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