Last week, in the first half of our series designed to help you better understand your earnings, we introduced you to the ad auction for AdSense for content. To recap, eligible ads compete to appear on your pages; our ad auction determines which ads show, and how much you can potentially earn from them. Now, let’s talk about smart pricing, a tool designed to help advertisers bid efficiently and effectively on many publishers’ ad auctions at once. Our Chief Economist, Hal Varian, explains >>Read more
Archive for September, 2010
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Back To Basics: The Power of Exclusion (Part 2)
September 29th, 2010 
JOY Last week, we saw how a website owner removed traffic from his latest promotion to study the effects of that promotion on his data. The blue line represents all visits over a 2-week period. The spike in the middle is due to a 50%-off referral-based promotion. The yellow line is where it gets interesting. This line represents all traffic except traffic from the promotional site. Since the yellow line excludes the promotional referrals, why does it show a spike in traffic? To find >>Read more
BazaarVoice Integration
September 28th, 2010 JOY We always love to share news about integrations and applications built on the Google Analytics platform. Here’s one from Bazaarvoice. Bazaarvoice helps e-commerce sites become social by providing a platform for visitors to leave comments and reviews about products. It's user-generated content right on an e-commerce website. With this new integration, Google Analytics users can now see visitor interaction with their Bazaarvoice social content. Here's what Andy Wolfe, Product Manager at >>Read more
Learn AdSense optimization techniques with our new video series
September 28th, 2010 JOY Did you know that a simple change like enabling both text and image ads can boost your eCPM and revenue? Or that a 300x250 medium rectangle typically performs much better in terms of revenue than a 250x250 square? Or that widening an AdSense search box can double the number of queries performed on your site, leading to higher earnings? If you didn’t, don’t sweat it -- the AdSense team and I have come up with a list of six top optimization tips and best practices that can help you earn >>Read more
How to: Out Yourself for Buying Links
September 27th, 2010 JOY Effective marketers leverage marketing channels. Scammers & spammers ruin them for everyone else. There is a long line of this on the web... Email was personal, then it was easy to automate & done in bulk. Guest books and blog comments were a way to add value, then they were sources of free links. Links were a signal of relevancy, then they were bought and sold in bulk. As people get burned the web as a whole gets more cynical. The scammers steal from the plates of honest folks >>Read more
Forbes.com – Home to The Best Press Releases in the World!
September 27th, 2010 JOY Forbes AdVoice, a new Forbes editorial strategy that does away with the traditional barriers between advertising and editorial content: The pitch is this: We'll sell you a blog, and your content will live alongside that of Forbes' journalists and bloggers. This isn't the "sponsored post" of yore; rather, it is giving advocacy groups or corporations such as Ford or Pfizer the same voice and same distribution tools as Forbes staffers, not to mention the Forbes brand. "In this case the marketer >>Read more
Chrome 6 Issue Corrected
September 24th, 2010 JOY Chrome version 6.0.472.55 was an incremental update to a new version of Chrome released on September 7 and announced here. There was a bug in the JavaScript engine that reported the wrong type of some JavaScript objects in a very specific case. This caused Chrome to incorrectly execute Google Analytics' JavaScript, providing an artificially high visitor count for some websites, for their visitors using that particular version of the Chrome browser. Note, not all Google Analytics accounts were >>Read more
New! Status Dashboard
September 24th, 2010 JOY Google Analytics processes huge volumes of data for websites around the world everyday, thanks to Google’s globally renowned infrastructure. While we never stop focusing on system reliability and scalability (here's an example), we also want to make sure our users have an easy way to get the latest updates from us should there be a problem. Today, we’re pleased to announce that we have launched the Google Analytics Status Dashboard. Now anyone can visit this Status Dashboard to check on >>Read more
Web Analytics TV #12 – The power of the API
September 23rd, 2010 JOY Lo and behold, it’s another episode of Web Analytics TV. In this exciting series with Avinash Kaushik and Nick Mihailovski, you ask and vote on your favorite web analytics questions via the Google Analytics Google Moderator site and we answer them. In this episode, we are delighted to have Rod Jacka as our special guest on Web Analytics TV. Rod is the Managing Director of Panalysis, a specialist web business analytics company and GA Certified Partner, Rod has experience in every web >>Read more
Insight into your earnings Part I: Explaining the ad auction
September 23rd, 2010 JOY "Why do I earn more money from some ads and less from others? Why do my AdSense for content earnings vary from day to day, or week to week?" If you’ve asked yourself questions like these before, you’re not alone -- we often hear from publishers that they’re unsure of how earnings are calculated and why their earnings fluctuate. As part of our efforts to be more transparent with publishers, we’re kicking off a two-part series to help explain these topics. With the help of Hal Varian, >>Read more
