A Big Xmas Present from Google Adsense

Our family doesn't do Xmas presents; we stopped all that years ago. It makes for a much less stressful holiday. However, Google just gave me a present I've been begging and whining about for years: they are integrating Adsense into Analytics. You'll be able to get "reports that break down AdSense performance both by page and by referring site".

I cannot begin to express how happy this makes me. This completely eliminates the need for clumsy solutions like Asrep, lessens the need for channels and takes the guesswork out of whether it's worth running ads on a particular page at all, which types of ads work best, which positions.. I'm giddy with excitement.

This is good news for everyone, publishers, advertisers and visitors. Advertisers will see better performance, publishers can tune for increased revenue and visitors should see less ads - the current shot-gun approach should be able to be tuned to be much more focused. Why annoy people by running ads on pages that never convert? Why run ads in positions that don't work? This is the best thing Google has done yet!

Analytics will also break down keywords, so if I found that people arriving at a page after searching for "x" convert well but people searching for "y" never are interested, I can suppress the ad for those people. This is wonderful!

Bloggers who write about multiple subjects may find patterns that suggest they should be writing less about certain areas and more about others. Or again, they may just want to suppress ads on the topic pages that don't convert well.. all very possible.

Chitika et al., are you listening? You need to provide the same depth of reporting. The cat is out of the bag; you will have to match this.

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Sun Dec 14 15:25:07 2008: Subject:   TonyLawrence


Update: I'm able to see a little of this in Analytics now.

The only thing that seems to be missing is a breakdown by ad type: was it the 728x90 that worked or the336x280? They don't include that.

It's far too early for me to have learned anything useful from the reports - I'll need at least a months worth of data before I can really dig in and analyze, but I am SO happy to have this now!

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