Forum Moderators: martinibuster
1. can it damage a website?
2. does it give Google to much power to know how much money you earn? E.g. they could find out to charge money in the future for their services by knowing how much you could afford? ;-)
3. they could reduce your Google traffic by knowing how much "money" they are giving away to you for free
It is for me a big risk, I don't want to lose my earnings or traffic. Google's power would be infinite, they would then know EVERYTHING about your site, your traffic, your earnings etc.
And also it makes websites slower, that's also a reason why I don't like it.
I don't need to put a code on my website?
You can split it. I have my Analytics linked to Adsense, but created a separate profile where they don't link (not using the main default profile).
I don't quite lick Analytics, it also makes the sites slower and I think it gives Google too much information so I will take the code out in a short time.
I personally have not seen any downside at all in linking my AdSense to my Analytics (and my traffic is running about 150% of what it was this time last year)
Google already has all the data and you can be sure that they're analyzing every bit of it.
The "linking" is already there, you just don't see it until you activate it in your account.
Data is one thing, making use of it, productively and easily is another issue.
I'm very skeptical, I once put Analytics on my sites, that was last year in February around, as soon as I did that, traffic was down (after a week or so), maybe just coincidence, although I don't believe in coincidence, when traffic numbers are very stable and suddenly drop.Had same experience, after trying analytics once.
As I said, I really don't think Google need YOUR linked account to compare Adsense and Analytics data.
They already compare traffic and adsense data of your site. They even compare it with advertiser's sites data (to calculate smartipricing for example), so the linking is already there, you just don't see it.
They do not however know anything about the pages that carry YPN, CJ, or third party ads.
By adding analytics you give them that knowledge. If I were Google, this would be very useful information to me, because I would then know how important I was to a publisher.
If only 10% of ads being served on a site are adsense, then adsense is being used as nothing more than just filler, indicating that google is not that important to the publisher, thus as google, I would want to take a smaller commission, in order to encourage them to use me more. ie i would have something to gain by lowering my commission.
If 90% of a sites ads are adsense, then it indicates that google is their main source of revenue. As google, I would take a larger commission, because I could. ie the publisher couldn't afford to drop me. Especially considering that they have too small a sample size with other advertisers to know that their comission had been cut, versus market trends.
I could then track and see how this effected their percentages. If they continued to use me at 90% I could then take a larger commission, and so on, until I found the balance between how much I could charge and losing market share with the publisher..
It would not be terribly difficult to program a bot to handle this automatically across all publishers.
Not a conspiracy, just smart business.
Thus, if Google increased their commission on us enough, all our ads would automatically shift to YPN, CJ, or someone else.
Again, not conspiracy, just smart business.
but i had a bad experience with analytics in the beginning. i think if you've got a very low traffic site then there's no benefit in advertising that fact to google. i swear i suffered when i put it on, and had to take it off, although of course it might have just been coincedence. but now i'm doing better i put it back on again and everything is good
I guess if you receive only natural traffic (via search engines) and your bounce rate is very high ...
I have little doubt that Google has for years been measuring how frequently a user clicks a link in the SERP then quickly hits the back button and clicks another link. Surely this would be a smart way to adjust SERP rankings, and requires no Analytics.
As my post makes clear, this is not the case at all. Google only has information about any impressions where you serve their ads. they have no idea about how often you serve pages without their ads. ie, how often you serve ypn, instead of adsense ads, etc.
Placing analytics on your pages give them that crucial piece of information, which is in reality the most important piece of information.
It is not conspiracy. honestly, I would be disappointed if they didn't track trends, and base commissions on them. It would indicate that they are not very good businessmen, and that we are all ultimately doomed to have to find another cash cow.
I decided to add google analytics and link it to adsense so I could get a better idea of which pages/type of content performed the best, from that point of view analytics was extremely useful but 24hrs after linking the two our adsense earnings took a complete nose dive.
This is (I hope) most probably complete coincidence but after 4 weeks (and after reading this post) I've decided to remove the analytics code. If adsense earnings start to improve I'll let you know :0)
