform preliminary checks on each and every site submitted into the Google Adsense program.

2. If everything goes well and the submitted site adheres to Adsense program policies, Google will notify the applicant via email, grant them account access and provide them a sample ad code. This ad code should be implemented on the submitted site, as the review process will be considered incomplete if the ad code is not found on the target website.

3. Live ads won’t immediately appear once the ad code has been placed on the submitted site. Since the application hasn’t been fully approved yet, temporary blank adswill be shown instead.

4. These blank ads will blend in with the background of the page, so users won’t see them and the user experience won’t be impacted. As a result, there’s nothing to click on and thus revenue can’t yet be generated.

5. A final and thorough check will be made on the target site and a final approval decision will be made. This can involve human eyes inspecting your website and judging the quality level or authority so here is a take away point Do not hurry with your submission. Take a deep breath, build a useful resource first and then apply for Google Adsense.

6. Once the final approval is over, blank ads will be automatically replaced with working ads. There is no need to change any code but publishers are welcomed to create new ad units and experiment with other customizations from their Adsense account.

Note to existing Adsense publishers:   Your Adsense account won’t be impacted in any way as these rules are only applicable for new submissions.

Want Your Adsense Application Approved?

If you want your Adsense application approved, here are a few things you should know:

1. Go to Adsense Program policies page and print out the entire Adsense program policy on paper. Read it from top to bottom, and don’t stop until you understand it fully. Wake up the next day and read it again, read it often and if possible – learn it by heart. I mean it.

2. If you have doubts, don’t be shy and post your question in Google Adsense help forum. It is very very important to completely understand each and every program policy first and then go ahead with your application.

3. Get a website under a top level domain. Gone are the days when you could open a free blogspot blog, write 10 blog posts as fast as possible and get accepted into Google Adsense.

4. WRITE YOUR OWN CONTENT. Please for Christ’s sake, WRITE YOUR OWN CONTENT!!

5. Thoroughly check your site for broken links and Under constructionpages.

6. Do not write on Porn, gambling, alcoholic or other socially abusive content. You have the full checklist on the program policy page

7. Let your website be at least 8-10 months old before applying for the Adsense program. I am sure there are exceptions but any sooner and there is a high chance you might lose it.

8. There are no shortcuts, schemes or get rich quick thingy on the Internet. Existing Adsense publishers have toiled really hard and made a valuable resource first, so you should also follow the same path.

9. While applying, make sure your street address is in the correct format.

10. Triple check your Payee name because there is no undo after this!

11. Do not involve with third party sites who promise to create an Adsense account for you. You will always play it safe with a clean application.

12. Do not participate in any traffic exchange schemes, stupid partnerships or any fake way of generating traffic. Your site should get traffic on its own, without having to force people to come to your site.

13. Read the program policies again and again and again and again and again. After 3 years of getting accepted into the Adsense program, I still read it every other Sunday.

Image credit

Google AdSense is one of the most lucrative ad service used by millions of bloggers all around the world. However, it is also one of the most strict and smart ad network in the world too. Every day, thousands of users are banned from AdSense because they have violated one or more policies laid down by Google.

While some of the policy violations are pretty straightforward, there are some which are really confusing and hard to figure out. I was the victim of one such policy in December 2010 and had received an automated email from Google which had me both confused and scared. I was pretty sure that I was not violating any policies, but Google thought otherwise. The email in question is posted below [some parts have been obscured].

This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does not
accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.
————————————————————————————————————–
Hello,

While reviewing your account, we noticed that you are currently displaying Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our policies. For instance, we found violations of AdSense policies on pages such as [redacted]. Please note that this URL is an example and that the same violations may exist on other pages of your website.

Publishers are not permitted to alter the behavior of Google ads in any way. This includes resizing ad frames to cut off parts of ads or hiding the Ads by Google moniker.

As stated in our program policies, publishers are not permitted to alter the behavior of ads in any way. This includes displaying more than three ad units on each page.

Please make any necessary changes to your webpages in the next 72 hours. We also suggest that you take the time to review our program policies (https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=48182&stc=aspe-1pp-en) to ensure that all of your other pages are in compliance.

Once you update your site, we will automatically detect the changes and ad serving will not be affected. If you choose not to make the changes to your account within the next three days, your account will remain active but you will no longer be able to display ads on the site. Please note, however, that we may disable your account if further violations are found in the future.

Thank you for your cooperation.
Sincerely,
The Google AdSense Team

So Google basically just told me that I only had 72 hours to fix my stuff or else I would be banned. This happened just 3 days before Christmas and I totally panicked because I couldn’t for love of God figure out what I was doing wrong. The content of the above email also confused me further more.

Also Read: Best Google AdSense Placements for Blogs/Websites | Useful Tips and Tricks To Grow Your AdSense Income

I don’t know whether it’s just me or everyone but I am observing a new update on how the Advertiser URL’s of Google Adsense ads are displayed. If you hover your mouse over an Adsense advertisement, chances are that you might know the URL of the target site, as shown in the following screenshot:

When you hover your mouse cursor over an image, the Alternate text of the image is shown (if any). This new feature of showing Adsense ad URL’s works exactly the same but the only catch here is that the URL is shown only for text ads. While ideally, it should have been exactly the opposite.

This is because users can already see the Advertiser URL when they are viewing a text ad. Typically, a text ad contains a title of the link, some description text followed by the complete URL of the target site whose ad is being shown. There are some situations when the webmaster of a site may want to block a specific Adsense advertisement, so knowing the URL of a text based ad is not at all a problem (both for the user and the webmaster of the site in question).

But think of image ads, there is no way to determine the Advertiser URL just by looking at the Adsense advertisement block

So a brief URL preview of image or rich media ads was required and Google has implemented just the opposite showing the URL preview for text based advertisements at the moment.

Important note to Adsense publishers: As far as policy guidelines go, Adsense publishers are not permitted to click their own ads for the sake of determining the URL of the advertiser. And neither you should ask anyone else to let you know the URL of a specific advertisement. If you can determine the URL by looking at the mouse hover text, that’s fine. Otherwise, leave it as it is.

Forum discussion at Webmaster World via Seroundtable

Google Analytics is one of the most used analytics software. Many websites use their analytics tool to learn more about their visitors, check their AdSense payments and more.

Google Analytics provides a comprehensive set of tools including heatmaps to check user clicks, ability to drill down AdSense payments by country and ability to track outbound links among other things.

The interface for Google Analytics is overwhelming for many users, and it has almost remained stagnant for the past few years. However, Google is now testing out a new version of Analytics, dubbed Google Analytics 5, which adds some much need features to the Analytics software.

According to an early beta tester AJ, Google Analytics 5 has some new features, which include but are not limited to:

• New Home Section
• New Dashboard
• Widgets
• Updated Custom Reporting Tool
• New Admin Section
• World Cloud Visualization
• Goals as Events

I am pretty excited to see Widgets support in this version as it would allow me to add relevant sections of the reports and view them with a quick glance, rather than having to click on multiple links.

I was able to get  a screenshot (click to enlarge) of the new analytics tool, courtesy @RonakBhagdev from http://www.greatestdesigns.net. As you can see from the screenshot above, the new interface is sleeker and add more widgets to the dashboard. Users will also be able to customize these widgets.

You can sign up to become a Beta tester of the new Google Analytics by visiting this page. Watch the video of the Google Analytics 5 in action in below. Click here if you can’t see it.

Yesterday, I wrote about Best Google AdSense placements for Blogs and Websites. Now many users also have forums addressing different topics. Though most of the forums are usually free, you can always make money using Google AdSense.

Also Read: Useful Tips and Tricks To Grow Your AdSense Income

Google has created some excellent placement suggestions for AdSense ads in forums, these suggestions are really useful and will allow you to maximize revenue from your AdSense ads. So without further ado here is a summary of best ad placements for your forum.

Google AdSense Placement Tips for Forum Homepage

For forum homepage Google suggests placing a large 728×90 leaderboard image ad in between the categories above the fold. In addition to that, Google suggests placing a 160×600 wide skyscraper in the sidebar of the post below your site navigation.

You can also use a 468×60 banner on the site if you do not have enough width in the content area.

Google AdSense Placement Tips for Forum Category Page

For category pages on forums, Google suggests users to place a large 728×90 leader board above the fold while adding another one between the threads list. You can also add another large unit at the bottom of the page.

Google AdSense Placement Tips for Forum Post/Threads Pages

For post or thread pages, Google suggests using a 468×15 link unit below the navigation bar and above the title of the thread/post. They also suggest placing a 728×90 after the 1st/2nd, 4th/5th and 8th/9th post in the thread.

So these are the tips from Google about placing ads in your forums. Do let me know how it works out for you if you follow these suggestions on your site. It is always best to experiment with new layouts for at-least a week before you make changes to them.

Google AdSense is one of the biggest ad platforms in the world. It is used by millions of users to place advertisements on their websites and earn money from clicks. However, not everyone earns a lot of money from AdSense and the problem may not be with the website you have, but it may be how and where you place your ads on the website.

If you are seeing a lesser click through for your websites or blogs, Google has come up with some really good tips which will help you earn more from your website.

Also Read: Useful Tips and Tricks To Grow Your AdSense Income

These tips come from Google themselves who might very well now which kind of placements work and which don’t, so you might want to take a look at some of these placements and work on them to increase your earnings. Here are some of the tips and placements summarized for blogs, news sites, forums, game sites and classified sites.

Google AdSense Placement Tips for Blog Homepage

Google suggests placing a large 728×90 leaderboard image ad on the home page above the fold for placement targeting. In addition to that they also suggest putting a 728×90 leaderboard ad unit in the middle of the page or at the end of the page.

In addition to that, Google suggests placing a 160×600 wide skyscraper in the sidebar of the post below your site navigation. Of course not all websites will have a design like the one above, so you will have to change certain things to find the best placement.

If you have a wider sidebar Google suggests that you place 2 300×250 ads in the sidebar of your blog as shown in the illustration above.

Google AdSense Placement Tips for Blog Content/Article Pages

The ad placements for the home page and single article pages should be different. According to Google, AdSense ad units should be placed  to the left of the content and should be wrapped around the text. You should also leave a gap of 10 pixels between the content and the ad units.

You can also place the ad unit to the right of the content, but Google suggests that left side ads work better. In addition to the the top ad you can also place another large unit below the article and in the sidebar depending on how large your sidebar is.

Overall, these placements are pretty standard and most of the blogs follow these. One thing I noticed is that Google hasn’t suggested placing ads in between the content, so it might not be working as well.

I’ll be following up this post with more ad placements for Forums, news sites, game sites and classified websites in future posts.

Earlier this week, Facebook announced that it will be allowing only a select list of advertising networks on Apps on Facebook.com. Only those advertisers who agree to not use user data and have signed the platform terms for ad providers will be allowed to advertise on Facebook.

Here’s the list of approved ad networks. Unsurprisingly, Google Adsense is not to be found on it. Google and Facebook have been at loggerheads over user data sharing, with Google often calling Facebook a walled garden. With these platform policies, Facebook has ensured that no ad provider is able to access user data through any application.

The official statement says that “We will begin enforcing this policy on 2/28, which should provide you and other developers the time required to switch ad providers or to help us sign terms with the ad providers you may be using. We will continue to add other ad providers in the coming weeks. If your ad provider is not on this list, we encourage you to contact them to determine if they are planning on signing our terms.”

Somehow I doubt that Google Adsense is going to make it on the list. Unless, of course, Google agrees to those policies, which I don’t suppose it will.

via Facebook