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.

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!

3 tips to finance your blog

Usually blogging is a hobby. But why not to earn some good money from it. The worse can happen is that your earnings will cover the hosting costs which is not bad since the blog will be self sustaining.
So let’s set as primary goal to cover hosting costs. This is not hard to achieve but you also has to do something to achieve it.

The very first tip is AdSense or AdBrite. Yeah, I know, this is a subject covered by so many people already that it hurts. But this is awesome for starters and can bring you some nice revenue. Well, nice in this case means it can cover your hosting costs quite easily, once you implement the ad-code into your blog theme, in the right place, the ads will immediately start showing up. If somebody click on an ad, you get money, that simple. Of course you should never click on your own ads, that’s just bad and your account will be disabled in no time. This method usually will bring you lower earnings, but it’s not uncommon to earn some very nice sums with AdSense. There are people who earn thousands of dollars per month with AdSense and all they’ve done is to place their ads in the right place, chosen the right color and format. An example I know about Is Andrew Wise; he implemented his AdSense ads in the right place, chosen the right format and colors. He earned about $100 in 3 months, that covered his hosting costs. And he’s only one example.

Another good method is to sign up to an affiliate network and advertise products on your blog. This option is recommended for blogs with higher traffic, since you have to be at least a bit authoritative to make people believe the product you recommend will suite their needs. After a user buys a product, you will get a percent. Simple enough to be a very attractive financing option. Just remember that for this you’ll have to have quite high traffic and users should think you trustworthy.

And the last one: why paying commissions for advertising networks when you can go on the in-house advertising method? This practically means that you sell space on your blog for advertisers. Usually no one will contact you so you have to contact other blogs, websites and web services and ask them if they would like to advertise on your blog. In the worse case they will say “No, thanks”, in good case they will try it out. While, for example Adobe, $10 per month is nothing, for you means that the hosting cost is already covered. Just be sure you have a quality blog, without spammy posts, and you should succeed.

Why did Google AdSense stop the Referrals program?

Almost every webmaster which used AdSense at least once, know about the AdSense Referrals. Now we can forget about it.

A while ago, Google announced on the Official AdSense Blog that they retire the AdSense Referrals program. Many were revolted by the announcement as Google did not provide a good alternative for the AdSense users. Well, it did provide, but it was invitation based and released as a public beta.

But let’s see why did they retire this program.

The answer is very simple. Earlier this year Google purchased Doubleclick, one of the greatest ad- and affiliate-networks. As soon as the purchase was completed, suddenly Doubleclick stopped it’s ad-network service. Why? Google already has an ad network, AdSense, so having two ad networks would have be pointless.
But what about the referrals? Referrals were practically affiliate programs, and let’s be honest, they didn’t work as good as Google thought initially. They didn’t pay well for the AdSense publishers, the lead tracking was quite hard to achieve on the advertisers end. I said before the referrals were practically affiliate programs. Doubleclick already had it’s own named Doubleclick Performics, an extremely well designed affiliate program, it was and is easy to use both for the publishers and the advertisers. The only problem with it at the moment is that they don’t support flash ads yet, which would be cool to have.

So to answer the initial question, the AdSense Referrals program was retired because the Google-Doubleclick fusion brought a much better solution, which has been named Google Affiliate Network. It is a refurbished version of the Doubleclick Performics but its simplicity both on the UI and idea level makes it probably the best program around the net.

To subscribe to the Google Affiliate Network, visit its Official Website.