Adsense Tracker Software Review

After Nick talked about using Adsense tools to manage your blogs click through performance I thought it would be a good idea to talk about my adsense tracking tool of choice.

AdsenseGold is one of a few products that I believe came out scripts produced in a WebmasterWorld discussion (sorry, no link. reg required) where the Google Adsense rep also provided a note that doing this sort of tracking is within the TOS.

As Nick has already said in his post, when you visit his site it is heavy on the hard-sell snake oil but do not let that put you off, the product is ok despite all that.

The product is $97, ignoring the "bonus free gifts" (and you should ignore them), you need to decide if you will gain more than £50 odd that you are spending. Let's dig deep and see what we find.

Installation

To run this product you need to have your own web hosting with PHP and MySQL capability. Failing that, as the product runs independently of your blog(s) see if a friend will allow you to install it on their hosting.

When you pay for the product you will download a .zip file. This contains the PHP scripts plus a installation guide in PDF format. There are also videos to help you with aspects of the installation.

The software is only installed once, even if you have multiple blogs. Each blog just needs a snippet of Javascript to perform the actual tracking. Installing involves uploading the files to a directory on your web server, creating a new database in MySQL and running the "install.php" script to configure the scripts to talk to your database and setup your user login for the reports.

How it works

These tools are not exact. Google does not provide any "hooks" into their software so the Javascript has to make an educated guess. The way it works is to go through all the iframes embedded in the page and looks for signs that the iframe is displaying an ad. When you hover your mouse over an ad the status bar changes, this is how the script picks up your chosen ads destination. While there are alternatives that use Google Analytics that claim to work with Firefox, this one does not seem to track Firefox clicks. I still use the product though because of the additional information it provides.

Reports

We are looking at the product to provide us with information, that's the important bit. As you would expect, the only information it doesn't provide is click value. The only way to get that is to log into your Adsense account. Until Google open up that information via API it will remain unavailable.

You can view the information by

• domains - more than likely going to be your blogs, unless you have multiple blogs on one domain
• date - you can choose date ranges or by month etc
• hour - time of day has an effect on click through
• ads - the ads that get clicked the most, I might approach my top advertiser
• formats - 336x280 is performing best for me on one of my blogs, this alone is valuable info!
• directory - the content folders that get clicks, this could be individual blogs or categories depending how you have yours set up
• page - individual pages, I have pages that way outperform others
• referrer - where your traffic is coming from, I have one referrer that consistently gets me more clicks ... I need to work out why
• referrer domain - my best referring site is not a search engine remarkably!
• keywords - which phrases are generating clicks, you can tune your content to these to attract more. For a long while I got a lot of clicks for one phrase, working out why earned me big time.
• clicks - just look at all the info for clicks
• ip addresses - which hosts are clicking, essential for click fraud investigation
• channels - compare and contrast with channel info, you could have a channel for "top ad", "left margin", "navigation" to further drill down useful stats

Interpreting the information

This is where you work out if there is value in having this information. Most people use channels to track performance of their adsense. Channels are a good way to tune, and that might be all you need.

Where scripts such as these come in is for spotting patterns that channels will not provide on their own.

Using this script I found out that all the clicks on one of my sites was coming from the homepage. This is not common across my sites, most of them have high performing content pages. Discovering what it was that was causing this anomaly paid back the price of the script on its own.

With your blogs you might discover certain search phrases bring in the clicks more than others, or that certain content outperforms others. I have two pages that brought in about $30 each last month. Not a lot looked at just in money terms, but a great success when you consider I can write many more posts about those two topics and when you look at the vast difference in CTR between those pages and the others. Heck, I could write a whole blog about one of the topics.

Summary

Choose this product or any of the others, but do get additional adsense stats. It has been well worth it for me.