Google Analytics updates are usually three to five hours behind real time for my domains. But since thursday 6pm GMT+1 no new data has been added to the statistics. I already noticed a few gaps in the tracking over the past days, but as I’ve posted yesterday, these were quickly filled some time later. However, such a delay is new for me and I’ve been using that service for quite some time. I wonder whether it’s related to the other Google issues that are currently being reported (Google Finance Down and Google News Goes Black Yesterday at SE Roundtable).

Of course analytics are still tracking, since the script is still being loaded and the according javascript function call doesn’t throw an error, but it’s odd nonetheless.

Update: Thursday’s data has been updated but still no data for whole friday.

It appears that Google has changed their payment model for Adsense and Adwords referrals. Instead of having to wait for your referral to earn the first 100$, Adsense publishers now get 5$ per conversion as soon as the referral earns his first 5$ and better even: as soon as that referral reaches the magical 100$ threshold himself, you will earn 250$ more. Making it a possible total of 255$ per conversion. The guys from SE Roundtable quoted Google’s response to an according inquiry

Thank you for the email. I’m happy to say that we’ve now changed the payment model for referrals so you’ll earn more from now on. You’ll, as it has happened, get $5 when a user you’ve signed up earns $5. When the user has earned $100 and complies with the general terms of service for referrals you’ll get additionally $250 on top of the $5 - total $255. This is brand new and we’re right now updating our help center with this information.

A very nice move by Google.  No need to mention that all Adsense publishers will be very happy about this change since most referrals will reach the 5$ mark easily.

Also the recent policy change, now allowing publishers to draw attention to their referral links confirms that Google is heading somewhere very attractive for Adsense publishers and that their referral program still seems to work out for them ;)

I recently found Rory Hansen’s blog through some technorati tags and I must admit that I was quite impressed by a little study which Rory conducted over there (starting with this post). With a 50$ signup bonus budget (for 5$ deposit) Hansen started buying traffic from Yahoo ads, redirecting the visitors to his so called “conversion websites” where Google Adsense referral ads for Firefox would be waiting. A referral conversion typically gerenates a dollar income so Rory did the math and tried attracting more visitors using additional PPC programs, such as Google Adwords and MSN Adcenter by only using the income generated by the 50$ starting budget. It’s like going to the casino with 5$ and managing to leave it again with a full wallet.

Of course, the additional PPC campaigns cost additional money, but in the end it seems to add up perfectly and a nice profit margin results. Very cool, especially since he doesn’t make a secret of the profit, for example december earnings:

Google Adsense: $82.30
Firefox + Google Toolbar Referrals: $2,000.01

Yahoo! Marketing: $435.90
Google Adwords: $539.02
MSN AdCenter: $3.21

Profit: $1,104.18

If you’re into Adsense and like playing with numbers, calculating possible revenues you might really want to check Rory’s blog out.

I didn’t know they did that. My analytics were showing gaps in very busy hours with drops to zero activity and back up. Now, two days later, the gaps have been filled with what seems to be the correct data. I really wonder how Google does all that, I mean I know how it’s done technically, but I find it remarkable how much effort they put into their free services.

Maybe I’m the only one noticing or maybe that’s been a well known feature for years, but I was pleasantly surprised :-)

So if you have been reading my blog (yeah right) you might have read the entry about my successful attempt to do fullsite caching with my Mambo driven website. Because of the way I implemented this caching method, all unregistered users get the same page which ist very fast and therefor great most of the time. Now, I also use Google’s Adsense program on my site which works, as you probably know, simply by including javascript code into your pages. One thing I like doing with Adsense is to serve their referal ads for Firefox or the Google Pack, but since the Google code does not check whether the user is already on Firefox, useless ads are served. Google also lacks a language testing routine, meaning that German users will get the English referal link or banner for either product. This means that these checks have to be done by us, the publishers. We need to identify the users’ preferred language and the browser they’re using. Using PHP that is pretty easy, however, my pages are cached and no longer dynamically served to most of my visitors!

So what to do?

Its a fairly simple trick: We do what Google does! We move our dynamic ad selection routine to a non cached PHP script and implement that via Javascript.

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Apparently many Adsense publishers have noticed increasing problems with Google’s response time. According to a post on Search Engine Roundtable and the Google Groups for Adsense webmasters have been receiving complaints from their visitors due to the Adsense Javascript slowing down the time to load pages extremely. This does not only reflect on massively dropping page hits but also seems to cause plunging revenues.

I have been reading about this problem for a few days now and can see a drop in my Adsense income already. Though not personally affected by the delayed ads - I still view them instantly - Google seems to be having a major problem serving their ads to a great number of networks.

So after I completely relaunched icq-4u.com recently I was worried about google’s ability of finding all my new pages on its own. Luckily there is a Mambo component called GSG (Google Sitemap Generator) which generates a google xml sitemap from all of the basic content. And because GSG allows enhancement with plugins, it is possible to add content from non-basic components such as Remository to the sitemap.

Note: Installation of GSG in Mambo seemed somewhat tricky at first. I had to copy the folders includes/domit and includes/patTemplate from a Joomla to my Mambo installation, but after that it worked fine!

I couldn’t find a ready-to-download Remository plugin, so I made one myself. Please keep in mind that I do not have secret or non public folders in my Remository, so I do not check for these aspects when generating the links. Read the rest of this entry »

As I’ve described just a short while ago, I was working on speed issues with my Mambo (ver. 4.5.1) based site icq-4u.com. In addition to the caching of the site’s download charts I’ve also thought about adding full site caching. Of course this step requires a fitting scenario since a full site cache freezes most of the dynamic content modules one might be using.

What I wanted was a pretty fast frontpage, but even with Mambo’s native caching enabled it was still somewhat slow. The page generation time that I was displaying on my sites footer (which by the way is far from precise if you only include it in the template file) always stayed around the 0.7 mark which annoyed me. Of course 0.7 does not sound so slow, but considering that that specific duration wasn’t accurate (try twice as much, when timing correctly prior to template initiation) and that caching was supposedly already enabled I was a litte bit disappointed.

Having looked into Mambo’s caching function already I knew what was there and what was feasible, so I studied Mambo’s index.php to find a fitting spot for a cache inclusion. These are the steps I did:
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I have recently found my site icq-4u.com to be extremely slow, getting slower every day. The site runs on the popular content management software (CMS) Mambo and uses several thirdparty components and modules.

After some detailed analyses, i soon found the culprit. An addition to the file management component Remository called Remository multi-module is included into every page of my site. Its purpose is to read the complete downloads logs table from the mysql database and generate a list of the most popular files in a certain time frame. After looking into it, it wasn’t much of a surprise that a mysql table with 50000 rows (downloads) after only a week since the implementation remository was a little much to analyze for every visitor and every page.

So this is what I did to resolve this issue. It’s a fairly simple modification which howevery demands that your installation of Remository does not have secret folders or files for certain users. If you do hide files from e.g. unregistered visitors, this modification won’t make you happy.

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Well, here I am with my first weblog post. Welcome!

Having watched the first weblogs rise throughout the Internet and constantly trying to ignore the hype, I have now decided to get one of these online diaries myself. Although I’m neither a specialist for a specific topic nor some famous actor, I too sometimes wish to express my thoughts ;)

Seriously though, occasionally it happens that I program something for my own purposes which others might also want to check out or I evaluate some software and a somewhat professional assessment may result. Who knows.

That’s it for my first entry. More shall follow.