You may be tempted to ask: what’s up with the little ads?
Answer: This is my experiment with Google AdSense.
AdSense is a mechanism by which Google can intelligently figure out the kind of content on a web page, and then as a result, serve advertising that is appropriate for that content. For example, you may notice a bunch of ads for running events and Mac products. That’s because recent blog entries dealt with these two topics.
The other aspect of AdSense is monetization for the website owner. For example, if you were to click on an ad on my blog, I will get some money from Google. Of course, I have not seen cent yet. That’s probably due to the low number of visitors.
In the old days, webmasters put counters on every webpage. The counters would increment every time the associated webpage is served (i.e. viewed by someone). On the original www.svgeek.com site, the counters were visible to visitors. I also had a private web page which contained all the counters so that I could see, at a glance, how many hits the site got.
Today, I use Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is a set of code that you insert into every web page. When you log into your Google Analytics account, you can see the number of daily visitors and every imagination statistic. You can also see how the visitors got to your site, for example, if they found you via a Google search, or if they came from another site. If the visitors found you via Google, you can also see the search terms they used. This is an interesting tie-in with AdWords, another Google product. I imagine that you would use the search terms from Analytics and advertise appropriately via AdWords in order to drive visitors to your web site. Very clever of Google.
I am very tempted to play with AdWords to see how I can increase traffic to this blog. The nice thing with AdWords, compared to the banner ads of the past, is that you pay only if there is a click-through. So I could come up with a budget of few tens of dollars and see what happens. Hmmm…
My other hat is as co-chair of the Haas EWMBAA communications committee. We have been sending out a weekly eZine via email to all EWMBA students. One intention is to drive traffic to the web pages “owned” by the various student committees(Admissions, Career Services, Alumni Affairs etc). The best way of monitoring the success/failure is to use Google Analytics to track traffic. Unfortunately, Blogger.com (our hosting service) does not allow you to easily insert the Analytics code. This in spite of the fact that Blogger.com is a Google property. So we will probably have to manually edit the HTML. This will be fun…