Google Adsense Referral Ad Changes

On Tuesday, Talia Brodecki from Google Adsense Product Marketing, announced that two impending changes to Google Adsense Referral ads. If you, as the publisher, live in North America, Latin America, or Japan, there will be no more sign-up bonus and less earnings for referring a user to Adsense. Check out the link above for more explanation.

The second and more relevant change to me is that publishers outside of the three regions listed above, you will not be able to promote Adsense as referrals. When this change takes effect at the end of January, you may still continue to promote referrals for other products listed in your account under "Adsense Setup" -> "Get Ads" -> "Referrals" (see below).

I have been showing referral ads for third-party advertisers using this sort of Adsense ads, and I have to admit they have not been successful at all. Perhaps the conversion criteria of advertisers have never been met as they usually require the visitor to purchase products or signup for services. Thus, I prefer to show Google-related referrals, such as Adsense, AdWords, Google Pack, and Firefox plug Google Toolbar, because their conversion is more attractive and their target audience is more global.

Getting visitors to switch web browsers from Microsoft Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox is the most satisfying because I've been a strong advocate of Firefox. If you're not on Firefox, you're missing out on the superior page rendering and extensive functionalities of this open-source browser. Click on the link on the right to download Firefox!

Back to Adsense referrals, unless you have a blog topic related to helping publishers monetizing their sites, I'd recommend you avoid promoting such referrals at all. Google Pack is a good choice as the software pack is very useful for common Internet users.

Technorati Tags: google, google adsense, advertisement, referral, referral ad, adsense referral, make money

Made Three-Figure Income with Google Adsense

After a long time of waiting for my Google Adsense publisher earnings to accumulate, I've finally received my first payment from Google via Western Union Quick Cash method. The feeling of getting paid a three-figure for publishing online ads is satisfying and honorable. It's not often that I get noticed by a billion-dollar company once in a while. :)

For most of us publishers residing in Asia where Western Union remittance is common, I'd recommend using Western Union Quick Cash to get paid easily. In your Google Adsense account, go to "My Account" -> "Account Settings" -> "Payment Details", select "Setup Western Union Quick Cash" and follow the wizard.

If you have set for payment to be released (under "My Account" -> "Payment History"), your earnings will be sent to you by the end of the month after your account balance reaches your payment threshold (usually US$50). I saw that mine was issued on 24 December 2007, but I didn't realize until I checked the page a week later. Somehow, Google Adsense did not notify me by e-mail, which I expected.

You will be able to see the payment details in this page, such as the payment date, money transfer control number (MTCN), and payment amount. Print out a statement of these details by clicking on the link at the bottom "Statement of Earnings". Go to your nearest Western Union branch with these details and a government/state issued identity document. Fill up the Western Union Money Transfer "To receive money" form, where you will need to use the printed statement for the sender (Google) details such as its address and MTCN.



Here is the form from CIMB Bank Malaysia which has Western Union services in most, if not all, branches. CIMB is, like most other banks in Malaysia, horrendously slow. I had to wait more than an hour with four customers ahead of me.

Western Union and the bank takes a cut of about 0.9%, according to the prevailing US currency exchange rate. They pay cash in local currency.

Some of you may ask, what are my tips for making money using Google Adsense. I'll share three tips here.

1. Build a good source of content that is fresh, relevant, and pleasantly-presented. Remember that ads are meant to help lead visitors to useful products and services which will make the experience of going to your site more valuable.
2. Optimize the context and placement of the ads (e.g. using "google_ad_section" tags), check out Google Adsense Help for more information on how. Large rectangles, vertical banners and link units are the best, YMMV.
3. Make use of channels to help monitor the performance of different types of ads (according to site, format, placement, etc.) so that you can take action as per tip #2.

I've yet to see my earnings payment from Nuffnang Malaysia, but meanwhile if you have a good experience with Google Adsense or more tips on using Google Adsense, share them here by adding a comment.

Technorati Tags: google, google adsense, make money, earnings payment, western union, quick cash, money transfer control number, cimb bank, ad earnings

Google Adsense Rotating Leaderboard Ads

Google Adsense has started putting rotating text ads for the 728x90 leaderboard format. For visitors, they will see two small arrow buttons on the bottom left of the ad space, as shown below. This was captured from my Malaysia Crime Watch Forum site.


Clicking on the right arrow button causes the current ads to slide and fade off to the right, and a new set of ads appear in their place. Note the mouse icon on the next screenshot.


The feature allows visitors to browse five sets of ads, so on the fifth click, only the right arrow button can be clicked, as shown below.


The loading of the next set of ads is quite fast and unobtrusive. When a set has been loaded before, it is cached and loads faster subsequently. It is very convenient to use, but perhaps more can be done to attract visitors to the buttons. Maybe Google Adsense should allow us publishers to specify the onbutton and offbutton colors.

This new feature gives publishers' sites more ad value as visitors get to see more ads without the site being cluttered up by numerous ad spaces. Perhaps the click value is less for the sets of ads other than the initially displayed one. Another suggestion for the Google Adsense team is to give publishers the option to automatically rotate the ads so that visitors can be easily attracted to the ad space.

I have also initiated my first payout instructions for Google Adsense and Nuffnang Malaysia yesterday. I'll be sharing the exciting news on my revenue gained from these advertising platforms when I receive the money over the next few weeks.

Technorati Tags: google, google adsense, leaderboard ad, rotating ad, arrow button, nuffnang, make money

News - From nntp to rss

Over ten years ago when Netscape was the de facto standard and finger was not a rude thing to do, I got started in the news and discussion addiction using nntp, or Network News Transfer Protocol.

Think of nntp as the ancestor of rss, or Really Simple Syndication (really). A network of nntp servers would be available for you to access and browse the discussion channels available. The number of channels during those days were in tens of thousands, from Apple to camping, Star Trek to Microsoft. Each channel has a thread of replies to one another with each message looking very much like an e-mail. The messages are just text-based, with the occasional text-encoding of binaries such as warez and pictures.

Those were the humble and sometimes underground days when news and data were quietly exchanged between people all over the world. Browsers were not favoured yet, and ftp was like the Internet jet engine of file sharing. I remember this was the way we used to get antivirus and browser updates from McAfee and Netscape respectively.

The program which I used to talk nntp was from Forte, called Free Agent for Windows 95. It was a simple three-frame Windows interface that worked well to deliver news. However, just like the news of today, I easily got flooded with news. Now, Forte seems to only have Agent commercially and it supports e-mail as well.

In 2007, we have Google Reader, which combines fancy http push (AJAX) and good 'ol frames. It can automatically update the news as they are published from blogs, newspapers and corporations. You can tag and categorize news. Best of all, it uses the familiar vi command set (e.g. j for down, k for up). Just like other Google apps, it is very accessible since it is web-based.

Just like a decade ago, look at the volume of news I go through... it's crazy in this information age.

Links:

Wikipedia - Network News Transfer Protocol
<URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nntp>

Forte
<URL:http://www.forteinc.com/main/homepage.php>

Google Reader
<URL:http://www.google.com/reader/>

Technorati Tags: review, software, nntp, news, forte, free agent, rss, google reader

Five Search Engines Old Timers Should Know

In the years before Google was anything but a simple colourful page, there were several legacy search engines still crawling the young and delicate Internet (or ARPANET). For those of you who first got online with a dial-up modem more than ten years ago, you should know these five common search engines back then.

1. Altavista

Has always been so minimalistic in design and returns useful results consistently. One nifty app that I still use for fun and research is the Babelfish (a nod to Douglas Adams fans).

2. WebCrawler

My second favourite search engine after Altavista. Its results are presented in a pleasant format.

3. Lycos

Lycos was probably the first search engine with lots of news links and little applications that Google is so well known for now.

4. Excite

Excite's design hasn't changed much since the beginning: just as messy. The results are quite accurate though.

5. Netscape

The darling of the early Web. Old timers were surfing using Netscape betas, cool! Back then, nobody heard of Internet Explorer, just Mozilla and mostly lynx (ahh beauty).

In another year, Google would be ten years old anyway.

Links:

Wikipedia - Advanced Research Projects Agency Network
<URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET>

Search Engine Watch - Where Are They Now? Search Engines We've Known & Loved
<URL:http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2175241>

Technorati Tags: search engine, altavista, webcrawler, lycos, excite, netscape

Google Reader Trends

Google Reader (GR), a web-based RSS reader, which I use to read my subscription feeds from various sources, has added the ability to view your reading trends. As you browse through your feeds and view pages, Google Reader tracks your usage and counts the readership rates.

Explore Google Reader by signing up for a Google account, if you haven't already done so. Then, go to GR and click on the "Trends" link in the middle of the page. The GR team hasn't yet added a link on the left sidebar to the "Trends" page, so click on the "Home" link if you can't find it.

The page is organized into five sections: a summary, graphs, reading trends, subscription trends, and a tags cloud.

Google Reader Trends page

At the top left side, you will find a summary of what you have been reading in your subscriptions. A rough indication of how scholarly you are. :)

Summary of my usage. Yes, quite a bit of reading.

The next three screenshots show my usage patterns over 30 days, a week, and hours of a day. Like most white-collar lemmings, I'm not particularly active online during the weekends, especially over the recent year-end holidays (5 days!).

On a typical 24-hour period, I tend to read mostly during mid-afternoon and quite a bit around midnight.

Last 30 days graph

Day of the week graph

Time of day graph

I don't actually read all posts, especially Bloggingstocks.com and Digg. More than half of them I skim over the title and just that bit of information is digested.

The reading and subscription trends show how complete I go through each subscription. Most of them are 100%, because my style of reading is to decide on-the-stop whether the post is worth reading or I should mark it as read immediately. Therefore, what I have left unmarked are all unread.

Go try out GR Trends and see how well fed you are on the web. Or is it watch what and how you eat?

Links:

Google Reader
<URL:http://www.google.com/reader>

Technorati Tags: google, google reader, trends, rss reader, statistics

Site Traffic Analysis for Q4 2006

lokety.com

My personal website, lokety.com, typically has an average of 83 pageviews per day for Q4 2006. I track and analyze my sites using Google Analytics, which has pretty cool and useful statistics. There are two spikes over this period:

Date	Pageviews	Unique Visitors
6 November 2006	713	36
2 January 2007	174	48

Date range: 1 Nov 2006 to 3 Jan 2007

The first spike is probably when I was testing a http-refresh page which shows random funny/witty quotes. More than 600 hits were to this page. It is meant to be displayed at the bottom of the splash page. Click here to view it. Since then, I've reduced the refresh frequency.

Date range: 4 Dec 2006 to 3 Jan 2007

The second spike shows how visitors like to come back to surfing my site after a long holiday period. As usual, the MechWarrior 2 Infopage came out tops, contributing to 44% of the 174 hits that day. The Myst and Riven Infopage placed second with about 13% share.

Date: 2 Jan 2007

Based on 337 search keywords used in December 2006, the following are the top three:

1. mechwarrior
2. singapore
3. t28

In the same month, Mozilla Firefox accounts for 26.4% of the browsers surfers use, while Microsoft Internet Explorer has 61.1%.

glob.lokety.com

The ultra-hip blog site has had 3 significant moments in the past quarter. The record 36 pageviews occurred on 13 December 2006.

Date range: 1 Oct 2006 to 3 Jan 2007

I think they have something to do with the top 3 posts and search keywords:

1. Google Finance Website Revamped
2. Cell Therapeutics To Submit New XYOTAX Drug Trial to FDA
3. Secure and Convenient Keyless Door Locks
   

1. malaysia
2. medklinn
3. ctic

Much thanks go out to the PayPerPost forum and WebProNews for their links. They helped my blog to reach almost 6 pageviews per day for Q4. Yay.

Gabriel's Journal

My son's blog has not seen more visitors, especially after the migration from the old domain name to gabriel-loke.blogspot.com. The average pageviews per day is 2.95.

Date range: 1 Oct 2006 to 3 Jan 2007

I appreciate the distant visitor from Hawaii, who must have made extra effort to find my boy's blog. Please do come again. :)

Date range: 1 Oct 2006 to 3 Jan 2007

Of the 266 pageviews, 187 of them or 70.3% landed on the index page. It will be a challenge to encourage these surfers to be interested to read more than the first two posts.

Technorati Tags: website, site analysis, google analytics, pageviews, hits, unique visitors, site traffic

Google Finance Website Revamped

Google has changed its finance news and charting website, Google Finance.



The new layout much cleaner and presentable as the page is divided into three columns. Recent quotes, stored using browser cookies, has been moved from the top right corner to the lower left corner. General news and corporate news of the recent quotes are featured in the center column. Most links on the page will bring you to a different page, except the top movers on the lower right.

However, the individual stock pages have not changed. :|

Overall looks pretty, but I have a few suggestions:

• Dynamically refresh each section using individual settings (they do change now, which is really cool)
• Display summary or beginning of news articles when mouseover links
• Background colour-code recent quotes with their related news
• Include stock historical prices and options

Maybe I should feedback these pointers to the Google Finance team? Although the traffic to this site is a fraction of that to Yahoo! Finance, I'm staying here because there are no fancy advertisements (full of offers that hardly benefit most of us but only the advertiser).

Technorati Tags: google finance, new website, website revamp, finance, recent quotes, new layout, yahoo finance, corporate news

Google To Launch New Ad Model

David Jackson from SeekingAlpha Network said that he received an invitation from Google (GOOG) to try a new ad revenue model, known as Cost-Per-Action (CPA). This is in addition to the existing Cost-Per-1000-Impressions and Cost-Per-Click models.

The site owner gets paid an advertising commission if the visitor clicks on the ad and performs a certain action. This action can be buying a product or referring more visitors to the advertiser's site. This model is similar to affiliate marketing, commonly practiced by many stores. One example is Sideshow Toys.

<URL:http://internet.seekingalpha.com/article/12363>

Technorati Tags: google, adsense, revenue model, advertising, marketing

Google Trends and Desktop

The Google machine has gave birth to two new/updated services: Google Trends and Google Desktop.

Trends shows the volume of search and news of any topic over time. You could see how often you are mentioned on the web by enterting your name. So far, no one has bothered about me, but why do I still get 50+ spam mail per day?

Search concentration is also sorted city, region and language.

I did a trend comparison between Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. Click here. Before Firefox 1.0 was released, interests about the browser increased tremendously. Goes to show what folks are looking for an answer to a better web experience.

Another fun search I did was this. Scroll down and click "Regions". Yeah, we Malaysians think about it all the time. :)

Google Desktop is a cool nugget of a software that I've been missing. It could replace my de-facto way of local searching (Windows+F) and aggregation of news (Serene Klipfolio). On top of that, it has the fancy photo and Google Earth integration. Yeah, you can keep your Mac, I'm still not interested.

I have an idea, maybe some of you may know that it actually exists. How about a Desktop plug-in that analyzes your computer usage patterns (frequency, duration, types of files accessed, speed and pattern of typing) and helps you organize information and pop you new presentations of your data. I've always been impressed with the cool crap flying around computer interfaces in movies like Minority Report and I, Robot. I think I've read about it before and it is being developed by an upstart using some natural algorithms.

Here are the links:

<URL:http://www.google.com/trends>
<URL:http://desktop.google.com/>

Oh, while you're fiddling with these goodies from Google, don't forget to buy a lot or two:

<URL:http://finance.google.com/finance?q=GOOG&btnG=Search>

Technorati Tags: google, trends, desktop, software