Late last week I found a surprising email in my inbox – from Google.
One of the product managers at Google’s Adsense said she’d found ProBlogger and wanted to know if she could ring me to talk about my experience with the program. At first I was excited – then I was a little cautious – I asked for proof that she was really from Adsense as I didn’t want to give any information away to anyone who shouldn’t get it – she provided me with details of my earnings that no one else could know. We then set up a time for her to call me – yesterday morning Aussie time.
The conversation was pretty interesting – I wasn’t sure what to expect or how to prepare for it. Without giving away all the details of our chat – Google was largely interested in hearing about how I’d started blogging, how I’d found Adsense, what impact it had had on my business and my tips for optimizing Adsense ads.
All up we must have chatted for 30 to 45 minutes in which time we covered a fair bit of ground.
At the end of the conversation the product manager invited me to email them with any further thoughts on the Adsense program as they were interested in any more thoughts that I had.
This got me thinking that perhaps I should open up the question to readers to answer.
- What feedback would you like Google to hear about Adsense as a publisher?
- What have you found that works well with Adsense?
- What do you wish they’d add to it?
- How would you improve any aspect of the system that they currently have?
Have you say in comments below and I’ll email a link to your comments to my new Adsense contact for her perusal. You never know – you might just say something that gets implemented in the future?
Blimey, in the world of blogs, that’s a bit like getting a call from the Queen.
There’s a fair bit of criticism of Google’s policy of kicking blogs/websites off without any recourse.
I think the biggest problem with Google’s Adsense is the lack of communication. Things happen without explanation, only to be banished forever. It would help if there was recourse for things that happend.
Google could help itself in that respect quite a bit instead of being equated with the evil empire. =P
Hi,
I would like to see them start a froogle adsense partner program, like shopping.com and pricegrabber have for there partners.
Regards Paul
I would love to set up a group of keywords on which ads are displayed. For example I run a site about webhosting and of course every single advertising is for webhosting. But I guess that my readers would also like to see some ads about webdesign, internet access providers etc.
I wish they’d get their direct deposit and RSS feed ads started. I’ve been waiting for these for a while, but they only offer them to certain people. The direct deposit payment method is especially important. For a small website, $100 could take years to get through the program. A direct deposit every $10 would be much better.
And hey, if she sees any of those people in charge of Gmail, tell them to release the dang thing to the public already. The whole “invited only” thing is getting silly.
That is pretty cool. I think the only thing I would change about adsense is of course adding even more ad size formats so that ads could fit in more areas and whatnot.
Hi Darren,
I feel they must get keywords from each block where we place their ad.. Take for example, my blog… It is more regarding technology, so one blog will say about .net & microsoft, another will tell about Linux, another will tell abt. the current happening in the industry, and it goes like that. And everything will be in the same(one) page…
The problem is, the adsense code placed b/w each of the blog entry will show unrelated ads in the above case… I can give handful of live examples… . thats the issue, hope u understood…….
” What do you wish they’d add to it?”
I’d love to see a chart showing the averages of our earnings. Something more graphical (I’m a visual guy!)
Paypal. Please give us payment directly to our Paypal accounts. Google Wallet hasn’t come out yet and it will surely be successful. But until then, can’t Google give us a break and give us Paypal support…
Maybe it sounds too fantastic yet (but hey! we have 21st century and where are those flying cars everybody was promising me by now?) but I would like Google AdSense to offer advertisements for podcasts. It would look like this: I upload a file with MP3 to Google’s server and I specify topics of my podcast. Then when users are downloading these podcsasts, then Google is adding audio advertisements at the end and at the beginning of each podcast.
If google would implement it then I kindly ask for “invented by http://comicstripblog.com” notice – I need no other credit for this invention.
well, ive had a bad experience – just started adsense a few weeks ago and someone started giving false clicks – turned out the gy thought he was doing me a favor and it was done without my knowledge.
google closed my account (as you would expect) but as this was nothing to do with me i cant see any avenue of recourse to communicate with them – ive explained in an email what happened but no response.
It got my mind thinking too – if someone didnt like you (possible) they could literally close your business by giving you false clicks and before you notice yourself then bang your account is dead.
In my case it wasnt malicious – the guy actually thought he was doing me a favor – i nearly died when i found out and told him to stop immediately but it was too late.
I understand their reason for closing the account – but is there no recourse for those who werent involved in the clicks.
Google need to have some kind of appeals route that you can go through.
Darren, maybe they are covering you for the next Adsense success story on their website.
I would like to put content specific adsense in my blogger posts- like you have on yours- The java doesn’t help me, and putting it on the side doesn’t allow it to be specific enough for the post I want it attached too.
Thanks
Maybe a client side app with settings or stats and graphs from google itself would be nice. And other ways to implement the ads indeed. :)
I would really like to see a different method of javascript. It makes google ads harder to track and deploy along with other ads. I would be happy to put a bit of code on each of my pages to help improve the ad placement but I would also like to use it with my current banner software.
So more “deployment” options.
I’ve tried Adwords and I really had to work to fit what I wanted to say into so few characters. Providing an option to have a wider formatted ad with more text might help with those Adsense sites that displayed the ads.
I second the PayPal bit.
While targetting seems to generally work, if the word “blog” appears multiple times on a blog mainly about technology or a non-blog subject, please take that into account and don’t just show blogging-related ads. Of course, allowing people to filter in or out keywords would lead to massive abuse, so perhaps they could do that transparently.
The paypal payments would be nice.
More customisations/integration options for the adsense for search would be nice. At the moment you have very few options :(
Completely unrelated to Adsense, it would be nice if google could understand a bit better what sites are about. The linked blog covers a wide range of subjects, but most of the posts are political. I also post (what I consider) humor occasionally and some celebrity stuff. This month out of my top 10 search terms 8 deal with celebrites and only one with the more important topic of my site. To a certain extent that’s because the former gets more searches than the latter, but it’s also because most newspapers don’t have those search phrases but with the political matters I’ve got all the same words they do and I get outranked by newspaper stories.
And, yesterday Drudge was linking to a story about strange doings on a farm in Washington. I really wanted to post about that, but I also felt constrained a bit because I didn’t want adsense to end up thinking that because of that one post my site was about those doings. Perhaps there could be a way to say “don’t take this page into account when targetting the other pages at this site.”
1) PayPal and/or other online ways to get paid.
2) Option to have lower payment thresholds (for those who want it, esp. when/if online payments become available).
3) RSS Feeds Ads availability to more publishers.
4) Relevance and customisation of RSS Feeds Ads.
5) Easier communication.
6) Make sure that cases like the one mentioned by “soul” can’t be easily done. Although I’m not sure how often that sort of thing happens.
7) AdSense availability for podcasts and video. This is probably a long way off, but still a good thing to consider as early as now.
Google AdSense Wish List
Darren over at ProBlogger.net recently asked for feedback about the Google AdSense programme. He’s hoping to be able to communicate responses to The Big G itself. And, of course, with the hopes that…
I like the idea of putting Froogle ads/products, similar to pricegrabber storefronts. I’m sure Google has already thought of the Advertising Podcast model, and I bet we’ll see that soon.
Great site!
Communications and transparency are my two issues. Unfortuntely like a lot of Google at the moment their speed in communicating in response to emails etc is slow. Transparency when it comes to kicking people off the program, I’ve heard horror stories all over the place when it comes to this one. I understand and respect that click fraud is a serious problem but Google has to consider that sometimes its not the fault of the blog owner. Thankfully I’ve not had any major problems myself but imagine having a good month and Google shutting your account and you losing all your money, and you Darren have got a bigger exposure then the rest of us combined.
One last point in relation to Lonewacko’s comments, I agree, they’ve still got some work to do on ad delivery, I’ve found that on some sites the ads deliver “blog” content because they are on a blog but not actually the topic of the blog.
I’ve heard that in India there are “sweatshops” where, for a fee, you can have 100 people click continuously on your ads. This must be very visible to Google.
I 2nd most of whats been said, particularly the online payment systems (direct deposit, paypal, etc.) and lower payment threshhold.
Also, the Adsense for content javascript is not compatable with XHTML sent with the XHTML+XML mimetype. There is a workaround available, but it would be better if Google’s code handled it.
And definitely better communication, that is probably Adsense’s worst point.
I’d love for the people at Adsense to talk to the people in the engine rankings dept.
Adsense offers up 100% accuracy with the Ads it serves my pages, yet my rankings on key search phrases is poor. Seems like the Adsense side can work out exactly what my site is about, yet seems to struggle putting my site into a relevant search engine query result.
I’d also love a bit more control over the ad layout, to enable easier integration into particular sections of the site.
I would like to personally thank Google for always paying me on time!!
Keep up the good work!!
Angela ;-)
I applied for Google’s Adsense twice and was turned down both times:
“We did not approve your application for the reasons listed below. If
you are able to resolve these issues, please feel free to reply to this
email for reconsideration when you have made the changes.
Issues:
– Unacceptable site content”
Apparently, memorializing the dead with obituaries is unacceptable. Despite the fact that my blog has received positive writeups in USA Today, MSNBC, The Miami Herald and various other media markets, and receives more than 5,000 visitors a day, I’m still unable to utilize this service. So, I switched to Blogads, which to date, has not let me down.
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Jade, that’s odd. I wonder how many Mainstream sites have obituary sections and put googleads on – I guess it depends which site you get approved the first time, as there appear to be few restrictions on what other sites you can put your code on afterwards.
I’ve so far had good impressions of Google AdSense support team. They’ve provided me useful information, they even took the time to answer my stupid questions. I got my first check last week. My only complaint would be that it takes so long for the check to actually get here. Don’t most mails only take a week tops to deliver, even internationally? Also if they could widen their direct electronic transfer support for South Asian countries it would be nice (nicer for me at least, but I’m sure there’s a few hundred/thousand others that would agree). One last thing. On specific blog posts I get irrelevant ads. I’m guessing my sidebar links has a lot to do with it. It would be nice if AdSense only try to match their ads with blocks of text instead of every single word including outgoing links, etc. I think that would improve contextuality (sp?) and better value for both the advertiser and the publisher. Thank you! :)
I’d like an option whereby if there are no ads to serve, and you haven’t/don’t want to provide an alternative colour or adverts, then it just ‘closes the gap’ – this would need to be an option otherwise it could mess up areas where the ad block forms part of the page structure. It would be useful where ads are served mid- or post-article.
I’ve been extemely patient with Adsense to no avail. They cancelled my account for no reason that I can determine. After multiple emails from them that contained zero information, they finally stopped responding. Most of the email responses from them were similar to the following. They have yet to tell me when these supposed invalid clicks happened, so how am I supposed to track down the person who likely went to my website and started clicking on the ads.
In fact, they don’t follow their own procedures, e.g., working with publishers, as they claim on their own blogsite.
http://adsense.blogspot.com/2005/08/keeping-your-account-alive-and-well.html
“As previously noted, we have confirmed invalid clicks occurred on the Google ads on your site. As you know, we solicited you for any additional information to better understand the nature of your traffic and
incorporate this information into our re-review of your account
termination. After thoroughly re-reviewing your account with this
additional information, we found we are unable to reinstate your account.
“Though you may be disappointed with our decision, please understand we are acting in the best interests of our advertisers.”