Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Counting the PSA Ads
If you want to find out if you're REALLY serving PSA's, whether you're seeing them or not, it's trvial. I don't know if PSA's are counted in the stats but I don't think so.
Install the collapsing ad unit code from Alternate Ads:
[google.com...]
Then you'll see something like this in your STATS showing how many times it loaded:
136791 /ads/google_adsense_script.html
Yes, I served 136,791 collapsing ads blocks instead of PSAs but this script allows me to track this in my own server log stats.
Tracking the pages generating PSA Ads
The installed script google_adsense_script.html is loaded from the page displaying PSA ads, and should actually get the page referrer displaying the PSA ads or you can pass it easily via Javascript otherwise. You could then modify the google_adsense_script.html page to be PHP, PERL or CGI (which I did) and actually track the referrers by appending a text file with the page names generating the PSA ads.
Now not only will you know how many PSA's you're generating but you'll know exactly where they're coming from!
I can't supply the script as my CGI won't do you any good, if some PHP slinger is willing to duplicate my trivial efforts (was about 5 lines of code for me) please post it for the masses!
Someone here said he served amazon affiliate ads as his alternate ads, and I think that's a good thing to do. My alternate ads direct the reader to other articles that I have hope they'd be more interested in if they aren't interested in sticking with the one at hand.
Remember folks, that having your visitors give you links is VASTLY more important than having them click your ads. If you can't make money because a PSA is being served, then give them an alternate ad to some page you think they'd be likely to want to link to.
There are instructions on google's adsense site for serving alternate "image ads". Basically you need a graphic the same size as the ad format it will run in place of, and a very simple HTML page that displays it. Clicking the graphic in the alternate ad's web page will take the visitor to the destination URL you select. Google will then display it in an iframe just like it does with its own ads.
You can load your alternate ad's page in a browser and click anywhere in it to check that it works. Once you've configured your adsense code in one of your pages, if you open the page on your own PC, as a static file that's not on the internet, google will see that the referring page doesn't have a URL it can access and serve your alternate ad instead of the usual PSA. At that point, if you hover your mouse over the alternate ad, you will see your destination URL show up plainly at the bottom of your browser window rather than something cryptic. In this case it's safe to click it to see if it works, because you'll just go directly to your own destination page without the click being recorded by google.
You can easily see how often your alternate ads are served because its URL will show up plainly in your log files. Use a log file anaylyzer such as Analog (http://www.analog.cx/) to see the stats. I don't remember because it's been a while since I looked at my logs, but I'm pretty sure the page in which the alternate ad was displayed will show up as the referring page in your logs. By looking at the referring pages, you can see how many times your alternate ad was served in each individual page on your site.
If you have an extensive site on widely varying topics and don't mind doing the work, every page on your site can have its own alternate ad. You may actually prefer to use the collapsing ad unit, in hopes that with no ad at all, your visitors will stay to read your content and hopefully link it.
In my case, I'm pretty sure that anyone who comes to my site with the inclination to click any ads at all aren't likely to read my articles, which go on sometimes for twenty pages - I'm sure you can already see that I'm long-winded! Because of that, I try to send them to some other page that I think they'd be more likely to want to take the time to read, and hopefully give me a link.
I've been meaning for weeks to start a thread to suggest ways to calculate what a link is worth to us. In my case, depending on the circumstances, I calculated that the links google tells me it knows about have ALREADY been worth from ONE HUNDRED to ONE THOUSAND dollars APIECE. That's the reason I am steadily removing adsense from my nonperforming pages: if the ads aren't earning me significant income, I don't want them to discourage my readers from linking my articles.
If you install an alternate ad, you can not only keep statistics but direct those inclined to click ads to some other page where you still have some hope of earning money.
That much is true too but slightly different as my purpose was to identify the quantity and location of the PSAs. In a dynamic site with about 40K pages it's just not possible for me to manually identify all the sources of PSA.
Passing them off to other services is useful too but I'm making far less from affiliates than I am from AdSense at the moment so my scope was to quantify, identify and eliminate PSAa all together, just the opposite of what it sounds like you're doing.
Already made some progress, based on my current stats (CTR and eCPM) if I get rid of them 100% I may be in the UPS club when I'm done!
So you can see where I'm coming from :)
I would prefer PSA's not be served on my websites. I do understand that PSA's are for charities and such and I'm very sympathetic to this. I would prefer to give on my own terms though. These are, in some cases, large chunks of real estate on my pages and I prefer to be able to control them.
half past midnight and all is well....
