blog guide: May 2013

Google Buzz's last-gasp addition to your Google Drive

This QuickTip is about a file that Google Buzz is going to put into your Google Drive, as part of it's final turn-off routine, for all Buzz accounts that haven't yet been deleted.

Google Buzz was one of Google's early-and-short-lived social networking attempts, but was used by some bloggers looking to promote their blogs.

It was closed down in October 2011

I haven't seen it published in any of the Google blogs that I follow, but recently I was sent an email saying that the last step in the close-down will happen on or after 17 July 2013, when Google will save a copy of the Buzz posts from any remaining active Buzz accounts to the account-holders Google Drive.

There will be two types of file, and the files won't count against your storage limits. They say:

The first will be private, only accessible to you, and have a snapshot of the Google Buzz public and private posts that you wrote.
The second will have a copy of your Google Buzz public posts. It will be visible to anyone with the link, unless you change it later, and may appear in search results and on your Google Profile (if you've linked to your Buzz posts). Any existing links to your Google Buzz content will redirect to this file.

Something to be aware of, if you used Buzz to make controversial comments: Comments that you made on other users' posts will be saved to those users' files. After the file-download described here id done, the other user can change the sharing settings of those files, if they choose to do so. And if they do, and if you have commented on another person's private post, that person could choose to make that post and its comments public. To remove the chance of that happening, you could delete all your Buzz content well before 17 July 2013

The Buzz-download Google Drive files will only contain comments from users who had enabled Google Buzz. They won't include any comments that you deleted before Google moved your data to your Google Drive.

AdSense now allow changes to their advertisement code

Unknown 13:06 Add Comment

This QuickTip is about a change to AdSense's policies about modifying their ad code: in short, you are now allowed to change the code in certain way, to achieve certain things.

AdSense have announced changes to their "Modifying ad code" policy.

In the past, publishers weren't allowed to change AdSense ads in any way other than what could be done through the AdSense ad-code generator or Blogger's Add-a-gadget / Adsense tools.

Now, however, some changes are allowed, so you can do things like:

Responsive design: creating a single webpage that adapts to the device on it�s being viewed on (eg laptop, smartphone or tablet).
A/B testing: creating multiple versions of a page and comparing how they are used to see which page is the most effective.
Setting custom channels dynamically:
Ad tag minification: Enabling your site pages to load faster by reducing the amount of data to be transferred.

In several places, AdSense say that the goals of these changes should be to "maximize ad and user experience" - and most of their Terms and Conditions about what you're not allowed to do still hold, so it's clearly not carte blanche to make any changes you want.

Provided you have enabled a mobile template then responsive / adaptive website design isn't and issue which Blogger users have to worry much about - although there are some things you can and should do.

A/B testing is certainly relevant- and I'll be looking to see how much support their code offers for this.

Right now, I'm not sure how relevant dynamic custom channels and minification are for Bloggers - will be investigating this over the coming weeks.

See AdSense's help-centre article for details and the specific code snippets related to the these types of changes.

Setting up Google Analytics so it gets AdSense data from more than one blog or website

Unknown 16:34 Add Comment

This article is about setting up Google Analytics on your blog in a way that includes data for AdSense clicks and behaviour.

Google Analytics and Blogger.

Analytics is Google's tool for measuring website performance: how many visitors, how long do they stay for, what pages do they look at - and if you use AdSense, where are your earnings coming from. It's a major step up from Blogger's Statistics displays, and has far more details eg where the visitors came from, what browser they are using.

When people first started using Analytics with Blogger, they followed the standard Analytics instructions to edit their template and add the tracking code to it.

However if they switched to use a different template, the tracking code was lost unless they remembered to re-install it - and many people didn't remember.

So some Google engineers started telling people to put the code into an HTML/Javascript widget instead, because widgets are kept through template changes.

This worked well, until mobile templates were introduced. By default, mobile templates don't show HTML-Javascript gadgets. And while this can be changed, it involves editing your template (so brings back the "what if the template is changed" issue) - and it relies on the mobile-visitors using devices that run Javascript.

So Blogger added a field to the Settings tab where you can enter the Google Analytics profile ID for the blog: GreenLava over at BloggerSentral wrote an excellent post about using this, including how to
check if your existing template has the code needed to make use of this new field.

But recently I've noticed that while setting up Analytics this way collected data about visitor numbers, it doesn't always get data about AdSense (eg how many ad-impressions, what page do "clicks" come from, what were the keywords, what browser were getting the AdSense clicksetc). In fact, this data has been missing for all but one of my blogs recently. So I did some investigation and found that this is deliberate - but that you can fix it.

Getting AdSense data from Analytics

If you only have one blog, and you have linked your AdSense and Analytics profiles, and put AdSense ad units in your blog by getting the ad-code from AdSense and adding it as code, then you should be seeing AdSense data in your Analytics account.

To check, log in to Analytics and check the Reporting > Standard reports > Content panel: when you expand it there should be a line for AdSense, and when you click that line some data should appear in the middle report panel (assuming your blog has some non-ad-blocked visitors).

But if you have more than one blog or website, then AdSense data is only put into Analytics for the one that is identified as "primary" in your Analytics profile. (For me, this is was the first blog that I added AdSense to.)

To get AdSense data in Analytics for more than one site, you need to get the tracking code-snippet for non-primary website from Analytics and install it in your blog. See below for exact instructions for this.

I've found that AdSense ad units that were added from Blogger's Add-a-gadget wizard don't report data through Analytics even if the tracking code is installed - and this support article from Google confirms that this is expected behaviour. I haven't been able to find any way to work around this, as yet.

How to get the AdSense tracking code for non-primary websites and blogs

Log in to Analytics with the Google account that owns your AdSense profile, and in which you have linked AdSense and Analytics.

Click on the Admin tab in the top right hand corner of any page.

In the Accounts section, click on AdSense Linking.

In the Secondary Analytics Properties list, find the name of the site you want the tracking code for (if you have more than one account).

Click the Code Snippet link to the right of the chosen profile name.

Copy the code that is shown, and install it to your blog. As menioned above, there are two choices for doing this:

Edit your template and add it to the header (ie somewhere between <head> and </head>) - but remember that it will be lost if you change templates again in future.