AdSpyTracker: New AdSense Click-Tracking Software

Earlier today Matt Callen, brother to Brad of Keyword Elite fame, released a new AdSense click-tracking software product called AdSpyTracker. This product competes directly against AdSense Gold and AdSense Detective, except it's priced much lower at $9.99. But what is an AdSense click-tracker and is it even legal to use these kinds of products? Let's take a closer look.

The Problem: No Detailed AdSense Statistics

AdSense publishers have a limited set of tools for analyzing which ads are making them money. The tracking is done through channels: URL channels for tracking clicks by URL path, custom channels for assigning specific channel IDs to individual ad and link units.

Unfortunately, Google's tracking is not very detailed. You can't get information about which specific ad was clicked — the closest you can come is to assign unique channels IDs to each ad unit. But that won't tell you which ad within the ad unit was clicked. And you can't find out which of your visitors are clicking ads.

This is why click-tracking solutions were developed.

How Click-Tracking Works

Click-tracking is done by the browser, oddly enough. You add a snippet of JavaScript code to the page you want tracked. The snippet is placed after the AdSense code. When the page is loaded, the snippet runs. It searches through the page for the AdSense ad/link units and installs code that traps certain mouse events on those units.

Whenever someone clicks an ad, the event code runs. It grabs as much information about the clicked ad as it can — the URL that was clicked, the text of the ad — and combines that with what it knows about the visitor — where they were referred from, their IP address, etc. — and logs it all in a database. The database is actually on another website, not on the user's machine, of course.

AdSpyTracker

AdSpyTracker consists of a set of PHP files that you install one one of your web servers. You only need to install it on one server to track all your sites, though you might want to install it on multiple servers if you're trying to keep your sites private as much as possible. You need a MySQL database, and configuration instructions are provided for cPanel users on how to create the required database. After the database is running, installation is dead simple, mainly you copy a bunch of PHP files up to the web server and run the setup script.

Once you have the ad tracking server up and running, you just paste the JavaScript on the pages you want tracked. You can then use the administration page to view the information the scripts gather from your visitors.

Click-Tracking Limitations

Note that this form of click-tracking is not perfect. There are some browsers (Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 in particular) that restrict the type of events the click-tracking script can trap. So you won't get as detailed information for those browsers. This limitation is true for all click-trackers, not just AdSpyTracker.

And, of course, the click-tracking software can't tell you how much each click is worth — only Google has that information…

Legality of Click-Tracking

So is click-tracking forbidden by the AdSense terms and conditions? Not specifically, no. I asked Google about it once and they sent me one of their vague replies that didn't really say much at all. In other words, you can do this kind of thing as long as it doesn't interfere with the functioning of the ads.

Give It A Try

For $10, I think AdSpyTracker is worth trying if you're looking for more detailed statistics and you're tired of creating channels to track things, or you've reached the limit on the number of channels you can create. Give it a whirl and let me know what you think.

P.S.: It looks like my rant about Technorati finally got me some action. Finally! Now we'll see if it keeps indexing this blog…

Eric Giguere wrote Make Easy Money with Google, which is not the spammy get-rich book you might think it is, and is about to release (finally) Uncommon AdSense, a book aimed at more experienced AdSense publishers. And no, it won't be overpriced.

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