David Carrington

Google Analytics is one of those great Google products that I’ve used from the start. It provides very useful statistics, graphs and alerts about site usage. I use it for all of my sites and have recently modified Dabr to work with it too – with only a handful of minor obstacles along the way.

First up was the fact that Google Analytics historically never had very good mobile support. Even once that was in place, I had to mess about with Google’s PHP code to add support for Opera Mini’s proxy servers.

Then, once I had the tracking code in place and was starting to get some nice stats – I noticed a piece of text that I should have seen before I started anything:

5M pageview cap per month for non AdWords advertisers.

Whoops – Dabr has a lot more pageviews than that!

AdWords is their service where you pay Google to show adverts that point to your site. Of course I’ve had to sign up to this (at an initial setup cost of £10) and there should begin to be a few Dabr adverts appearing on websites around the web. I’ve even started getting a few clicks.

Google charges me with every click of those adverts, which is a little annoying, so I’ve set up AdSense too.

AdSense is the opposite of AdWords. It’s where I get to add other people’s adverts to my sites and I get a trickle of cash for doing so. Typically I’ve seen clicks earning me about 10p to £1 each, but clicks are fairly rare. I don’t (yet) know enough about CPM and those kind of fancy buzzwords to tell you any real figures. I’m sure I’ll blog something in the new year.

So now I’ve got the three A’s working nicely for Dabr:

• AdWords to bring in potential new users,
• AdSense to bring in a little cash,
• and Analytics to track site usage.

Thanks Google :)

I have one AdSense account (the forced limit) and three Analytics accounts (work, personal, and Dabr). Can I link them up how I want to? No.

The AdSense account is used to show ads down the side of this site, which I thought was an interesting idea to see what kind of money it can pull in. It’s not much, about £1.67 in 40 days. It has highlighted something annoying to me though.

Google lets you link up your Analytics account to your AdSense account so you can get some fairly interesting statistics like those shown in the screenshot on the right. I like it a lot as I’m a big fan of Analytics and what it can do. Unfortunately, they’ve made the next part a little frustrating: you can only link one of your Analytics accounts to AdSense (remember I have three).

So what if I want to show AdSense stats on another account? I can’t. You’re not even allowed to set up a second AdSense account because the sign up form specifically tells you not to (and makes you tick a box to agree to that). To add even more frustration, unlinking your Analytics and AdSense accounts is a manual process and you need to visit Google’s How do I unlink my AdSense account from Google Analytics? page to contact their team to do it for you.

All that for some stats? Thankfully my other experience with both products has been rather smooth – for now at least! In a few days the Dabr account will go over the 5M pageviews/month limit for free accounts and I may need to sign up to AdWords to keep that working. Fun fun.

The other day I created a new Twitter account: @newdabr. I had a burst of creative thought and rushed some code to achieve this live demo. It really isn’t much to look at, but what the site is doing is a big improvement over the original @Dabr. (more…)

I keep look at what I had on davidcarrington.co.uk and thinking it’s too empty, too plain. I do have this semi-unused blog but hopefully I can build on it and make words flow a bit more smoothly out of here from now on.

More geeky updates, less waffle. No promises.

Bryan Person heard about it from Marketing Over Coffee and thinks it’s a good idea, as do his two commenters. Bill Deys wrote about it too.

Scoble refuses to not do it:

“My link blog is for keeping what I think are the most important RSS items of the day, including mine.”

The positive side of doing it is that you’re potentially pushing your blog into more people’s RSS readers. The only negative feedback I’ve read so far consists of one of these two arguments:

• Duplicates – This is reasonable, hopefully Google Reader is now smart enough not to show an item twice. If not, it’s probably something they’re trying to do.
• “I don’t like your blog” – People saying this have a fair point. For now, their only choice is to put up with it or unsubscribe.

I’m personally going to add this to my own Shared Items (david.carrington AT gmail DOT com if that helps).