Enhanced Tracking On Its Way

Reply from Adsense to a 2nd account application

[Camster]

I applied for a second Adsense account which I was planning to use for testing adsense on new sites. I got a prompt and pleasant response from Google saying basically:

- we see you've already got adwords on that site
- we can continue our review for a second account but we want you to know you can use adsense on any site you control
- AND we are working on improved tracking and reporting

They didn't provide any details.

I responded by suggesting that my ideal tracking / reporting scenario would be to have as many as three tracking fields in the javascript. Webmasters could place any codes they wanted in these fields. Then, on the reporting side, they could provide an advanced reporting app where you could slice-and-dice your stats based on date ranges and any of the three tracking fields.

Whaddya think? Any other thoughts on tracking needs. Maybe we can influence the path they take with these enhancements.

Camster

[Tiebreaker]

Main thing I would like is multiple tracking ID's - rather like the amazon program gives its affiliates.

At the moment, you have no way of judging how a particular section of your site is doing - we need to be able to know when things are not working - otherwise how can we improve it?

I appreciate there may be a problem here with google not being keen on us doing this - we could use this method to identify which are the really high paying keywords - but with a little thought, I'm sure they could think of a way of covering this angle

[hyperkik]

I would like some tracking on the performance of different colors of ads on my site. That could be an excellent tool to determine which colors to drop, and what catches the eye of site users. (Of course, you would need a significant number of impressions before the statistics became significant.)

[devlin]

I like Camster's idea:

my ideal tracking / reporting scenario would be to have as many as three tracking fields in the javascript. Webmasters could place any codes they wanted in these fields

One problem area is how many tracking fields would people want? Personally, if there was just one field it would probably be enough. I'd use this code to test colour experiments, to set a different code on different sites or parts of sites.

Why three tracking fields, Camster?

D.

[aroach]

I would love to know which sections of my site Adsense is doing well on and which sections might be better off with affiliate links.

I started out with Adsense on my artices and fiction pages only and did very poorly. I added it to my directory pages and started doing great. So I assume the articles and fiction were poor performers and took the code off those pages only this morning and replaced it with highly targeted affiliate links.

It would be nice to know what sections and/or pages are performing without trail and error guessing.

[Camster]

Why three tracking fields, Camster?

Three isn't a magic number... but more than one would be magic. With three, you could track and report on site, color and even traffic source independently or together. I'd love to do the traffic source analysis to be able to see if PPC traffic to a page is profitable on its own.

And having FLEXIBLE tracking fields is the other piece of magic. It would be less than ideal for Google to impose a set of trackable things (site, page, color) on us. With undefined tracking fields (field 1, 2 and 3), you could track those things AND anything else your webmasterly heart desires. For instance, to track color, you would define a color palette, set field 1 to the name of the palette and let it run till you get enough data. Then change the palette and the field 1 value and run it again to get your comparable results.

So, Google: we want MULTIPLE fields and FLEXIBLE fields. In return, we promise to send your advertisers VERY TARGETED CLICKS!