Forum Moderators: martinibuster
After comparing notes with a few others....looks like things have changed in the Google code.
I used the tool a lot to find the MFAs to block.....
heyday
The status bar no longer displays 'go to website.com' when hovering over the ads.
...and so the click trackers can not capture the landing URL of the ad. The scripts now capture all clicks as either IE7 or Gecko-DOM, with no information whatsoever on the destination.
*sigh*
Why does it always have to be one step ahead and two steps back?
No mention on the adlogger site when I checked though?
Hasn't being doing so for a while. I thought it was particular to my site. I think 15 days or so..
I'm still seemingly able to count the clicks as before, though only for IE users as ever, which is a diminishing slice of my traffic.
Rgds
Damon
I can see only two reasons for this, one good, one bad:
Good: The AdSense team are going to add a feature into the reports to allow us to view which ads are clicked.
Bad: The AdSense team want to conceal how well this and future mass bannings go.
Please don't be evil Google!
Here's the code:
<script language=javascript>
function hit(){
window.focus();
if (window.status){
img = new Image();
img.src = 'http://www.domain.com/clicktrackerscript.php?ref=' + escape(document.location) + '&title=' + escape(document.title) + '&ad=' + escape(window.status) + '&id=MySite';
};
};
document.getElementById("google_ads_frame").onfocus = hit;
</script>
Well, I have like 4-5 less reports to maintain now :(
Looking at the Ad Target URL, I see:
Unknown
n 1 15:09:12 UTC 0100 2007
y 31 13:05:29 UTC 0100 2007
Also, the CTR is way less than it suppose to be.
I hope they fix this problem real soon.
In any case, G really should allow us to track destination urls so we can know where people are going when they leave our sites...
[edited by: inactivist at 5:18 pm (utc) on June 1, 2007]
I hope they fix this problem real soon.
Are you assuming this is a 'bug' and not a deliberate change to kill off click-tracking scripts, as well as any services that have grown up around them?
Or possibly because they're afraid it leads to the overoptimization of MFAs.
Or it's possible some arbitrage sites were tracking AdSense clicks as "conversions", and Google didn't like the implications of that.
I hope G decides to offer us lowly AdSense publishers some way to get at this info, because, it seems wildly unfair (and I hate using that term) that the vast majority of the tracking and blocking tools seem to be on the AdWords side of the equation. Kinda makes us feel like second-class citizens...
1) Better stats on publisher referrals
2) Site-targeted contextual ads
(Disclaimer: I'm not a programmer, so this is just a layman's idle "what if" guess.)
One answer to this may be that the "Go To" line in the status bar has lost its importance anyway: It did not work with Firefox, and it did not work (by default) with IE7, and with both browsers gaining importance, the preview URL was getting less important.
Also I want to mention that I had put in calls to Urchin into my clicktracking script which made the analysis nice. And free.
Oh well. Maybe G will offer publishers integration with Urchin for analysis instead of the (silly, stupid, of limited value) reports in the AdSense account pages. All they'd have to do is add a section in ad setup for a tracking URL, and make the call to urchinTracker() for us when an ad is clicked.
How am I supposed to add shady looking ads to my filter when I can't determine the URL?
I'm guessing that's exactly the point. They want to take that control out of our hands and take care of it themselves thanks to routine purges. That makes me feel uneasy.
They want to take that control out of our hands and take care of it themselves thanks to routine purges. That makes me feel uneasy.
Next step will be a reduced filter size of, say, 20 slots. Official statement will be along the lines of: "Due to our recent successful efforts to reduce the number of advertisers with unsuitable business models for the Google Adsense program, we see ourselves now in the favorable situation where we can use the existing hardware much more efficiently, saving power and thus also reducing CO2 emmission."
Sorry, got carried away.
The landing page url is after the parameter "adurl="
DXL, you can get the URL of the ads you are seeing by clicking Ads By Google. Then look at the URL of the page you land on, the advertiser URLs are hidden in there. That's how I feed my filter.
That doesn't help for ads that don't show up for the community or country you're in.
