Google Analytics integrated in AdSense: A Complete Failure?

We were excited when first heard that Google Analytics will be able to track AdSense. Truth is that first we didn’t believe it, when it was announced we were the first who commented on the official AdSense blog and thanked for the feature, now we are amongst the first who complain about it.

Why? Look on the above two graphs:

The two graphs shows the AdSense earnings in the past 7 days. Since we’re not allowed to publish our earnings, the numbers on the left represents our earnings as units, so 1 can mean anything from $1 to $1000.

The problem is that while AdSense reported 7.74 earning units on the past 7 days, Google Analytics reported only 3.93 . Since AdSense hand-in-hand with AdWords is the bottom of Google’s heart and they do anything possible to keep it accurate as possible, we take that the earnings reported by AdSense are correct. But then Google Analytics is a complete failure.

And what if the rest of the reports are the same inaccurate?

Note: the graphs shows aggregate report for all the channels and domains AdSense ads are running.

21st of Decemeber : Where my traffic went?

First of all, it’s not just you. As news sources reported, a major internet fiber optic cable was cut. The cable we are talking about links Europe with Africa and most likely it was hit by a ship’s anchor. Another possibility would be a minor earthquake but since no earthquake was reported in the area, this version is not plausible.

Since some of the Asian traffic is also routed through this particular cable, some routers practically had and still have 100% packet loss. Diligent efforts were made to route the traffic on other cables, but since some routers still reports 100% pocket loss, seemingly the efforts were useless.

The so called issue happened at the shores of Egypt and caused serious headaches for more than a dozen of countries. Interesting fact is, that this year this is the second time when a ship hits this particular cable with its anchor. The first time was at the end of January, beginning of February 2008; conspiracy theories didn’t wait too long to appear regarding the US army cutting the cables to cut Iran off the Internet. Possibly, this cable rupture will blame the NSA or CIA doing malicious activity with the cables.

At the time of this post the following countries’ have difficulties routing the internet traffic (incomplete list, provided by InternetTrafficMonitor.com):

1. Iran
2. Japan
3. China
4. India

If your website is hosted in western Europe or in the US and usually gets massive traffic from Africa or Asia, this is a plausible reason of why the traffic drop. But it is still unclear for me how a ship’s anchor can hit such an expensive object, why is not protected in a way to not let things like this happen.

Speeding up the AdSense-Analytics integration on your AdSense account

I believe I was the only one in the World who didn’t believe that the integration of Google Analytics in AdSense is possible, and smelled conspiracies all over the net. For my shock a while ago on the Official AdSense Blog appeared an announcement that they will gradually roll out this feature for all of the AdSense publishers, starting with those who live in North America. The bad part is, that I don’t live there, but in Europe.

So I had to wait. I also expressed my feeling about the fact that I couldn’t jump on the band-wagon in every possible way, but no one listened, at least that’s what I thought.
Then in my RSS reader a new entry appeared: Extending AdSense for domains to all publishers, obviously, this was posted on the Official AdSense Blog as well.
Great, I thought; another feature which is rolled out gradually, another thing which I can not use just because I don’t live in North America.

But, as I started to read, I observed a note just below the header:

Want to integrate your AdSense account with Google Analytics? Improved reporting was on publisher wish lists this year, so we’re spreading the reporting cheer this holiday season. Fill out our interest form, and we may be able to enable the feature earlier for you.

I went ahead and filled out the form. And a miracle happened: in less than 24 hours my AdSense account was boosted with Analytics.

Hugs and kisses for the AdSense team.

AdSense transforming in non-contextual advertising program?

Since AdSense appeared on the market, it was known for every publisher that it’s one of the greatest contextual ad serving networks. They advertise on every possible way that “[...] Because the ads are related to what your users are looking for on your site, you’ll finally have a way to both monetize and enhance your content pages. [...]”

And that’s almost OK. They really serve ads which are related to the (website’s) content, but. There always has to be a but, right? What about learn even more about the users before serving those ads?
I explain: Devoracles.com has quite a lot of content related to Google, Google Chrome and AdSense. So it’s quite easy to predict that if possible, AdSense will show Google-related ads for the users cos those are also relevant to our content. And if you look at our ads, you’ll see that sometimes there are Google related ads. If you look at the right ads in the right time, you will see that there are Google Chrome ads, too. Like, “Download Google Chrome“, or something like that.

Now look at the image on the left. What’s wrong with the image? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it! I see adverts which keeps telling me to download Google Chrome even though — ironically — I’m seeing the advert through Google Chrome.
That’s the feature of contextual advertising? Advertising Coke and iPhone for the biggest fans of these products? Come on, Google, this can’t be right!

Wait no more on Rapidshare

I was searching for some downloads on Rapidshare. I don’t want to pay for their service for various reasons, the first being that it kinda looks like a scam for me, because users provide files which they believe it will be free to download, but when we want to download that file, we have to wait 30 seconds or more, because we don’t have a “premium” account. Pathetic.
After spending about 1 hour in total to wait till the counter arrives to the “0″, I got annoyed. How could I reset that dam counter to 0 as soon as it starts? The counter is likely to be Javascript, so it shouldn’t be too hard. After a quick peek on the page’s source, I find this:

function fc() {
    if(c>0){
        document.getElementById("dl").innerHTML = 'You are not a Premium User and have to wait. Please notice that only Premium Users will get full download speed.
Still ' + c + ' seconds

';
        c=c-1;
        setTimeout("fc()", 1000);
    } else {
        var tt [...]

So, the value assigned to “c” is the variable what you see as the counter. Cool. Now let’s set it to 0. This is quite simple, just type in the address bar of your browser the following: javascript:alert(c=0) and you’re done. Now if you press the Download button, you’ll be taken to another page, which tells you that in order to download, you have to have Javascript enabled. Just refresh 4-5 times and the download will start.

Another method i’ve found interesting is that when you look at the source of the page which counts back to 0, a form is displayed with Javascript. That’s fine, but kinda dumb as if you copy out the value of the src attribute and paste it in the address-bar, you will be taken to the actual download location.

Another thing remained which should be bypassed: the number of downloads limit. This can be quite annoying since, it looks for how many times were download requests made from your IP. Thus it records your IP address. Nothing is lost though. If your ISP provides you dynamic IP and you’re on Windows, you can request a new IP by flushing your DNS then asking for a new one. The problem is when you have static IP like I have: the ISP will give you always the same, dedicated IP. Anyway, to get a new dynamic IP, open up a command prompt and type the following in it:

ipconfig /flushdns
ipconfig /release
ipconfig /renew
exit

And you got a new IP. Fantastic. I’ve read somewhere that you have to clear your cookies as well. I checked my cookies and seemingly Rapidshare didn’t set any cookie, so it would be pointless to do so.

Now what about the static IP addresses? We still have the public proxies. Just do a quick search on Google and obtain a proxy IP which let’s you download through it.

I hope these tricks will help you as they helped me. If something is unclear, feel free to ask and will answer as soon as possible.

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