Not to harp on this (though of course I am), but one of my readers reported a whopping 44% drop in Chitika eMiniMalls earnings after the January audit. This is the biggest drop I've seen so far, others who've mailed me have mentioned a 10-20% drop in earnings. The site owner was very disappointed, to say the least.

More reason for Chitika to speed up the auditing process, as I mentioned a couple of days ago.

I'd be curious also to hear from others about their eMiniMalls earnings in general. I theorized a while ago that post-Christmas earnings would be lower than the pre-Christmas earnings, independent of any auditing issues. I don't really have enough data myself to form a definitive answer to this, as currently I'm only running Chitika ads on the Invisible Fence Guide. I'm working on a couple of more product-oriented sites, so I should have more data in a few months, but that won't help me with the post-Christmas analysis. (If you don't have a product-oriented site, AdSense is by far the better choice for your ad program.) If you have some concrete data either way, I'd like to hear from you… post a comment or send me mail.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense.

Let's continue with our review of AdSenseAccelerator. I teased you with a few screenshots in Part 1 of the review, but not let's actually see the product in action.

As I mentioned before, the Keyword Research and Top AdSense Bids tabs are the most interesting parts of this tool. Let's start with the former.

The Keyword Research tab is where you start your search for good-quality keywords. You start by entering a “theme” keyword for the category and then pressing the “Get Keywords” button. Let's try it with the theme “adsense” and see what we get:

Wow! The “adwords” keyword look pretty impressive! But click on the Refined tab and you'll see even more keywords:

Hey, these ones look even better! But how good are they, really? What you want to do now is get bids and traffic estimates for the various keywords. To do this you put the keywords that interest you into the keyword basket. The quickest way to do this is via the “Select All” button. Let's add all the keywords we found on the Refined tab to the basket. We then move to the Step 3 part of the window and press the “Get Bids & Estimates” button and end up with this:

You can click on any of the column headers to sort by that column. Click on “Top Bid” and you'll see that the phrase “adsense blog” comes up on top at $27.50, followed by “adsense revenue” at $20.18. Apparently, my blog isn't raking in the big bucks it should be! But of course, there are some key factors to remember:

• The prices shown are the AdWords bid prices for those phrases. Your payment will be a percentage of whatever the the advertiser pays, so it won't be as high as what you see.
• There could be a steep drop in between the first (topmost) bid for a keyword and the second bid. This matters to you because the winning advertiser will pay at most just over the second bid's price.

That's why the other columns in the keyword list are important. One judges the relative quality of the keyword — the more dollar signs, the better. These keywords are all low-quality keywords, as we'll see when we explore them in detail with the Top AdSense Bids tab tomorrow. Then you see relative search activity and the total number of pages containing those terms. You want keywords that are searched enough but that don't have a whole lot of competition. Lots of factors to consider.

Tomorrow we get to the best part of this program, the bid analysis.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense.

Joel Comm, the well-known guy who wrote Google AdSense Secrets, has just released an AdSense statistics collector and analyzer called AdSense Detective. I need a few more days of data to give you the full rundown on this product, but it collects similar data to what you can get using Google Analytics, only it's much more approachable — I find Analytics to be a bit overwhelming for beginning and intermediate webmasters, plus it's not immediately obvious how to use Analytics to do ad tracking.

Joel recently released a free standalone ad tracking program called AdSense Buddy, but this new one is much more complete. The AdSense Detective solution is hosted, which means all you do is put a bit of JavaScript in your pages and it does all the tracking for you.

Watch this space for more about AdSense Detective, but first I'm going to continue with my review of AdSense Accelerator.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense.