Dabr & the three A’s
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 :)