Some thoughts about the new Google Adsense Ads
November 16, 2007 by martin
Filed under adsense, make money
The new Adsense ads that saw a reduction in the area that can be clicked are live on most websites by now and first reports come in confirming that webmasters are seeing an decrease in click through rate, eCPM and revenue. Figures range from 5% to 40% so far and it is a bit early to judge if those decreases will remain like they are now. CPC seems to drop between 0-2% for most websites which is a huge decrease reflected in the income level.
Google is hoping that this move will show advertisers that they are indeed fighting for them battling invalid clicks that most likely will not lead to a sale. Their reasoning that advertisers might spend more money for advertisement if they see an increase in ROI could become true but publishers will most likely see a decrease even if advertisers add more to their spending budget.
Google Adsense alters Ad Units
November 14, 2007 by martin
Filed under adsense, make money
The following news could be devastating for a lot of webmasters who do use Google Adsense to monetize their website. Currently they do get paid when a user clicks anywhere on an Adsense ad which consist of a title, a description, the url and the background area.
The new ad format changes the content that can be clicked. Only the title and url can be clicked in those new ad units while the description and background are not clickable anymore. The intention is to reduce the amount of accidental clicks.
A reduction in accidental clicks will keep users on your pages, interacting with your content until they choose to click on an ad. This change will enhance the users’ overall experience with your websites and improve advertiser campaign value, but it’s likely that your click-through rate will decrease
Pagerank Checkup Tools fail across the board
All those nifty Pagerank Checking Scripts that are offered on literally hundreds of websites are failing to display any score at the moment. It does not matter which website is entered in the scripts all return a PR N/A on all datacenters which leads to the question of why this is currently happening.
I can think of three possibilities right now. First, Google changed something in their API which had the result that all of those scripts are failing right now. Another possibility would be that Google has some internal problems and can’t answer the scripts requests right at the moment.
The third possibility would be that Google decided to cut access to its datacenters to all Pagerank checking scripts by disallowing that this data is being pulled from them.
Whatever it is it is still on going and it surely will take some time until the World receives an official answer from Google.
Update:
It seems that some scripts are still working. One of them is Oyoy as confirmed by Andy Beard
Use Google Trends to your advantage
November 3, 2007 by martin
Filed under Analyze, drive traffic
I’m sometimes in doubt about the correct keyword that I have to use in an article. This happened for instance in the past when I was writing about hard drives, or hard disks. I was not sure if I should use hard drives or hard disks in the article. Using both in the same article was out of question so I had to make a decision.
Instead of rolling some dices I decided to use Google Trends to take a look at the search volume for both terms and pick the term that would have a higher search volume. The higher search volume might not always be the best pick because it means usually that the competition is also using that term in favor of a lesser searched one.
