Adsence for feeds

It's about time these two neighbors got to talking to each other. Most Saturday afternoons you'd find them politely waving as they passed at each other by with their push mowers, tending to their neatly manicured tables, charts, and graphs. It just made sense that the grounds would look that much more complete if they removed a bit of fence between them. And so they've done just that.

If you use either AdSense for feeds or Google FeedBurner to track item clicks and also use Google Analytics, as of today, you will automatically start to see your feed item click analytics show up in Google Analytics with some additional information added to help you understand how distributing your feed with FeedBurner leads to traffic on your site.

Specifically, we will help you classify your links by tagging the Source as "feedburner", the Medium as the channel in which we sent out your feed such as "feed" or "email", and the Content as the actual endpoint application in which the user viewed your feed content such as "Google Reader" or "Yahoo! Mail". In order to slice your traffic by these endpoints, in the All Traffic Sources view in Google Analytics select the "Ad Content" field in the second column.

In the coming weeks, you will start to see many more distribution endpoints in your reports. The represent ongoing additions to our database of applications that process feeds.




By default, these analytics will show up in the "All Traffic Sources" and "Campaigns" views in Google Analytics. You can filter the results just to only the traffic that comes from Google FeedBurner by filtering on "feedburner" on the All Traffic Sources page or "Feed:" on the campaigns view. You can also use these sources in the Advanced Segments views.

In this view below, we actually have two separate feeds driving traffic to this blog, and that can now be tracked easily in one view.





If you have item click tracking enabled, we are now automatically tagging your item URLs with Google Analytics parameters. If you're not using Google Analytics, or for some other reason don't want these parameters in the requests coming to your website, you can turn off Google Analytics tracking on the "Configure Stats" page on the Analyze tab at http://feedburner.google.com. If you don't have item click tracking enabled, this is also the perfect time to turn it on, which can be done on this same page.





For instance, if you would rather see the detail of where your feeds are read directly, you can add ${distributionEndpoint} as the medium, and then you will get views that look something like this.





Again this will happen automatically except in one specific case: if you are already tagging your feed item URLs with Google Analtyics tags such as "utm_source" and "utm_medium" - we have disabled this feature and you will have to turn it on manually by selecting "Track clicks as a traffic source in Google Analytics." Note that if you do this, we will replace any existing "utm_" tags that may be in your permalinks with the values generated from FeedBurner.

In the coming weeks, we will be releasing more features in Google FeedBurner that take advantage of this functionality, so we highly recommend that you register and set up your site with Google Analytics if you haven't done so already.


Posted by Steve Olechowski on behalf of the Google FeedBurner team

18 comments
AdSense policy clarification on using AdSense for feeds and AdSense for content

Monday, November 9, 2009 | 8:05 AM

Labels: Policy Issues

This is just a quick clarification on AdSense for feeds as it relates to the AdSense for Content specific policy of only allowing three ad units and three link units per page.

Many publishers have asked the question "Since feed items often get displayed with many feed items on a single web page, can using AdSense for feeds jeopardize the status of my AdSense account?"

The answer is no. Having three ad units per page is a product specific policy for AdSense for content. Product specific policies can be read about here.

In essence, the variable ways in which feed items are displayed are controlled and optimized automatically by the AdSense for feeds application and the choices you make as a publisher in your AdSense account when configuring your AdSense for feeds ad units. This means we may automatically suppress ad impressions when we detect there are too many feed ad units being displayed, resize ads based on the size and length of your content, and adjust the ads that are displayed based on the device in which the feed is being read.

Better contextual matching

As an AdSense partner, you know that Google is continually making improvements to the way we match ads to your content so that users see even more relevant ads, which should help you make more money over time.

A "referral URL" is one of many signals we use to deliver contextually relevant ads on your website. The referral URL contains information about the link a user followed to arrive at your website, whether from a search engine or another site on the Internet. Any webmaster for any site can look at referral URLs to see how users arrive at their site.

Let's see how this works today when a user arrives at your golfing advice website from a search engine results page. Imagine that someone searches on Google for [golf shop atlanta] and clicks on a search result that takes them to your site. The referral URL that is passed to your site may look something like this: http://www.google.com/search?q=golf+shop+atlanta. I'm using Google as an example here, but the same type of information is transmitted if a user arrives at your website from another search engine.

To deliver the most relevant ad, we treat the query words [golf shop atlanta] in the referral URL as if they're part of the content of your webpage. We can then better tailor the ad we deliver on your site. In this example, we could use the additional information from the query words to show an ad for a golf shop in Atlanta rather than for one in Chicago (depending on the other words in the page).

We've recently started to expand the use of the query words in referral URLs to a few hours so we can so we can continue to deliver more relevant ads. The technical way that we're doing this is by associating the relevant query words in the referral URL with the existing advertising cookie on the user's browser. After a short period of time (a few hours) the query words are no longer used for the purposes of matching ads. Of course, users can continue to opt out of our advertising cookie at any time here.

This allows us to deliver more relevant ads on a wider range of AdSense partner sites that a user may browse over the course of a few hours. Let's assume the user in our example leaves your golf website and browses through to a news website that is also an AdSense partner. Since [golf shop atlanta] is in a referral URL that was visited in the past few hours, we may use those query words, along with the content of the news webpage itself, to determine the most relevant ad to show the user on the news website.

Using signals from the referral URL is just one part of our teams' continuing efforts to deliver even better contextually matched ad