Google AdSense Stats

AdSense launched a section for new publishers - Newbie Center - where you can find a lot of basic things about the program, but also read some numbers. Google uses "might" whenever there's a number involved probably because they don't want to influence you too much.

"While there's no magic formula to determine how much revenue you'll receive based on a certain amount of traffic, it helps to be realistic about your earning potential. For example, for every thousand page impressions you receive, you might earn anywhere from $0.05 to $5.00." A 2006 article from Business 2.0 Magazine partially agrees to this: "CPM rates on Google AdSense and competing automated systems are estimated at anywhere from 50 cents to a few bucks."

Google also talks about the magical high paying ads: "while it's nice to receive higher paying ads, keep in mind that higher paying ads may be aimed at a smaller target audience and therefore generate less interest and ultimately fewer clicks." Google says that "for a larger site, 1% might be considered a decent clickthrough rate".

Google AdSense's TOS doesn't allow you to reveal the clickthrough rates for your sites and, by default, Google displays stats at the page level. So instead of seeing the average CTR and CPM for an ad unit, Google will show the average numbers for a web page. To see the real numbers, you need to go to advanced reports and select "show data by ad unit". Note that Google doesn't break down the data by domain or subdomain, so you need to create URL channels for each of your site. You can create up to 200 URL channels and they start tracking data only after you add them.


Google AdSense makes it difficult to find key information about ads and it doesn't separate the performance by ad block type, domain, referral etc. At some point, a post from Google Analytics blog suggested a possible integration with AdSense, but the current level of openness is not encouraging.

Google Artificially Promotes Recent Web Pages

Google paid a big price when it started to index pages faster and show them in the search results minutes after they're published. The problem is that you can't rank a page that has just been created because it has no backlinks so Google artificially inflates the rankings of the recently-created pages based on historical data and the few backlinks that are detected.

In some cases, if Google sees a lot of searches for a query that wasn't popular before, it assumes something has happened recently and shows more recent results.

These two changes are extremely visible today. If you go to Google's homepage and click on the special logo that celebrates 25 years of TCP/IP and the New Year, you'll be sent to the search results for [January 1 TCP/IP] and you should normally see a Wikipedia page as the top result. But the first page of Google's results has changed dramatically in the past hours and all the results are new: most of them are from spam sites, pages that discuss Google's logo and quote from Wikipedia. Most notably, the top result is a Digg page that links to a newly-created blog with a meaningful address: january-1-tcp-ip.blogspot.com and a highly-optimized title: "January 1 tcp/ip". Obviously, that blog hoped to take advantage of Google's new logo and succeeded: the two top results are Digg pages that link to that site and they're followed by that blog's homepage and a post from the same blog.



The site gets traffic both directly from Digg and from Google's homepage.


You can see at Google Trends that [january 1 tcp/ip] was the "hottest" query for December 31 in the US and continues to be very popular today.


It seems that Google can no longer send users to a search results page from a doodle because the results can become unpredictable and they show a big flaw in Google's algorithms. The same bug can also be a feature if there's a devastating earthquake somewhere on the planet and people start to search for more information about it after they hear the news.

Update (9 hours later): Other blogs take advantage of the situation.