“Google Publisher Toolbar—a Must-have for AdSense Publishers” plus 1 more

Google Publisher Toolbar—a Must-have for AdSense Publishers

Posted: 24 Apr 2012 01:02 PM PDT

This guest post is by Kevin Muldoon of WordPress Mods.

Google AdSense has been in the news a lot over the last month, for all the wrong reasons. Many top AdSense publishers such as Zac Johnson and Spencer Haws have had their accounts banned and their last month of earnings withheld. And Google won’t give a specific reason as to why any particular account—including either of these—has been banned.

Despite its critics, Google AdSense remains a reliable source of income for many bloggers and website owners across the world. Earlier this year, the developers released a tool that helps you check your earnings more easily and track the performance of your ad zones. The AdSense Publisher Toolbar is an official Google Chrome extension that adds a publisher toolbar to your Chrome browser. It also adds an overlay to your advertisements so that you can see exactly how they have been performing.

I’m surprised that Google hasn’t been promoting this extension more heavily as, in my opinion, it’s vital for anyone who makes money online using Google AdSense.

The Publisher Toolbar

Google publisher toolbar

Once you’ve installed the extension in your Chrome browser, you will see an AdSense icon at the top right-hand side of your browser (to the right of your address bar). Once you have authorised the extension to log in to your Google account on your behalf, clicking on the icon will display a menu that shows your AdSense earnings. (Note: I’m not 100% sure of Google’s policy of displaying earnings etc., so I’ve used its screenshot instead of taking one of my account.)

At the top of the box you can see today’s earnings, yesterday’s earnings, earnings this month, and earnings from last month. The bottom half of the box shows your top five performing custom channels and top Five performing URL channels. Your lifetime earnings via Google Adsense are also shown at the bottom of the box.

The Publisher Toolbar was obviously not developed as a replacement for checking your stats through the main Google AdSense website, however it’s perfect for anyone who wants to quickly check how their AdSense websites are performing without logging into the main site.

The in-site ad overlay

The second, and arguably its most useful, feature of the Google Publisher Toolbar is the in-site ad overlay. Once you’ve installed the toolbar and signed into your account, the extension will place an overlay over all Google Adsense and DoubleClick advertisements on your websites.

When you load one of your website pages, your Google Adsense advertisement will be displayed as it normally would.

The ad overlay

Then, a second or so after the page has loaded, the ad overlay will be displayed. The overlay places a see-through black box over all of your AdSense advertisements. The name of the ad zone is displayed at the top of the overlay, and at the bottom you can see how much that particular zone has made today, yesterday, and over the last seven days.

Comparing performance between days

What does this all mean?

In a nutshell, it means that when you are browsing your websites you can quickly see which ad zones are performing well today, yesterday, and over the last week. I’ve found this to be a really useful tool when optimizing the ad positions of my Google AdSense ads, as it highlights which zones are under-performing and which zones are making the most money.

The great thing about this feature is that you can see the performance of each ad zone while you are browsing your website—you don’t need to log in to some external location to view your performance.

If you make money online using Google Adsense, I encourage you to try Google Publisher Toolbar out as it makes checking stats a breeze. Unfortunately, the extension is currently only available for Google Chrome but hopefully in the future we will see this available for other browsers such as Opera, Fireox, Safari, and Internet Explorer.

Kevin Muldoon is a Scottish webmaster and blogger who currently lives in South America. His labour of love is WordPress Mods; a blog which focuses on WordPress Themes, Plugins, Tutorials, News, Modifications.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Google Publisher Toolbar—a Must-have for AdSense Publishers

Question: How Do You Beat the Social Media Monster?

Posted: 24 Apr 2012 07:03 AM PDT

Over the last couple of days we’ve looked at various tactics that bloggers are using to gain traction, grow followings, and generate blog traffic on:

I’m sure that these posts gave you some great ideas for developing your interaction with fans and followers on these social networks. But I also know that social media is one of the key distractions that bloggers face.

Without a solid strategy or approach to social media, you can end up feeling like you’ve wasted time, fragmented your following, and—in some cases—created a social media monster that just wants to suck up more and more of your waking hours.

What’s your strategy for beating the social media monster?

I’m interested to hear how you choose to spend your time on social media. How important is this tool to your blogging efforts? Do your audiences congregate on certain networks, and ignore others? Have you had to change your approach over time as social media and its users have evolved?

My own approach involves three components:

Audience: I focus my engagements on the social media I know are the most popular with my blogs’ readers. Primarily, this is a simple time-cost tradeoff. I don’t have time to try every new social network that pops up, so I focus on those where I know a lot of readers hang out, and I’ll get the greatest possible return (in terms of engagement) on my time investment. But my audience also helps me understand how I need to evolve my social media usage. That’s why I was so eager to create a following on Google+ when it was launched: because I knew from talking with my blogs’ readers that this network would be big with them.
Goals: I control my time on social media by keeping my blog business goals top of mind. Every so often while I’m using social media (and throughout my day in general) I’ll ask myself if the way I’m spending my time is moving me closer to my goals. If it’s not, I check what I’m doing, and refocus on something that will. My goals also dictate a baseline for social media interaction—for instance, they helped me decide to auto-tweet the articles we publish here at ProBlogger, and help me choose what to add to the ProBlogger Facebook page. Finally, my goals also help me to choose which new networks to try as new options come onto the market.
My schedule: Social media can swallow up a lot of time, and as a blogger there are many, many things I need to do each day. So my social media strategy is also limited by my schedule. I can only give social media so much time out of each week, and I try to streamline that time as much as I can so that I can achieve as much with social networking as possible.

That’s me—but what about you? I’d really love to hear a bit about your social media strategy in the comments.

How conscious have you been about creating a strategy for your social media interaction? Have the articles we’ve published in the last few days given you some new ideas to try? What else is working for your social media engagement? Don’t forget to link us to your social media profiles so we can check them out and see what you’re doing for ourselves!

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Question: How Do You Beat the Social Media Monster?