GA Report for Pages with Clicks and Zero Revenue

Today, when browsing Google AdSense Help forums, I noticed one fellow AdSense Publisher saying: “…if they [Google] were showing us what pages caused most invalid clicks we could reorganize that page and prevent further invalid clicks…”

I strongly believe (but I might be also wrong) that the notion of “invalid clicks” is related to the user behavior and traffic source in a first place and much less to the pages themselves. However Google Analytics provides publishers with a way to see list of top pages which produce AdSense clicks with zero revenue.

So if you believe your content or layout may cause illegal clicks – follow the instructions bellow (I am using new beta Google Analytics interface).

Let me mention first that for this method to work you should obviously have working Google AdSense and Google Analytics accounts, as well as they should be linked. See “How do I link my AdSense account to Google Analytics?” article from the AdSense Help if you need step-by-step instructions on how to link your accounts.

Create Custom Advanced Segment

So, in order to see the list of pages on which clicks which bring no revenue happen you need to create a custom advanced segment which targets all visitors produced click(s) with zero revenue. For that:

1. Open report section of your Google Analytics account.
   
   
2. Click on “Advanced Segments” button.
   
   
3. Click on “+ New Advanced Segment” button.
   
   
4. Assign some name to custom segment, and 2 statements: ‘Include “AdSense Ads Clicked” greater than 0′ and ‘Include “AdSense Revenue” Equals “0.0″‘, just like shown on the picture bellow:
   
   

   GA Advanced Segment Setup

   
   
   
5. Then click on “Save Segment” button to save it, after that custom segment will be available for selection in the “Advanced Segments” -> “Custom Segments” section.

Now let’s apply this newly created segment to the AdSense Report available in GA account

1. Open “AdSense Pages” report by clicking the following menu items: “My Site” -> “Content” -> “AdSense” -> “AdSense Pages”
   
   
2. Open “Advanced Segments” section, put checkbox next to the custom segment you just created (make sure only this one is selected) and click “Apply” button on the left:
   
   

   Apply Advanced Segment to GA Report

   
   
   
3. Scroll down to the main report section and click on “AdSense Ads Clicked” column to sort list of pages by amount of click descending:
   
   

   GA Report for Pages with Clicks and Zero Revenue

   
   
   

Results:

1. AdSense Pages GA Report before custom advanced segment Applied:
   
   

   AdSense Report without Segment Applied

2. AdSense Pages GA Report after custom advanced segment Applied:
   
   

   AdSense Report with Advanced Segment Applied

Enjoy!

– Julia

Usually if you see on your website a white/blank space instead of Adsense ads, this means that Adsense cannot show adds in that unit for some reasons (we are going to talk about possible reasons below) and also you have enabled the “Fill space with a solid color” feature (in the “Choose what to display if no relevant ads are available” settings of this ad unit). I probably should also say that if you set “Show public service ads” instead of the “Fill space with a solid color” one, the PSA will be shown instead of a blank space.

If you notice no usual ads for content being shown on your website first of all – don’t panic: even though some of the reasons may indicate your AdSense account is in danger of being terminated (or is already terminated), there are others reasons which mean nothing bad and just need a bit of attention from your side.

There are some reasons for blank space or PSA to be shown instead of the AdSense Ad:

Considering your AdSense account is in good stand with Google and is active

Reason #1: The ad unit has been just created or changed

Newly created ad creatives don’t start showing instantly: let it to be at least 10 mins (I would do 30 mins to be safe) since creation of the code in your adSense account before checking if it appears on the website. By the way this issue is also related to making changes to ads – like changing font and color settings: they aren’t instant either.

Reason #2: There are more ad units on the page than it is allowed by AdSense

In this case you will probably see first ads in proper way, but all ad units above the limit will show up as blank blocks. Amount of allowed ad units per page may differ depends of what type of product you are using, more information in this regard may be found in “Product-Specific Policies” section of AdSense Program Policies.

Reason #3: Browser you are using has JS turned off

AdSense ads require support of JavaScript to work properly. And I understand this reason might sound “stupid” for some ppl, however it happens: you maybe wanted to see how your page (or any other page you were browsing before) looks like when JS is turned off and then simply forgot to turn it back on. So check whatever your browser has JS turned on, when you see blank blocks instead of the AdSense ads and turn it on (in case it was turned off) to fix the issue.

Reason #4: Using Ad Blocker?

Ad blocking software is used to remove ad content for you from the pages you are visiting with your browser.

Such software can be installed:

• directly on your computer;
• on a proxy server configured in your browser settings;
• in some rare cases your ISP can forward all the traffic to go through a proxy configured in such way.

The possible purposes to block ads could be:

• increase a speed of page loading: pages without additional banner pictures are faster; it makes sense to use ads blocking proxy to speed your Internet up if you are connected using a slow cell-phone connection;
• to use less traffic (it makes sense to browse pages using an ads blocking proxy if you pay for traffic);
• some ppl just hate looking at ads, I can understand this purpose too

To make sure that this is not our reason for white/blank Adsense ads:

• check and make sure that you do NOT have any ads blocking software running (careful, in some cases it can be a part or special settings of antivirus/malware packages);
• check if you use any proxy… and if you are not sure about this proxy settings, try to disable that proxy.

Reason #5: The ad size is bigger than the place allocated for it by the surrounding content

If you are trying to fit an ad into space which is smaller than the ad unit itself the ad won’t show up. If you are doing it un-intentionally: check the size (height and width), margins and paddings of the block of space you are trying to fit the ad unit in, make sure the space is enough to display the whole ad. Check block sizes in various browsers: different browsers may render HTML/CSS differently and that could lead to the situation when in some browsers ad shows and in other you see a blank space instead.

Reason #6: Google can’t find a relevant ad for the page content

Rarely but that happens: it can be you page are soo unique so none of the advertisers purchased keywords associated with it. However much more often happening issues is that your page lacks content so google can’t find ads suitable for it. That is one of the most cases for pages with media content: images, videos, flash; but without good text support. My advice here would be to accompany your media with rich text descriptions, titles, alt tags and links: all those will help google to pick good relevant ads.

Those mean something is not right with your account:

Reason #7: Your account may be under review of blocked

If your account is blocked for ToS or Program Policy violations or is under review after appeal all websites with codes associated with this account will show blank blocks or PSAs. If you discover your sites are not showing ads properly first 2 things you should do are: login to your AdSense account to ensure it is still active, and if not then check if you did receive any emails from Google AdSense team (check junk folders and old emails, chances are you simply missed the email)

Reason #8: The page content or whole website isn’t suitable for the family oriented auditory

According to AdSense policy ads may only appear on the pages with content suitable for whole family. If AdSense indexing robot notices any kind of content which may be considered unsuitable (e.g. curse word(s) / profanity, content close to adult (text or media), advertise or sell alcohol, tabacco, etc.) of some of the pages of your website – it will flag such page and ads will not show at such page. AdSense team may also send you an email saying you need to fix the ToS or Program Policy Violation and a timeframe allowed for this. Check your mailbox for such kind of email and make sure no emails from google gets into the junk folder, as neglecting such kind of email may get your account banned.

Reason #9: You didn’t verify your PIN or Phone Number

PSA or blank blocks will be shown instead of the fully functional ads in case AdSense team asked you to verify your PIN code of Phone Number and you didn’t complete the procedure yet. See the Payment History page in your Google AdSense account for more details. If it indicates that you are required to verify phone: check the number on-file with your profile (make sure it is properly formated and contains country code) and follow the instructions to complete the procedure. For the PIN code you may need to wait for some time as it comes in a mail. Meanwhile make sure the postal address on-file with your profile is your proper current address. I believe for both verifications AdSence system sends out an email in advance – make sure check you junk mail folder as well. I believe a failure to verify PIN or Phone (when requested by AdSense team) may get your account blocked after the time period given to you in the email is over.

Those are the reasons I can think of for the topic. Some of the I’e discovered myself during setting up my account, some of them were reported on the Google AdSense support forum. I understand this list may be not complete. Please share your experience in this topic with me and readers of this article if you have something to say.

Thank You!

– Julia

Today I was surprised to find an email starting with words “dear adwords customer” in my mailbox. It was weird enough, because I don’t use Google AdWords and therefore I don’t have an account with them. But even more strange was the fact that the email asked to use some URL which had nothing to do with google.com to login to my account and check “a new alert from Google AdWords Team” I supposedly received recently.

Based on those 2 facts it was pretty easy for me to guess: I have been targeted for a against my google account. Most probably if I had followed the instructions in the email, my account with google would already have password changed by hackers, my private info stolen and my AdWords account balance used to advertise some questionable sites (if I would have one).

So, if you receive some suspicious emails from Citibank, Facebook, Google and others on daily basis, and not sure how to deal with those, continue reading. Hope you will find this article useful.

What is phishing and how does it work?

Usually phishing attempt starts with an email. Phishing emails try to mimic emails being sent from real websites and systems: popular services, social websites, internet stores and auctions, banks, payment processing systems, forums.

Phishing email will do everything to drag your attention and make you click on the URL it contains: it will urge you to check the recent update in your account, or receive an important notification, or even address an issue which requires your immediate attention and can cause your account suspension if you ignore it (main call to action in such emails is “click on the link below to login”). The page available by this URL may look very similar (even identical!) to the page which exists on real website, so people very often don’t recognize they are visiting some other site instead.

This page and this email exist only to make visitor fill in their login and password information after that it is just matter of time when criminals will log into the account, steal the private information or even change password and start using the account for their fraudulent activities. Sometimes such pages also tries to install malware on the computer of the visitor.

How to distinguish phishing email from the real one?

#1. Try to remember if you have an account with the system which claims to sent you an email. Very often phishing emails are being sent to wide range of email addresses independently of the fact if that address is registered with the system the “phishing” attempt is targeting or not. So the first fact what should really alert you is receiving email which appeals to your account in the system you don’t have an account with (just like in my case, I don’t have an account with AdWords, so it is weird for me to receive email about some alert in my AdWords account, so the email about it is a phishing email with 99.99% confidence).

#2. If you have an account with them, make sure the email address on file with this account is the same as the email address you’ve received the email to. If not, it is most probably a scam email!

#3. If you have an account with the website the email refers to, login into it and check if the issue/info described in the email is true. For that open your browser, type in the URL of the website (but NOT the URL sent in the email!!!), login to your account and check: do you really got an alert or notification or invitation to some group the email was talking about? If not – you most probably are the target of a phishing attempt.

#4. Check if URL in the email does include the exact domain of the website it implies to lead you to. Pay double attention to singular/plural forms of words used in the domain name, using characters which look similar but are in fact different (like number 1 instead of letter l), using a website name as subdomain in some different domain, adding some prefix or suffix to the domain name to make it similar looking but yet different domain. If you notice any of those – the email most probably is phishing email.

#5. Check if the email is indeed sent by the system which clams to sent it. See the email headers “From: ” header can be easily faked, however “Return-Path:” should be related to the system which sends it. So it you expect email to be sent from google the “Return-Path:” value should include some adress on google mail server, for example …@analytics.bounces.google.com. However this method bring some false positive results in case the company used some third party email sending software, so don’t rely only on this one.

What to do if you receive suspicious email / link?

• If you are not sure whatever an email you’ve received is legitimate and suspect it to be a phishing one, never ever click on or open the URL sent in it! If the issue described in the email sounds like it require your immediate attention try to login into your account by typing the website address in your browser manually instead.
  
  
• If you are confident what you are target for phishing attempt, report it to the website which the phishing email trying to obtain your info for . Most websites have contact forms or pages where you can submit info about abuse or phishing email you’ve received (make sure you access this website by typing the address directly, not by clicking on the link in the email!). After all, the website owner customers of whom are getting targeted by such activity should be most concerned with preventing this. For my case, I reported the email on “” page.

If your account has been compromised

• If you happened to have your account on some website already compromised do to phishing activity, contact the owner of the website as soon as possible in order to prevent any data loss and using your account for any fraudulent activity.
  
  
• While you are waiting for their reply try to re-set password, a lot of resources have a functionality to re-set password and send it to the email they have on file for your account, however that will only work if the person who got access to your account hasn’t change this email to his yet.
  
  
• If you are using the same combination of login and password to access other resources or/and mailboxes – change passwords for those to something unique. Generally it is good practice to use unique passwords for each service.
  
  
• Hope for the best!

Instead of PS…

Sad to say, but phishing is not only email related issue nowadays. Messages with damaging URLs can be sent via instant messengers, private messages inside the the social network or even posted on a website. So be extremely cautious before clicking any suspicious URL even if it has been sent / posted / twitted by your friend. Their account may have been compromised and criminals may use it get to your private information. If you notice some unusual activity from your friend account: let him know directly, it might save him some troubles later on.

Thanks for reading, feel free to share your thoughts about the topic in the comments section bellow.

Julia

Google Analytics Stops Reporting Stats

I am reading for quite some time now and I see a lot of people asking over and over: “Why Google Analytics suddenly stops showing any new stats but it was working just yesterday / a week ago / in last month?”

Based on my experience I’ve compiled a list of why usually such happens (even if there is a “Receiving Data” sign for this Google Analytics profile) and I hope you will find it useful.

I am looking forward to make this list complete, so feel free to share your experience in comments! Thanks.

Reason #1: You have multiple GA accounts or profiles for the website and you are looking into the wrong one

As banal that may sound, that happens. View source of the page on your website, locate the “UA-…..” number in getTracker(“UA-XXXXXXX-X”); in you tracking code and make sure it corresponds to the profile number you are looking at.

Reason #2: You’ve changed design of your site and forgot to apply GA tracking code to new design

That may also include changing of the Blog design template if you are not using a plugin/admin settings to add the GA tracking code. To check for that open your website, right click on the page, select “View Page Source” and search for “google-analytics.com/ga.js” string (that string is common for both asynchronous tracking code and standard one). If you can’t locate this string in the page source the tracking code isn’t there anymore, so add it and that should fix the problem.

Reason #3: The tracking code got messed up during some changes on the website

There a multiple way how the code can get messed up:

• Partial GA tracking code . For proper tracking your website should include complete and working GA code snippet. If code is corrupted somehow you will most probably see your browser reporting a JS error while you have your site opened – so check the browser status bar for error or get some developer tool addon which allows seeing more info about JS error (e.g. ).

• Duplicated GA tracking code . Check your page source (open the page in browser, right click on the page, select “View Page Source”) and count how many timer “google-analytics.com/ga.js” string appears in the page code.

  Even though GA allows to have multiple tracking codes on the same page those codes need to be modified in order to get it working, and that is a topic for a whole separate article. Assuming what having multiple tracking code isn’t your intention you need to make sure only one code snippet is included to the page in the same time. If you see duplicated code snippets eliminate all but one. It can be pretty easy if you’ve added snippets manually – just remove all but one. However it can be a challenge to find where the multiple tracking codes come from if you are using some CMS or a Blog software. So check if you have tracking code add-ons/plugin or multiple of those installed and maybe added a code manually in the same time.

• Special characters in the snippet got replaced with HTML entities . Generally that should not be an issue if you are using some simple text editor to insert the tracking snippet. However if you used a website editor or a CMS to insert the code snippet, some characters in the code snippet may got replaced with their HTML entities (something like & or &quote;). Check if that isn’t an issue and if so you may need to find another way how to insert the code.

• Special characters got replaced by some others while copying/pasting the code. That issue may rise if you copied the tracking code from, lets say, Word Document (or other rich text editor) before including it to your website.

  Generally any kind of rich text editor isn’t good for programming code because they tend to replace some special characters with others which look better in a text document, however it mess the programming code. That may affect single and double quotation marks, ampersands, slashes, dashes and so on.

  So if you used some rich text editor to copy/paste the tracking code, my advice would be to get a new code from the web interface of Google Analytics directly and insert it again, because it can be quite of challenge to locate special character replaced this way (they will look almost the same) to fix them. I should also note what in this case the tracking of website with such code would not work from very beginning, but I thought it is good idea to list this case here as it .

• Leading or tailing spaces before / after UA-XXXXXXX-X in the getTracker(“UA-XXXXXXX-X”);
  That happens when you do use some CMS/Blog software and inser the tracking code with plugin/add-on. So view the page source, locate getTracker function and make sure there no spaces before or after its argument, and if it does go to the add-on/plugin settings and remove those no-needed spaces. Believe me that too.

I really hope my checklist helped you to locate problems caused google analytics to suddenly stop reporting stats. However if it didn’t, or if you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to comment here, I will be happy to help!