Upstarty

At the beginning of December I was invited by Google to try out the new Adsense interface. It's definitely a welcomed step in the right direction.

As an Adsense publisher and Adwords user I have seen the Adwords interface evolve into an impressive app. In Adwords I have a ton of information provided to me by default, with a little customizing Adwords home page becomes a one page information nirvana detailing all of my spending.

With that in mind, it was odd as an Adsense publisher to see their sister program receive so many new improvements while the publisher side remained stagnant for years. It almost seemed that Google only cared about the people throwing money into Google's already overflowing coffers. Additionally, it seemed that Google resented the publisher side.

There was a ton of need for improvement in the Adsense interface. Most needed were better and more intuitive reporting. It was a chore to develop reports on which Adsense units were money makers and which were duds. It involved a lot of channel building and going into the reporting tab to develop custom reports.

Adsense now allows some common choices readily available with just a click.

So, it was very welcome to see that by default on Adsense's new interface is the ability to not only get your information by channels but also by ad size, ad type, and most helpful ad units. It's great to be able to see at a glance which ad units are performing and which are not. This really helps out for the purposes of A - B testing.

For example, after checking out the ad units report, I have discovered that I have a 728x90 ad receiving a ton of impressions but no clicks. However, I have a 468x60 that is receiving the same amount of impressions and has a healthy 1.36% CTR. Doing a little more digging I see that all 728x90 ad units are under performing. I plan on doing some more investigating and investigating across my sites to see if maybe it's time to retire 728x90s. People may just be blind to a standard banner.

Adsense unit reports can give you a quick glance where changes are good...or bad.

With that glance at information the new interface provides, I now want to try playing with the colors and design of the 728x90 that is receiving a ton of impressions. Maybe that will change it from being a dud to an earner. Or, it may just mean that I should get rid of that ad unit and re-purpose that space, improving the experience for my visitors.

However, the interface still has room for improvement. One annoying quirk of the new interface is that when looking at channels there seems to be no option of viewing all of them at once. You are limited to viewing 10 at a time, meaning that there's a lot of clicking to get an overall view on how your channels are doing. Google has stated that one of their goals for their new interface was to limit the clicking needed to do common tasks. I would say that this is a common task and something that really needs to be improved upon. Right now the only way to see all of your channels at once is to export a report.

Another oddity is that Google now provides a nice graph upon signing in to give you a visual on your earnings. However, I've noticed that the graph and the information in 'Earnings Estimates' does not match up in real time. As of writing, I can see that my daily earning has amounted to $4.57, but the graph and 'Earning Estimates' are still showing that I've made $0. I'm sure this will match up when the new interface comes out of Beta, but it's a bit shocking to keep seeing $0 for the day.

In conclusion, I'm pretty happy with the new interface...it's been a long time coming. I can't say that I'm overly impressed, there is still much room for improvement, especially considering how much the Adwords interface has improved through the years. So, hopefully we're seeing the first iteration that will be built upon, not an interface to be released and left stagnant for years like the past interface.