Internet users who feel that the tracking goes to far can install programs that disable the tracking. This ranges from the excellent NoScript add-on for the Firefox web browser or the Disconnect extension for the Google Chrome web browser.

If you want to block Google from tracking your every move, you’d could install Google Disconnect for the Firefox web browser. The add-on has been created by Brian Kennish, who is also responsible for the Facebook Disconnect extension which blocks website communication with Facebook.

Google Disconnect works similar to that extension, with the difference that it is blocking communication with Google servers. The Firefox add-on blocks Google scripts running on websites. This includes Google Adsense, Analytics and Google Plus. It is likely that additional scripts are blocked as well, but the Firefox add-on description is not providing enough information to tell which.

All Google services that you may use, Google Mail or Search for instance, continue to work as before. The extension is rather bare bones at the moment. Next to the missing list of services that it blocks, it is also not providing any visual indicators that scripts have been blocked. Options to block only select scripts are missing as well.

I have tested the add-on by opening websites that make use of Google services in Firefox with the script enabled, and in Google Chrome without the script. I also looked at the source code to make sure that the scripts were indeed not loaded at all.

Google Disconnect can be downloaded and installed at the official Mozilla add-on repository.

One of them was the non-existing option to pick site categories and provide information to potential advertisers. Google now has introduced the Google Ad Planner which changes this slightly. The service seems to be in a testing phase with webmasters being invited by email. Every website that has been added to Google Webmaster Tools can be added to Google Ad Planner which then offers a basic interface to add information about the website.

This includes a small 250 character description, the selection of an advertising url directly on the website, up to five categories that describe the website’s contents (Computer & Electronics category alone has dozens of subcategories to choose from, the accepted advertising forms and the option to share Google Analytics data with Google Ad Planner (only unique visitors and pageviews which are estimated by Ad Planner).

It is obviously to early to tell if these information will make any difference at all as they only seem to affect so called placement ads on a website. Placement ads are ads that are placed by Adwords customers directly on the website. This stands in contrast to contextual ads that are placed globally on websites. Contextual ads usually make up the bulk of ad placements on a website whereas placement ads pay better.

Interested webmasters can take a look at how their website is displayed by visiting the Google Publisher Center.

Usually, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is very critical of big corporations who intrude on people’s privacy, but their criticism was not very harsh. Why? Because Google has developed a web browser plug-in that permits users to opt-out of this scheme.

The plug-in is available for Internet Explorer and Firefox and modifications to browser preferences in Chrome and Safari also allow people to opt-out. Google also maintains an ‘Ad Preferences Manager‘ which allows this tracking cookie to be disabled until the next time cookies are wiped.

There are several reasons to disable these cookies. Firstly, you may not entrust Google with your details. Secondly, adverts based on past browsing may be displayed to other users of the computer… not perfect if, for example, you were buying a present for a family member and they are suddenly swarmed with advertisements about it!

Most tracking cookies can be disabled if you modify browser settings. In Firefox, for example, in Preferences>Privacy, you can refuse to ‘accept third party cookies’.

The Inside Adsense blog made an announcement today that changes this restriction. Adsense users can now switch from the default Google Adsense font selection to either Arial, Verdana or Times. This makes it easier to use the same font for the display of Adsense units that is being used on the rest of the website. It is most likely that using the same font to display the Adsense unit and the content on the website will yield higher revenue.

It is probably a good idea to test all three new font combinations on the website to find the one with the best results. Fonts can be changed for single ad units or globally in the Adsense account. A click on the My Account link in the top menu and a selection of Ad Display Preference will open the menu where the font setting can be edited globally. Individual ad units can be changed by clicking on Adsense Setup > Manage Ads > Edit Ad Settings.

Being able to change the default font face is definitely a step in the right direction. Premium publishers have still an advantage as they can change the font size and other settings as well which are still locked for non-premium users.

Would you be affected at all? Would you be able to access other systems and use them until Google would be up again? One serious problem with a company that has such a large market share is that their demise would affect a large part of the population. Pretty much everyone would be affected in one way or another if Google services would not be accessible anymore.

The Download Squad published an article yesterday about Google being down for 18 minutes. It turned out to be a false alarm and a problem of the Internet Provider Verizon and not Google.

Imagine how much buzz a downtime of an hour or two would create on the Internet. So, coming back to the initial question. What would you do and how would you be affected if Google went down right now?

There are for example no graphs, no hourly statistics or comparisons with past revenues. CSV Adstats aids webmasters tremendously. The tool can be configured to automatically download Adsense CSV files which are then analyzed by the tool.

Once that is done webmasters can access all sorts of statistics and graphs that give in depth information about Adsense performance including Adsense for Search and Referrals. Webmasters can analyze global stats or channel stats and receive information about revenue progression, revenue average, click through rate, cpm, clicks, views, compare charts with the last years and much more.

It would take a long time to describe all the different functions and options that CSV Adstats offers. What I really like is that it automatically updates your Adsense earnings throughout the day similar to the Adsense Notifier extension for Firefox. No browser is needed though to view the updates though.

I enjoyed the best of category as well which displayed the best revenue, cpc, ctr days since running Adsense. Webmasters who want to use CSV Adstats will have to add their adsense login details to the software to make it work which might be enough reason for some cautious site owners to not use the software.

It is to early to really say if this will turn out to be a lasting effect of if advertisers in turn will spend more money which results in higher earnings per click. I’m a bit skeptic that advertisers will really increase their bids on keywords and have the feeling that this drop will remain as it is for a very long time.

Several webmasters already decided to move away from Adsense and use other ways of monetizing their website. This is unfortunately not an option for many.

I compiled a list of tips that might help in this situation:

• Don’t panic ! This is probably the most important tip. We need more time to analyze the impact on the webmaster community and discover strategies on how to cope with this situation.
• Blending might not be the best option anymore. Most webmasters did blend their ads to fit into the site design. They were able to do this because it did not really matter where the user clicked on the ad. Even the whitespace was clickable. This is different now with only the title and url clickable
• Be patient when you try different ad units and color schemes. Try those for at least 1-2 days before you draw a conclusion. We all know that Adsense earnings rise and fall on a daily basis and it is essential to test ad units for a certain time. My suggestion would be to test them on at least two weekdays.
• Take the time and look for Adsense alternatives. It is always a good idea to look around and have alternatives if Adsense earnings remain on these low levels. A good starting point is Darrens Problogger blog and webmaster forums like Webmaster World and Digitalpoint
• Making Ads stick out. I’m currently testing different color schemes and a early conclusion that I can draw is that the color red seems to be excellent for a higher click through rate. I would suggest to change colors and ad units and test those as well. Title and URL have different sizes in many ad units which means that the clickable area is different as well. Some ad units do not display the URL at all which means that the only clickable area is the title.

Feel free to add additional tips and alternatives to Adsense. I would also be interested in your observations.

I’m using ad placements for a while with no obvious result whatsoever but it could be rather site specific. If I recall correctly those ads can then be booked directly at the website. It is not working at all for me but it does not cost anything and it could work for your website.

The second tip is a no brainer as well and I’m using this setting for a very long time. Image ads are mainly paid on a CPM basis while text ads on a CPC basis. Remember that the best paying unit is shown which could be either, so activate both.

Last but not least we have the medium rectangle which received their recommendation. I know that some webmasters are using this medium rectangle successfully on their websites while others have more success with the large rectangle. I’d say to test both and see which performs better on your website.

Besides this emails from Adsense representatives are floating around the web stating that there will be a major change in the design of the ad units. This has lead to some confusion among webmasters.

They say that descriptions and the background will no longer count as clicks that are paid in the future. Some webmasters understood it the way that they remain clickable but will not produce any revenue while others understood that they will not be clickable at all.

I think the latter will be the case because of this sentence:

Previously, users could click on the background and full text of an ad, but now users can click only on the title and URL of a text ad

Webmasters will nevertheless see a reduction in clicks and it remains to be seen if the drop in CTR will affect many webmasters. Googles hope is to make Adwords attractive to advertisers and that the reduction in accidental clicks will lead to better conversions and higher advertising budgets.

I don’t think it will make much of a difference for solid websites if the background and description will not be clickable anymore. What bothers me a little bit is that some Ad formats do not display a URL which would mean that the clickable area on those units would be reduced to the title.

The red bar is showing my Adsense earnings (excluding Adsense for search and Adsense Referrals) from October 2005 to October 2007, the blue bar showing the traffic that my blog received in that time (the impressions counted by Google to be precise). For the sake of getting those values on the same chart I decided to divide my traffic by 10, just imagine it would be somewhere outside that graph..

The interesting part is of course what we can learn from that graph. Here are my conclusions after looking at that graph.

• I did not start optimizing Adsense (position and layout) until May 06, that explains the first huge upswing in earnings.
• The rise in December 05 was due to several of my articles making it on the Digg frontpage.
• The big drops in revenue can not be explained with decreasing traffic. I’m not sure what caused the drops, I did change to my new theme in August which might have something to do with the drop. Not sure about the cause in April though.
• The traffic increase can be mainly attributed to increasing the post frequency from three to four / five posts per day.

Did you experience similar increases and drops since monetizing your blog with Google Adsense ? I used to panic a lot when I recognized huge drops in earnings but looking at this graph once again shows me that it does not make sense to panic. If traffic remains steady the revenue drop can more likely be attributed to holidays and advertisers stopping campaigns.

Webmasters who investigate their account ban may stumble upon sites that display advertisement with their Adsense ID embedded. Bad neighborhood sites, or sites in breach with the Adsense TOS could have led to the ban of the account. It was highly difficulty to prove to Google that particular websites were not related to the Adsense account.

Webmasters asked Google to implement the feature for a long time and finally Google decided to add it. The Adsense Setup tab of the Adsense account has a new tab called Allowed Sites. You have the option to add all of the sites that are your own and have the Google Adsense code implemented.

Ads will still show if they are implemented on a site that is not in the list but will not generate revenue. The problem that I see here is that it is not possible to get a list of sites that you probably missed when adding them. You could accidentally block one of your own sites if you are not careful with the feature. This should not be a problem for webmasters with one or two sites that use Adsense, but webmasters with dozens or hundreds of sites could easily forget to add one to the allowed sites listing.

I’m also not sure about cached pages and proxies which could turn out to be problematic if many of your visitors use proxies to connect to your sites.

Will you be using the new feature ?

The only prerequisite is that you do have an Google Adsense account. If you do not have one simply go to Google and signup for one. They take almost any site and do not look at visitors or other stats of your site. My first try at earning money from this referral did not work out well. I tried to add a banner in a sidebar at the beginning which did not work out that well. Mainly because it was out of context there and I removed it soon after placing it there.

I visited one of my partner sites (Webby’s World) by chance at work using the Internet Explorer and saw a message that caught my attention. The first paragraph after the header did not show his site content but a notice that I was not using Mozilla Firefox with a small text explaining why I should use Firefox. The link was of course a link to Google Referrals and I thought that this was indeed a great way of reaching a target audience. This text was not showing when I opened the site with Firefox which meant that he had to use some sort of script to determine the browser of the visitor. I decided to give this a try.

I did find a php script that was checking the browser of the visitor pretty fast and added it to my site with the Google Adsense Referral link and a short text inside. The results were amazing. I was able to earn five times the amount that I was earning before from referrals by targeting only Internet Explorer users and explaining to them why I made the suggestion to switch to Firefox with Google Toolbar. Let me show you the script first:


function ae_detect_ie()
{
if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']) &&
(strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'MSIE') !== false))
return true;
else
return false;
}
?>

Place Code and Text in here


I added the script to my single.php file of WordPress below the articles. I first thought about placing it on top like I saw it at Webby’s World but I did not want to remove the attention of my visitors from my articles. It surely performs better if placed at the top of the site.

I may not disclose how much I’m earning with those referrals but I can give you a percentage. I’m currently earning about 5% of my monthly Adsense earnings from those referrals which is a nice addition.

If you want to test how it looks on my blog visit my blog once with Firefox or Opera and then with Internet Explorer.