I have wondered for a long time whether people who come to my site via google behave differently in respect to ads than other users. There are lots of reasons for wondering this but specifically for now I am thinking that potentially someone who has just come from google may be more likely to click on an adsense link than someone who has come from somewhere else.
Thankfully I have 10s of k's of ad impressions daily to test this on and the technology isn't exactly challenging. I have set up a cookie on every page of my largest site that drops on a users computer once every 72hrs where they have been referred from. This is done using the following code contained in an include(''); file.
if ($HTTP_COOKIE_VARS["paperairplanesreferrercookie"] == '' )
{
$value = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
$timenow = time();
$time = time() + 7200;
$cookieset = setcookie("paperairplanesreferrercookie", $value, $time); // expire in 2 hours
};
Then lower down the page on every page I have a similar include that powers my advertising. Within this include I read in the cookie and test whether it contains the string ".google." (not perfect I know but good enough for my purposes. The code which does this is below:
if (strpos($HTTP_COOKIE_VARS["paperairplanesreferrercookie"], ".google.") === false)
{echo $googleadvert1;
}
else
{
echo $googleadvert2;
};
Note the === in the strpos() function is because strpos() doesn't always return false when it is false therefore you have to look for responses equivalent to false (===) rather than just equal to false (==). So for me this looks like it could be a really interesting test, I will of course paste the results of the test here and if there's any substantial difference in results I will of course make changes to capitalize.
I may choose later to also split out people with cookie blocking (since I love vinny's article) and see how they behave but for now I will just let the results tick over like this for a couple of weeks.
Great web site. Than you for the information his site is amazing. Very well developed with great information.
Posted by: bob kesto | January 10, 2011 at 11:17 PM
I'm slowly moving to google calendar but trying a wacky multi-way sync with outlook and my phone. My skillz are not paying my sync bills. I like tag clouds and love the fact you've built these two bad boys - i'm tagging my posts and have a cloud it on my site and my name is the biggest tag because I'm so vain. How did you find the delicious/flickr apis? (just adding your delicious to my livebookmarks - geekorama!)
Posted by: viagra online | March 16, 2010 at 03:21 PM
Yeah I suppose you are right. I actually see a lot of people using trulia.com and I use del.icio.us and flickr actively. My calendar is getting firmly embedded in my Yahoo Mail account too. The last thing I use is facebook and I use that tonnes.
Posted by: generic viagra | March 09, 2010 at 07:35 AM
The results are out http://www.alexschultz.co.uk/weblog/2006/09/adsense_google_.html and they are interesting. I found the flickr and del.icio.us APIs ridiculously easy to use they were great. I have a post half written about the typepad API which I should really complete since I think they have entered an awesome new world of API methods where Auth and Auth totally happens on the Typepad platform with no interplay which is impressive.
Anyway, so much geeking out to do and so little whiskey and water to get me through it.
Posted by: Alex | September 30, 2006 at 03:00 PM
I'm slowly moving to google calendar but trying a wacky multi-way sync with outlook and my phone. My skillz are not paying my sync bills. I like tag clouds and love the fact you've built these two bad boys - i'm tagging my posts and have a cloud it on my site and my name is the biggest tag because I'm so vain. How did you find the delicious/flickr apis? (just adding your delicious to my livebookmarks - geekorama!)
Posted by: cian | September 28, 2006 at 02:25 PM
Yeah I suppose you are right. I actually see a lot of people using trulia.com and I use del.icio.us and flickr actively. My calendar is getting firmly embedded in my Yahoo Mail account too. The last thing I use is facebook and I use that tonnes.
Personally I find tag clouds incredibly useful to scroll through and navigate my account.
I really should sort my life out and create a photo widget though.
Alex
Posted by: alex schultz | September 27, 2006 at 05:16 PM
I'm still not entirely sold on these tag things. Sure, it makes Flickr what it is - but I just don't see why everyone is jumping on it. I'd be interested in hearing which Web 2.0 sites you actively used. I find so many of the concepts to be really great and interesting in playing with, but so few can you actually use all the time. At the moment my bookmarks and calendar stay offline. But I've been using Remember The Milk for a while though and love it!
Nevertheless, this cloud thing is pretty neat and makes it easy to know what your blog is all about.
Posted by: Keith Mander | September 24, 2006 at 07:37 AM
Good to hear from you Keith. Will hopefully have a couple of hundred thousand impressions within the next two weeks and shall definitely follow up.
Do you like my tag clouds in the right margin by the way? Am bloody proud of them.
Posted by: Alex Schultz | September 16, 2006 at 09:13 PM
Looking forward to the results from this! :)
Posted by: Keith Mander | September 16, 2006 at 08:22 AM