AdSense Detective review: Tracking ad clicks

It's the end of the month, do you know where your clicks have been coming from? Not long after the AdSense program started, some clever programmers realized they develop tracking scripts that would give them more information than AdSense channels ever would. In the next issue of my newsletter, out tomorrow, I discuss how tracking scripts work in general and how to make sure you're not violating the AdSense terms and conditions. Today I'm going to review a tracking script product called AdSense Detective that I've been using for most of this month on a couple of sites.

Joel Comm and Robert Puddy

AdSense Detective is a joint venture between Joel Comm and Robert Puddy. Most of you reading this know Joel as the author of Google AdSense Secrets, the well-known AdSense e-book (now in its third edition). Robert Puddy is an Internet marketing expert specializing in traffic generation and list building.

I asked Joel if he wrote this stuff himself, but he found that very funny and said that he couldn't code his way out of a paper bag.

How AdSense Detective Works

Unlike the freebie software that Joel distributes called AdSense Buddy, you must pay for AdSense Detective. In fact, it's not really a software package but a hosted service. In other words, Joel and Robert run the computers that gather the tracking data and that generate the reports — all you do is place their tracking script on your pages. Very simple and very similar to how AdSense itself works. As a hosted service, AdSense Detective will appeal to those who don't want to install databases and scripts on their web servers. (Because it's all hosted by them, you can use AdSense Detective on a Blogger blog, for example.)

One you've signed up for the service (there's a monthly fee — more on this later), tracking the data is just a matter of using this script:

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
var AdDecMember_ID = "XXXX";
//--></script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.adsensedetective.com/adstrker.js">
</script>

You place the script on each page you want tracked. When the page is loaded, the script runs and installs the necessary hooks to track ad clicks. As an aside, always install this script (or any other tracking script, including those from Google Analytics) at the bottom of your pages, just before the </body> tag. Placing them at the top will slow down the loading of your page and may cause the script to fail (you want the ads to load first).

AdSense Detective Reports

After you've placed the scripts on your pages, data starts flowing back to the AdSense Detective servers almost immediately. The service has a simple console you can use to view the data and create all kinds of reports. Here's a small screenshot showing the kinds of reports you can generate:

You can generate reports for the current day or for a range of dates, for as far back as your data goes.

The most interesting report, of course, is the Detailed Clicks report, which shows you entries like these:

This particular entry tells me that someone clicked “Google AD Sense” on the page “http://www.memwg.com” and that they were referred to that page from Google.co.uk site. (In other words, they found me through a Google search.) [Please note that I've changed some of the details to keep within the Google terms and conditions.]

In my experience so far, AdSense Detective gathers information about most of the clicks, but sometimes it can't tell what ad was clicked, only that a click possibly occurred. These are due to limitations in the browsers themselves that all tracking scripts have problems with — more on that in my tracking script article in my newsletter.

The data in AdSense Detective is updated as soon as clicks occur, which means there's always a lag between what AdSense Detective shows you and what you see in your AdSense console. And there are a few false positives. But you do get a lot of detailed information.

AdSense Detective Pricing

Like most hosted services, AdSense Detective is priced based on usage. Currently it offers three plans based on the number of page views you have per day:

• Standard: $9.97 per month for up to 1000 page views per day
• Gold: $29.97 per month for up to 10,000 page views per day
• Platinum: $49.97 per month for up 100,000 page views per day

I suspect the Standard plan is the one that appeals to most people. To be honest, if you have 100,000 page views per day you can probably afford to setup the database and scripts required to run your own tracking service and avoid the recurring fees.

AdSense Detective does offer a 3-month money-back guarantee so you can test it out and see if you like it.

Final Analysis

Up until now, I've done most of my ad tracking using custom and URL channels, which give you very general information but not the kind of detailed information that AdSense Detective does. I can't say I've had any troubles with AdSense Detective yet, though if it gets really popular I hope they'll make sure their servers can handle the load. The wide variety of reports they offer is definitely useful. I'd recommend it to anyone looking to get more information about their audience and what kind of ads their visitors are attracted to. A $30 investment for the first three months isn't too expensive, and if you don't like it you can ask for a refund.

Let me know if you want more details, I'm sure there's more stuff I can dig up.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

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