AdSenseLog 5.1.0 was just released. This new version includes new ‘total’ reports. These reports combine all of the three AdSense products – Content, Search and Feeds. This means you can now view reports with your total eranings – whether in graphs or tables. We also added the reports split by product. So you can see how your earnings on feeds compare to your earnings on seach, etc.

The new version can be downloaded here.

One of the easiest ways to increase your AdSense earnings is to optimize your page ads.

Basically you can try different ad sizes, colors, types, and location. Obviously you can also try different ad providers, not just AdSense.

The best way to see which is the best combination is to do split-testing (sometimes called a/b testing). Split testing means that you keep changing between combinations – usually with a simple ‘random’ way (or a round-robin). This means that the next visitor will get ad type 1, and the one after that will get ad type 2, and so on. This is better than changing the ads once per day, or a week, because it will be very difficult to find out if the performance is indeed better in one combination over the other – maybe the traffic profile changed over the days/weeks? (for example, the day of the week makes a lot of impact, and the traffic source is also important).

So making the combinations change ALL the time makes the test more reliable.

Following the results in AdSenseLog is easy – you can simply add a custom table report with all the combination channels, and see the difference. Obviously you should wait a little bit till you have enough traffic… otherwise the stats might not be relevant.

If you want to read some more about split-testing, see this post in ProBlogger.

Alltop just accepted both OLED-Info and MRAM-Info as news sources for their tech site. The site is simple – it includes several (too many?) blogs on a certain subject (like technology, in this example). It’s by the guys behind truemors (somehow connected to Guy Kawasaki).

Anyway if you have a good-quality blog, you can ask them to consider it for inclusion (everything there is hand-picked). Don’t expect a lot of traffic, especially if you’re down at the bottom of the list…

I believe that the internet is currently undergoing an interesting shift of focus. There are so many web sites and services, that people are losing their patience. Establishing your web site as a site that people will visit frequently is getting harder every day. Many web publishers tend to rely on Google Search for traffic…

But today there are platforms available that allow you to distribute your content or application outside of your own site. Those platforms include Widgets (of many kinds), social applications (such as the Facebook platform), toolbars, open APIs, and more.

Recently we have done quite a bit of work on those platforms -

• A few weeks ago we released the Tao Te Ching widget – you can easily add this fun and free widget to your blog or site and personalized page (iGoogle/Netvibes), and get daily quotes of Chinese wisdom.
• We are working towards an AdSense API, currently in first beta testing.
• We have several toolbars available, including the AdSense toolbar. This toolbar includes a small web application – your AdSense stats built right into the toolbar, and it’s getting quite popular.
• We have written the TripTouch travel widget – get local events, restaurants, travel information, travelers, attractions, and more. This widget is available for Netvibes (native UWA code) and iGoogle (native iGoogle code).
• Also for TripTouch, we released the Facebook TripRecord application – which lets you state the countries you have visited, and check out where your friends have been.

We are  happy to offer our development services for web publishers who want to distribute their content or services – If you need a widget or toolbar application, please keep Metalgrass software in mind – I’m sure we can do a great job for you.

We’re happy to announce the release of AdSenseLog 5.0.0. This new version includes support for AdSense for Feeds data, along with other minor bug fixes. You can download it here.

We have also raised the price to 69.95$… This is to reflect the lower US$ rates, and of course the amount of work still invested in AdSenseLog – to keep it updated and include new features. People who purchase get a year of free updates, and also discount for later updates.

We have just released a new version of the AdSense Toolbar.

We have added support for Feed ads, a new AdSense feature. The toolbar will auto-update for all users that already installed.

We have released a new widget for sites, blogs or personalized pages (iGoogle, Netvibes, etc.). This widget simply displays the daily quote from the Tao Te Ching book. The widget was developed for the iGoogle platform and then imported into Widgetbox to enable more distribution options.

The latest AdSense related tool being worked on here at Metalgrass is the AdSense API.

Basically it will allow you to get your AdSense stats via an API call, whenever you need it. There are several possible usages for the API, including:

• If you want to write your own monitoring, tracking or analyzing tools
• Smart ads to your own sites: Many publishers put links to ‘popular’ or ‘best-performing’ pages in the home page of their site. Using the API, you can always make sure the best-performing links are placed in the most-clicked on positions – and more revenue for you!
• Perform some site or maintainance actions according to stats. For example we have one publisher who expressed interest in the API to use in some sort of user-benefit according to channels (i.e. whenever they earn money in a user’s page, the user gets credit). This can also be used as a simple solution for small revshare sites.

The API will soon be released in a first beta…Want to participiate in the beta? click here!

There are some reports that Google has finally started beta-testing AdSense tracking in Analytics. This will be really neat, and might help us web-publishers increase our earnings.  The reports say we’ll be able to get the following info from Analytics:

1. Number of ad clicks per page and revenue.

2. CPM and CTR per web page (might mean we’ll no longer need URL channels)

3. ‘Top AdSense Referrers’ – this is really interesting… perhaps Google will allow us to know the eCPM per each traffic source, or just the top ones.

More info here (Digital inspiration)

Hello everyone.

This is the first post on the Metalgrass blog. This blog will focus on news about our product, services and web sites, and also on web publishing, monetizing, adsense, web technology and more.

Enjoy!

Ron Mertens
Metalgrass software