A few weeks ago I was chatting to a Google Adsense consultant who was asking me for my opinion on how to improve Adsense. One of my suggestions was that they should add some sort of a ‘Change Log’ system which would help publishers to track changes that they make to their ads.
The reason I suggested it was that when you have multiple web pages with multiple types of ads on each it is difficult to keep track of what changes you’ve made and what impact they might have had. There have been many times where I’ve made a range of changes to my Adsense ads on different blogs and have promptly forgotten what it was that I did – so when I notice a few days later a change in my ad performance I have little idea what was the reason for the change. Frustrating.
Anyway – it was just an idea and I doubted (and still doubt) that the Adsense team would implement it – but today I noticed on the official Google AdWords Blog (ie NOT the Adsense one – but the AdWORDS one) that Google have just made a new tool available to Advertisers – it’s called the My Change History tool which – you guessed it – tracks changes made to an Adwords account over 3 months.
Of course it’s a lot easier to track changes in an AdWords account so I still doubt that we’ll get something similar as Adsense publishers – but I’d still love to see them add something to help us keep track of our Adsense changes. Even if it was some sort of note taking space (or what about a private, internal blog?) for publishers to manually keep track of their changes.
There is of course nothing stopping us all doing our own change logs – in fact this is what I currently do these days – each time I tweak an advertisement (ie if I change a design, placement or add or subtract an ad unit) I just jot a note down in my Change Log so changes in my results can be traced back to the appropriate action. I use my Back Pack It account to run my Change Log – but any word processing, spreadsheet or calendar program would probably work.
Do you track your Adsense changes? If so how? And what other features would you love to see the Adsense team add to the publishers tool box?
