I saw many people at Digital Point and WebMaster World complaining about their Adsense income drop over the past few months. People attributing it to the worldwide economic depression. The proof is here now.

Google has released its 2009 Q1 earning statement recently. Amidst all the complex jargon, two stats are of particular importance to all those affected by Google Adsense. Google Network Revenues and TAC – Traffic Acquisition Costs.

Google Network Revenues are the partner sites generated revenues. The partners include major establishments like Ask.com, New York Times etc and all bloggers and small sites owners. This can include revenues under other programs as well.

TAC – Traffic Acquisition Costs are the portion of revenues Google has received only with Adsense programs.

As the graph below shows, TAC is on the decline since Q32008. This means Google is earning lesser by every quarter through its Adsense Program.

Google earning has a direct bearing on the publisher earning, hence you may be seeing lesser moolah through the Adsense on your site.

All in all, don’t fret if you are seeing a lesser amount in your account everyday. It’s happening with everyone!

PS: If you want to explore programs beyond Google Adsense, here is a pretty good list of adsense alternatives.

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This is for all those who are not able to login to their Google adsense account today. For the unaware folks, Google adsense is up with some new design for adsense home page but with this new design they seem to have messed up with the login for some of their publishers worldwide. Technically what that means is, if you’re among the effected lot you will find yourself in the "loop" between your adsense account login page and your Google account settings page. 

Though the official blog post claims to have resolved the problem but I can still see this occurring for me. So for those people like me still facing this issue, try login with this page instead https://www.google.com/adsense/login3 

I’m sure you will be able to access your account. Gozar!

PS: Ad review center is now available for Adsense for Feeds as well. [With the help of ad review canter you can control the placement targeted ads that can appear on your site.]

Just saw “Adsense For Domains” link in my adsense reports today.[Much earlier than I have anticipated in my earlier post on adsense for domains ] Those Indian publishers who were eagerly waiting for this announcement, your time has arrived. Enjoy!

PS: I have blogged about some FAQs related to adsense for domain. Check them out.

After seeing a recent blog post on Adsense Blog, I thought of experimenting with inline ads on one of my blogs hosted on blogger. I liked the tip about making the adsense inline with your blog post instead of putting it under the title or above the title.

Here I am reproducing what I did to my blogger hosted blog to make my adsense ads left align and wrapped around my content, the same way as can be seen on this blog post. THERE IS NO CHANGE TO ADSENSE CODE, SO NO NEED TO FEAR ABOUT GOOGLE TOS VIOLATION.

1. Trust you already have adsense code set up below the post title. If not, follow instructions carefully on this post to add adsense below the post title.
2. Now, to put the ads on left side of your post. Add  <div style=’float: left;’> and <div style=’padding-right: 3px’> before the adsense code. Don’t forget to close them with the </div> tags. Here is how it should look like.
   
3. Now, to put the ads on right side of your post. Add  <div style=’float: right;’> and <div style=’padding-left: 3px’> before the adsense code. Again, don’t forget to close them with the </div> tags. Here is how it should look like.
   
4. Wondering why I have added padding-left or padding-right? This will ensure that your ad is separated by a safe distance from text. You can increase/decrease the pixels as per your requirement.

Also see, how to safely test adsense ads?

Adsense below the post title is known to give good CTR(Click-Through-Ratio). Here is how you can add adsense ads below every post title, only on inner pages and except the home page of your blog. [Yes, in a safe way!]

1. Go to Dashboard > Edit HTML.
2. Click on ‘Expand Widget Templates’.
   
3. Search for <div class=’post-body’> and place your adsense code below this line.
4. This is the most important step. Inside your adsense code’s <script type=’text/javascript’> and </script> , replace every occurrence of
   • < with &lt;
   • > with &gt;
   • “ with &quot;
5. You should NOT change the < and > around script type=’text/javascript’ and /script.
6. To show your adsense only on the inner pages and not on home page, add <b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;’> before the adsense code and </b:if> after the adsense code. You can also add <center> tags to center align your ads.
7. The final code should look like this.
   

Regarding code changes that I have done, no need to worry about Adsense TOS violation. I have asked my Google adsense representative and according to her as long as any page’s source shows the same code as you copied from adsense account there is no problem. You can verify this by going to your page where you have put adsense. Right click and View Source (in IE) and View Page Source (In Firefox). Of course if you want to double verify this, you can always check with your adsense rep.

For those interested in testing and knowing which ad unit would perform best for them, can refer this excellent post on A/B testing from official adsense blog.

Inside Adsense – the official blog of Google Adsense is following its new year resolution to the T.  In the first of its kind post, the adsense team has come up with a post on Behind the scenes of scheduled maintenance. They have given a nice explanation on how maintenance happens and what all goes in the background. Here is my favorite excerpt from the post…

Some of you have noticed that impression and click stats appear a bit low after we bring the AdSense site back online, wondering if maybe AdSense maintenance is used to change data to affect your earnings. That’s a theory I’m happy to debunk: this discrepancy is actually a reporting artifact, occurring because we pause stats tallying during our maintenance period. After resuming, our reporting systems have to digest all of the accumulated impression and click logs, and there’s a lot of data! It takes the reporting systems a little while to process the logs, but rest assured that once we get the chance to catch up, the reports will reflect all of the impressions, clicks, and earnings that occurred during the maintenance period. If you’re concerned about the stats you’re seeing, we recommend checking back throughout the day as your reports are updated.

Looking forward to more such posts from the team. Source

For the uninitiated, Google Adsense for domains is a program from Adsense that allow publishers to place adsense on undeveloped domains. The idea behind this is to let user find related relevant information rather than 404’s and also let the publisher make some money from the clicks that get generated on undeveloped domains. Till sometime back, this program was only available to big domain name registrars and domain parking companies like Sedo, Godaddy etc.

What can be termed as a big decision, Google is now opening up this program for all publishers. Most of the terms and conditions that are applicable for normal adsense usage are applicable for Adsense for domains too. Check TOS. Here are some quick facts about Adsense for domains program-

• A maximum of 1500 domains are allowed per publisher.
• It won’t work like normal adsense where we can just copy and paste the code. You need to modify your DNS settings – like CNAME and ANAME Record. Here are the complete Instructions for major Domain Name Providers.
• You can’t use Google adsense for domains with any other Google service. For example, you can’t use Google Apps and Adsense for domains on the same domain. Though adsense for domain on example.com and Google Apps service on mail.example.com (sub-domain) should be fine. Refer.
• With this program, you can change the look and feel of your entire page (not only the adsense ad) right from your adsense account. Some of the options available are-
• With adsense for domains you have the option to provide keywords. The keywords provided by you may be used while targeting ads. While specifying keywords make sure that you don’t give conflicting keywords for ambiguous domain names. For example if your domain name is appleforum.com, then either enter keywords that refer to fruit apple or enter keywords that refer to the company apple. But not to both. Refer some more hints.
• Here is a quick start guide on Google Adsense for domains.

As of now this program is only available to US publishers. Considering Google’s past record with such releases, it should be available to non-US publishers within 6 months.

Now why it can sound death bells to domain parking companies?

Most of the domain parking companies use ad feed from Google, Yahoo or Ask. Domain owners flock to them just because they want to utilize their unused domains and make some money out of it. The money made from such ads is divided between Google, domain parking company and publisher. With the introduction of this program, the middle-men (domain parking companies) can be easily cut. Thus making more moolah for a publisher. I guess in coming future these domain parking companies would get reduced to a market place or an escrow service provider for domain buyers/sellers.

Here I assume that you are using the blogger beta and not on the classic one. It’s been a long time now that blogger has moved to beta. There is no reason for you to remain on classic version now.

You want to show adsense ads on sidebar of the home page of your blogger blog and not on the other pages OR you want to show adsense ads on all pages except the homepage of your blogspot blog. Here is what you can do-

1. LogIn to the blogger dashboard. Go to Layout. Say you want to show ad on the left sidebar top. Click on “Add a Gadget” on LHS of layout and enter your adsense code. 
2. Now go to Edit HTML. Scroll down and locate left sidebar. You will find something like this-
3. Copy the name of the first widget. In my case it is HTML6.
4. Now click on Expand Widget Templates (given on top right) and search the name you have copied in the above step.   
5. You will find a similar code except what is in the red box above. Copy and paste  <b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;’> and </b:if>, EXACTLY at the same place as shown in the image above.
6. If you want to show ads on all pages except on the home page then copy and paste this <b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType != &quot;index&quot;’>

Save Template’ and you’re done.

Gozar!

Recently, Google started rolling out Adsense integration with Google Analytics. [If you have not got your invitation, fill out this form and Google will update you in 24hrs, I got it that ways!]

So far so good. The problem occurred when I clicked on the invitation link –Integrate with Google Analytics-on my adsense home page. It prompted me to either create a free account or use the existing analytics account.

I use two Google Accounts, one for adsense and the other for Gmail, Analytics, Orkut etc. After clicking on continue, this is what it had to say

There was no link , no option there to link adsense with the other Google Analytics account. If you are facing a similar problem here is what you can do:

1. Go to your Google Analytics Account.
2. Click on Analytics Settings on the top left side.
3. Scroll down on this page and click on User Manager.
4. Click on Add user link given on right side.
5. On the next page, enter your adsense email address.
6. Make access type as Account Administrator. [For some unknown reasons the integration would not work for View Reports account type]
7. Select all the website you want to grant access and move them to right hand side.
8. Save changes.
9. Now go to your adsense account home page and click on Integrate with Google Analytics. You will see a similar page as shown in image on the top.
10. Click on continue and you will find all your website names populated there. Enjoy!  

On a daily basis I hear people getting banned from adsense for one reason or the other. Here are some facts I have gathered to keep your account safe.

1. Don’t brag about your adsense income, unless you are some big time publisher like Markus, ShoeMoney, Amit or JimKarter. It seems Google give their top notch publisher some-unpublished-security from click frauds and probably they have a warning system in place for them unlike newbies who are banned from the program without warning,

2. Never ever touch the ad code. In rare cases when you have to do that, clarify with adsense support whether it is legal to do that. A couple of times I wanted to do that. First time they told yes but in second case I was shown the red flag. Though I was sure that in both cases, I wasn’t doing anything that could hurt adsense “system”.

3. Though Google does not ban you for creating ad impressions. But yes it may ring an alarm bell for a large no of impressions. This could be possible if you are operating a forum. Forum tend to have a high page impressions to visitors ratio. You can easily write a script whereby the ad would not be shown to you or any moderators thereby saving you from false page impressions.

4. Get a click monitoring software like asrep. In an unfortunate event when you get kicked off for no obvious fault of yours, you should be ready to show the click logs. I have found this software to be pretty good and moreover —as the site claims— it is approved by adsense.

5. Newbies to adsense have a tendency to fool this system, probably undermining or unaware of Google’s tracking and would go around cyber cafes/friends places and click their own ads. NEVER EVER do that. This is not to scare you but to let you know that Big G has some solid systems in place.

Related Post: How to test adsense ads without any fear of invalid impressions?