Adsense Tracker is one of the most useful tools that any Adsense user could invest in. As the name suggests Adsense Tracker gives you statistics that Adsense does not even come close to giving you in their statistics/reporting package.

Track Click Throughs from Each Page – For example – have you ever wondered which pages on your blog are providing the click-throughs? Adsense only lets you track 50 channels – most of of us track categories but Adsense Tracker lets you track every page on your blog!

Now in my mind that is information that I’d pay for. Think about it. You’ve got 1000 pages on your blog. The clicks could be coming evenly from them all – or they could be coming predominantly from one or two pages. Wouldn’t it be useful to know which pages they were so that you could:
1. write more posts on those topics (or even start a new blog dedicated to them)
2. promote those pages more
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Interesting post over at Digital Point on Read more AdSense Per Click Payout Based On Natural Rankings. The basic question – does Google rankings for keywords have an impact on the rate at which ads on those keywords pay out at? The thread starts with this:

Conversely, I have a site that did rank top 5 for something, and it was getting about $1.20 for AdSense. The rankings have dropped, and the AdSense per click payout mirrored that drop (now it’s averages $0.02 per click).’

‘Brainy Betty’ over at the Adsense forum at Webmaster World has started a good thread on Lessons Learned with Adsense. She writes:



‘A year and a half later with AdSense and still going strong – here are my lessons learned: (What are yours?)

4. Ad Settings: Change them about once a month or so. Make large banners smaller; use verticals in some places, definitely change colors so people notice – especially repeat visitors who have ‘turned off’ the ads in their heads if they see them in the same place with the same colors and formats all the time…’

Read more from Betty and others at Lessons Learned: AdSense

With the arrival of September’s Adsense cheque today (its now November 4) I find myself doing what I like to call the ‘Adsense Shuffle’.

As a non US citizen cashing my cheque is becoming an increasingly difficult prospect. You see not only do I have to arrange for my cheque to be cashed, exchanged into Aussie dollars (which involves the filling in a number of forms) – cheques over $xxxx require further authentication which means the cheque has to be physically sent back to the US before they are cleared. Despite the planes that fly back to the US every day this extra process takes a further 6 weeks!

So the money that I earned on the first day of September is not likely to hit my bank account until the 18th December (if I’m lucky)!

Of course I’m getting used to it now – money still comes to me every month – but its amazing that a company with as many innovations and cutting edge technologies as Google can’t arrange for the people who are paying a lot of their bills to get their share of the profits a little quicker than 108 days after they earned them.

Of course I shouldn’t complain too much – my real gripe is with Amazon which only sends cheques quarterly. The money I earned from them on the first day of July won’t hit my bank account until 18th December also!

Those of you using Adsense might be interested in some of the upcoming changes and directions of the program being talked about by Google executives.

‘ After building its business through direct-response search listings, Google is likely to expand into brand advertising.

Speaking to investment analysts on the company’s first-ever earnings call last week, Google executives said its fledgling effort at distributing graphical ads was an important initiative for the company. Google has begun to test the display of graphical ads on Google Image search. For now, the graphic ads shown through AdSense are priced on a click basis. Display advertising is often sold on a cost-per-thousand-impressions basis. Stein said Google is unlikely to simply adopt CPM pricing, but could instead have a hybrid system that charges a flat fee for impressions on top of click charges.’

Read more at Google Sees Brand-Advertising Opportunities

Adsense may be testing some new features – I just stumbled upon a site that seems to be being used as a testbed for the new stuff. This is a page I first noticed two ads per page on – about a month before it became public that the rest of us could do that. I notice three new features so far:

1. Little dividers between the ads on the skyscraper site. It breaks it up a little and is a little different.

2. Change to Ads About Option – Also I just noticed that this particular user has another option at the bottom of their ads that says:

“Change to Ads About:” and then it lists five other related topics to click on. When you click on one of the options the ads change to ones related to the topic at hand.

3. Change to Ads About Search – Also after you click on a couple of ‘change ads’ options a search field comes up that says:

“Change to Ads About:”

This allows you to type in a request for ads about any particular topic!

So it seems Adsense are testing a feature that lets our readers choose their own topics for ads! Interesting. I’m not sure how many of my readers would take the time to toggle the ads. But this feature would be useful for ME if I could have a little more control over the ads my users see on particular pages – which I’m not seeing as an option.

Has anyone else seen these options on sites?

Nerve Endings Firing Away has a good review of Google Adsene, from a blogger’s perspective.

“It has been a month since I succumbed to the advertising devil in disguise. But in retrospective Google Adsense is indeed impressive and makes perfect sense for small-time publishers. Regular bloggers have achieved the tag of informal journalists and are publishing czars in their own right. But there is no free lunch in a capitalistic society. I moved to Typepad couple of months ago from Rediff for greater flexibility and customization of my blog. This additional coolness comes at a cost; $8.95 per month to be exact. Google Adsense gave me not only a way to cover the costs, but also superceded my expectations by making some more. In a nutshell, all visitors see the ads on my blog, some click on them, and advertisers are happy to get traffic on their commercial websites, even if the visitors don’t buy anything. They pay Google for customizing the ads, according to the content, for my blog and Google pays me a share. How much is Google paid and the percentage of my share is not clear yet.”
Read more at Google Adsense makes sense

Read the first post in our Adsense Tips for Bloggers series.

Go4-Webmaster.com has a good review of the Adsense Program from Google.

“Google AdSense is for someone who wants a complete solution. It might not fill all of your ad inventory (well, maybe, now that you can have up to 3 units served on a page), but it will do good with what it does fill. It’s simple, easy, and all encompassing. With fluxuating EVERYTHING, it’s difficult to produce a larger yield then well targeted Sale/Lead affiliate programs. That being said, it’s an excellent program for webmasters who rather focus on content. It’s potential revenue power is, however, extraordinary.”
Read more at Google AdSense Review – Go4-Webmaster.com

I’ve been using Adsense for close to a year now and find that it is very useful on some blogs but next to useless on others. I’ve got friends who run niche blogs on highly targeted subjects (sometimes quite localized on particular countries) and they have struggled to have any ads served to their blog. As with any contextual advertising it largely depends on your content as to whether it will work or not.

Get some good Adsense tips in our Adsense for Bloggers tutorials.