AdSense Tweaks

The clever people at Google (or the same bastards who stole my PR, depending on your perspective) have changed the way that AdSense for content ad units respond to clicks. Previously users could click anywhere on the ad unit and their click would be counted; now only those clicks which fall on the ad title or URL will be counted.

"What's the purpose?" you might ask. Well, according to Google they've tweaked the system to try and reduce the number of accidental clicks - accidental clicks which AdWords advertisers have to pay for but stand little chance of converting. They also claim that the decrease in accidental clicks will benefit publishers by making their visitors stop for longer. So it's a pink, fluffy, all-round nice state of affairs that will keep everyone in the ad food chain happy.

Read the complete story at the official blog, Inside AdSense.

WidgetBucks Update #2

My previous WidgetBucks posts:
WidgetBucks - Making Your Traffic Pay
WidgetBucks Update

I've had a good month with WidgetBucks but if you read around you'll find that some people have not. WidgetBucks is drawing in thousands of new publishers every week with the enticing lure of up to $6 CPM and a $25 sign up bonus - not surprisingly, with such attractive payments on offer, some people are trying to dodge the rules and pocket the cash.

To maintain integrity in the system for the benefit of their advertisers WidgetBucks has come down hard on certain rule breaking publishers. A lot of people have received warnings or bannings for:

• Click fraud.
• Placing their widgets on sites with adult content.
• Placing their widgets on non-content (eg. ad only) pages.
• Placing their widgets on non-English sites.

Obviously anyone who has been banned isn't very pleased with WidgetBucks and consequently there is some negative publicity floating about at the moment.

Have faith - WidgetBucks is part of the respected Mpire advertising business and they will honour their payment pledges as long as the publisher keeps to the terms of service. I can not emphasise that enough - people are only being banned for unnecessarily ignoring the rules.

Today the official WidgetBucks blog announced that October's earnings have been confirmed and it has been a good month for me. I am not raking in loads of clicks each day, but even a few 30 cent clicks begin to add up over the month. I'm on target for a nice little Christmas bonus, when I receive my first payment in December.

Another thing I like about WidgetBucks is the way they respond to publisher feedback. One thing that was concerning me was that referral earnings were only posted at the beginning of each month and there was no way to track them in between. Today WidgetBucks announced that they will be adding a real time referral earnings tracker to their site. Some publishers have also complained about losing track of their earnings from deleted widgets - to overcome this problem a new section is going to be added to keep track of these earnings too.

WidgetBucks are still offering the very generous $25 instant sign up bonus for all new publishers. If you haven't joined yet I recommend you do so before this $25 bonus offer is ended. Please use our referral button below to tell them AdSense4Dummies sent you.

AdSense Introduce Resources Tab

A very brief entry today, it is the weekend after all, just to say that publishers may have noticed the addition of a new 'Resources' tab on their account dashboard. The new button provides AdSense publishers with a convenient shortcut to an array of program policy information. Why not check it out yourself next time you sign in?

More on this story at the official blog, Inside AdSense.