AdSense Questions for School

[Jeremy_H]

I'm in a communication research class this semester, and I have to think of some topic to research and prove/disprove with empirical data for the research project.

I'm wanting to focus on some aspect of communications where research would be of interest to me (such as online advertising).

I'm having some trouble in thinking what to do, and was wondering if anybody has any good questions they'd like to suggest?

Thanks

[miguelito]

well i wish you good luck but i imagine that the use of empirical data will mean it is imposible to use adsense in a study as the TOS strictly forbids the sharing/divulgence of such information.
I doubt whether any publishers would be too happy to share all those stats anyway.

[Jeremy_H]

You have an excellent point miguelito, I'm glad you shared it with me before I got too far in the semester with it. I think I'll focus in some other area unrelated to AdSense, but hopefully I'll learn some great things that will help my site.

Thanks again.

[jomaxx]

Why not check out Google's "heat map" recommendations? Test out Google's suggestions, define some of your own and test them out, etc. You have to be pretty rigorous about what you're measuring and what you're proving, but that's what the project is intended to teach you.

Caveat: Just don't use AdSense ad blocks for your testing; use some kind of non-commercial link instead. In addition to the issue mentioned above, if you're actually earning money from your testing then that's likely to be a distraction that could cause you to mess up your research in hopes of picking up a little extra beer money.

There's all kinds of other tests you could try regarding user behaviour on a web page. Where they look, what they retain, how they make decisions about what to do next, etc. etc.