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Thursday, October 23, 2008

«AdSense and Analytics Sitting in a Tree...»

K-I-S-S-I-N-G... Yeah, ok. I'll stop with the nursery rhyme.

So the biggest news for me lately is Google is finally integrating Google AdSense (their ad network) with Google Analytics (their tracking software). It appears to be part of a big upgrade they've did with Google Analytics. You don't even know how much I've wanted this to happen.

Tracking clicks and revenue on the ads using their current system in AdSense is a real pain. Using all the different channels and such has always given somewhat confusing and overlapping results. Once it's tied into Google Analytics, that shouldn't be an issue any longer.

I've been really happy with Google Analytics. About my only complaint with it is I wish it were more real-time; the stats only update a few times a day. It took me a bit to set it up properly after I switched to the new domain. There was about a 10 day period I had it set wrong and didn't notice: all the visits site-wide registered as being on index.html instead of their corresponding pages. It was entirely my fault though. I had set a custom filter so I could tell what sub-domain the page visits were on, and I had left out some parentheses. So, like anything involving code, that little error totally borked the entire thing.

It's going to be great to be able to pull up the traffic stats on a page and also be able to see how much money the page has made me. However, as the usual Google updates go, they roll it out slowly. The option (or invite as they call it) hasn't been offered to me yet. Probably won't be for a while, but I'll keep checking.

My theory is they roll things out slowly so if there's a bug or glitch it will be reported and they can fix it before the majority of people are even using the newer version. Good idea I suppose. I was one of the last to get the new iGoogle homepage. I wish they would have just skipped me entirely on that one. I like the old iGoogle much better. I've even been tossing around the idea of writing my own homepage or just using "about:blank". It'd defiantly load faster.

As a side note, sometimes when I have Google Analytics open in my browser, I have a few other tabs open as well. Then when I look at the tab names I'll see "Google Anal..." as one of the tabs. I had a few laughs when I first noticed it.

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