The Google Insider

I just received this note from the Google AdSense team and thought I would pass it along so everyone can stay up to date with what is going on.

Note from the Google AdSense Team

Hello,

Over the past few months, AdSense has gone through quite a few changes – some big, some small, all designed to make the program that much better for our publishers. In case you missed any of these updates, we’ve outlined them below and provided links to resources with more information. We hope you’ll learn more about and take advantage of the new features and improvements to get the most out of your AdSense account.

If you have any comments after reading our updates, we encourage you to share them with us, so that we can continue to improve the features and services we offer through AdSense in the future.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

---

New Revenue Opportunities

Onsite Advertiser Sign-up

Earlier this year, we launched site targeting, a new way of targeting ads to sites in the content network, that offers advertisers more flexibility and publishers more ad inventory. To make it easier for more advertisers to create ads targeting your site, directly from your pages, we are introducing the Onsite Advertiser Sign-up feature.

When you use Onsite Advertiser Sign-up, your ad units will display an ‘Advertise on this site’ link that guides advertisers to create a Google AdWords ad automatically targeted to your site, and your site alone. You can customize the landing page advertisers view when they sign up so that it features your logo and communicates important details about your site . By allowing advertisers to create ads targeting your site precisely at their moment of interest, Onsite Advertiser Sign-Up helps create greater demand for your ad space, and more revenue for you.

To learn more, you can take a tour of Onsite Advertiser Sign-up. Your ad units will automatically take advantage of this feature, but if you’d prefer not to participate, you can opt out by updating the settings on your ‘My Account’ tab.

Referrals

If you’re a fan of AdSense, you may already encourage people you know to take advantage of the opportunity AdSense offers to monetize their web content. While we appreciate the efforts of altruistic publishers who’ve referred users with no incentive, we now enable publishers to increase their revenue by spreading the word about AdSense and other useful products. Using the new referrals feature, you can generate earnings while you direct users to sign up for AdSense or to download Firefox with Google Toolbar simply by adding a referral button to your site. Visit the Referrals tab within your account for pricing details and instructions on adding a referral button to your site.

Improved Reporting

Custom Reports

One of the reporting features most often requested by publishers was the ability to save frequently used reports. Earlier this year, we released custom reports, to allow you to save report settings and access them with just one click. Any report you often generate from your Advanced Reports page can be named and saved as a custom report that you can quickly access from your Reports Overview page.

AdSense for Search Top Queries

If you have an AdSense for search box on your site, you’re likely curious what your visitors are searching for from your pages. With the AdSense for search top queries report, you can learn the 25 most common searches conducted through your AdSense for search boxes. Use this report to identify additional topics to add to your site, or to keep track of your most sought-after information.

Useful Resources

Stay Up to Date with the AdSense Blog

Every day, our AdSense specialists think of suggestions, tips and ideas we’d like to share with our publishers. Back in August, we started the AdSense Blog as an outlet for our team members to share their product knowledge in a wide range of areas: optimization, troubleshooting, payments. Check out adsense.blogspot.com for new feature announcements, technical tips, and answers to questions you may not have known you had.

New Publisher Case Studies

How do you take your AdSense program to the next level? Recently, we talked to a few of your fellow AdSense publishers—Askthebuilder, CamcorderInfo, and Weblogs—about how they improved their AdSense revenue over time. You can find the complete list of AdSense
publisher case studies to find new ways of making your website even more successful.

Troubleshooting Ad Issues with Wizards and Demos

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach him how to troubleshoot his ad issues, and you’re giving him more lasting assistance. Our new troubleshooting wizards aim to do just that by guiding you through a series of simple yes or no questions to help diagnose and resolve any ad issues you may have. We’ve also created a Help With Ad Code Demo to educate publishers about basic issues they may encounter when implementing the AdSense code into the HTML source code of their pages.

Use Publisher Tools to Improve Your Site

Discover new publisher tools that can help you make your site better than ever. When you use Google’s tools to drive traffic to your site, add interactivity for your users, and increase your revenue, you can put your focus where it belongs: on creating quality content.

Comments(1)

Google just finished the design and application for an even more personal search. When using your Google Account, your search queries will follow you around where you go on Google and will become integrated even more into your search activities. The Google Personalized Search is tracking Web searches, Image searches, and News searches. The functionality is still there to pause, items, select all, etc. As far as we can tell, Google has not disclosed any information about how this ‘personalized search’ data is used. It could be a very good marketing seller to a company. Hopefully Google will release more information about how this data will be used in the future or now.

There is a lot learn about Google Personalized Search and even more to use with it. It has a great future, lets just make the best use of it.

Comments(9)

You heard right. It seems that unusual species names aren’t limited to scientists’ favorite rock stars or Star Wars figures - now Internet search engines are in the game. Entomologist Brian Fisher named a new species of ant, Proceratium google, in honor of the mapping program Google Earth. Fisher, who chairs the entomology department at the California Academy of Sciences, was impressed with the support he got from the Google Earth team when he was integrating the online warehouse of ant data, AntWeb, with the search functions of Google Earth. Now scientists can plot ant habitats in three dimensions or search for ant species by location. For the record, P. google lives in Madagascar and feasts exclusively on spider eggs. Get more ant facts at antweb.org.

Courtesy California Academy of Sciences

Not much else can be said. Google is becoming more and more global every day. When you think they have reached their limit of getting across to people and customers, they go ahead and do it again. Not specifically Google themselves doing the job this time, but Google’s name is mentioned and written down in the history books once again. Google seems to be writing history day in and day out. Every moment I get a chance to read up in the news, Google appears somewhere on the page without a doubt. In my experience, I haven’t seen a company with this much publicity for quite some time.

Popsci.com

Comments(6)

Google may have a new product coming out soon. It appears that they have it indexed in their own database, but when going to the actual link it only shows the homepage of Google.com. I could see them trying to integrate a service like Calendar into something with the Office product they were possibly going to put out as a team effort with Sun Microsystems. We will hopefully soon see whether or not this will be a service they will be releasing to the public or not.

Comments(5)

The Google China Code Jam is an offshoot of the company’s annual Google Code Jam competition. The final event of the 2005 competition, held in September, was won by Marek Cygan, a university student from Poland, who won $10,000 in cash. Two other university students, Erik-Jan Krijgsman of the Netherlands and Petr Mitrichev of Russia, each won $5,000 in cash for finishing second and third, respectively.

Respectively, Google is making a good move with this only because they can easily attract a lot of talent and for a low price. $30,000 is a drop in the bucket for them while they can easily bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of code in and talent. I expect that they will be hiring the top finalists and possibly the runner-ups in the contest as full time employees. Google is trying to gather a lot of the world’s best talent, including management from Microsoft. (more…)

Comments(6)

Google has opened up a page that will let you be notified to when they will be reopening the sign-ups for Google Analytics. Simply visit their page and enter your e-mail address and name to be included on their ‘notification’ mailing list.

Comments(3)

I have been using Google Analytics just like another two hundred thousand webmasters have been. While the data is great, they did leave room for using the data in other places other than just viewable by you. ie they could sell it if they really wanted to. The TOS made an allowance for this in case of something that were to come up to help benefit Google or even the webmaster.

But the real code hack is what I read on ZDNet.

As an example, if your shopping cart requires 4 steps — from sign up to payment — and this entire process is all done on the same physical page using a series of posts (ie. cart.php), you can dynamically output “urchinTracker(’step1.html’)” to “urchinTracker(’step4.html’)” rather than simply “urchinTracker()”. Most log file analyzers will see 4 requests to cart.php, whereas Analytics will record hits for step1.html through step4.html.

I see many sites that use carts with the same page simply because it’s a good practice in my opinion. Using multiple pages for different steps in a shopping cart is just bad practice because of the flexibility you get using one file. This is a good resource for webmasters that may be wanting to track signups or other like portions of a site. ie vBulletin sign-up or premium membership purchase would be a good example to use this code for. A webmaster can dynamically use the code as well simply be using a little PHP and $_SERVER or whatever programming language you are more comfortable with.

Comments(4)

According to reports, Time Warner’s board of directors is hunkering down Thursday for discussions on the future of AOL, and is expected to choose between partnering with Microsoft’s MSN division or Google. However, a final decision is not expected for a few weeks, says the Financial Times.

AOL currently utilizes Google for its Web search service, bringing a moderate percentage of revenue to the world’s biggest search engine. But MSN has reportedly come to the table trying to unseat Google in order to grow its own share of the search market, which it has struggled to do organically.

Google is in the running next to Microsoft for selection of future corporate needs from AOL. As quoted, Google is currently being utilized for the web search that powers AOL.com, but AOL may look at Microsoft’s MSN division as a supplier of media for the future needs of AOL. If AOL were to choose Microsoft over Google, it would probably mean that AOL Search would move away from Google and move to MSN Search instead. While Google remains a very strong partner of AOL, Google dismisses any thoughts of being pushed away right now and AOL/Time Warner are not available for commenting right now. Expect a decision regarding this case within the next few weeks.

BetaNews.com

Comments(29)

I will simply let the quote speak for itself here:

I work closely with Riya. Google has NOT bought them. But thanks everyone for all the kind words.

Stated on this blog that he works closely with the company. I still have my reserves that Google will buy them out in the future only because Google does need to pick up the slack as far as online community photo sharing goes. There are hundreds of portals out there that offer this, but I really think that Riya is what Google has their eye on. Only time will tell.

Comments(15)

Search? Content? You can choose from both now. Google recently introduced ‘dual bidding’ as a function of AdWords that will let a user choose from either bidding on the search results or the content results; or both. With the introduction of this new system, similar to how Yahoo! does advertising, the system will let advertisers track their promotions and campaigns a lot closer so that they can narrow down their marketing schemes.

Google says that the new content bidding mechanism will be available to advertisers through the AdWords campaign management interface and is available to all advertisers worldwide. It also says the new service will not affect the site targeting feature, which is the tool that allows advertisers to target specific content sites in the Google network.

This will hopefully bring a closer relationship between the advertiser and the publisher. But here’s the kicker….

In addition, the minimum bid for content is now a static $.01 (in the US).

PCPro.co.uk

Comments(10)