[kinlan]

One of the authors of the site here.

We are very keen to get feedback on the content that web developers want to see with regards to monetization. For example one area that I am keen to see us grow is building components in sites that optimize credit card data entry.

[silverbax88]

I would like to ask how these recommendations are reached. Meaning, can you show hard data that backs up the assertions on how people buy, etc.?

I am not trying to snipe you or the site. I appreciate the effort. But in my experience Google recommendations (with Adwords or Adsense or which reports I should see) mean almost nothing and I rely entirely on my own data.

For example, the first article on the first page 'Let Users Explore Before They Commit' cites a research study, which I then have to click through a couple more navigation screens to find. Oh, except the page with the research study throws a 404.

https://developers.google.com/web/http://www.google.com/thin...

Other than that, the content is sparse. To be blunt at this point I (personally) would not come back because it looks like you didn't even test the site and you haven't actually read the paper and then on top of that haven't actually analyzed the aforementioned paper to see if it actually says what you're asserting it does.

I know this sounds harsh, but I'm being as truthful and direct as I can be because Google hardly ever actually has a human soliciting feedback.

Good luck.

[kinlan]

Urgh, that is a url encoding error on our site. I have raised a bug (https://github.com/google/WebFundamentals/issues/664).

With regards to the study, that data was ascertained by working with direct user studies and taking feedback from them, I think we can certainly make this a lot clearer in the those set of documents.

re:sparse. Yes it is as we are still building this section out and fleshing out the guidance more, but we have worked with the team that did produce the study (It also turns out I am pretty good at making the bad examples of the sites). I do have one follow up question: Would you like to see code that espouses the principles that we are saying are good.

re: relying on your own data. I am curious, what do you look for?

[silverbax88]

I look for two basic things:

1. Where did people come from and how did I convert them?

2. What is my conversion/impression/sales, etc. for the month/quarter and how does that compare to previous month/quarter or a specific date?

So, what I mean is if I have an event coming up and I am marketing to that event - I have email lists, twitter accounts, FaceBoook, a popular blog, co-op email partners, and I buy ads on multiple platforms...I want to know how many people came from each source, what the conversion rate was, how far they got in the process, and I want to see how this year's event is comparing to last years'. Or last months'. Or last weeks'. Or an event I had three quarters ago.

I need the data to be as accurate as I can get, because if people are coming into the site, and all of the ones coming from, say, Twitter, are not buying and don't even read anything, then I need to know that.

As an example, for a sports event I run in the summer, two years ago I dropped PayPal as an option entirely. I had so many complaints from consumers about PayPal in general I just decided to implement Stripe. A lot of people told me that since PayPal is so ubiquitous, I would be cutting out an ease-of-payment option and I would lose sales.

But my data showed two things: a lot of people DID use PayPal but I lost a ton of conversions when people hit the PayPal page AND my #1 complaint topic was PayPal related. About 60% of the people who signed up used PayPal.

Both of the last two years after implementing Stripe my conversion rate increased dramatically and I have ZERO complaints about the payment process. Literally, zero.

So that's what I'm always looking for. How do I optimize and track turning people who are searching into customers without wasting their time or my time? How do I remove frustration for users? Where do they navigate to? If they hit a specific page and then suddenly jump around looking for a 'contact us' page, I need to figure out what those people are looking for and fix it for them.

With Google analytics or adwords, I get some data but a lot of it other than a few pieces is superficial or the data doesn't match my server logs.

Sorry for the digression.

[Breakbeat_dj]

Financial stability from a legitimate high paying career. Where can I use my current covert knowledge and learn the inner workings of this choose your own adventure online saga. I am considering going the robin Williams route..am ibthe only one who realizes I am going crazy???? Am I really a government employee??? Why doesn't anyone at least pay me enough to live comfortably and pay all my bills on time.....why am I denied a living wage.....why can't I even make enough to pay cathy and Greg baclnforball they have done for me?

[kinlan]

No worries about the digression. This is great!

We are working on getting an analytics section built for this that is just not Google Analytics but also guidance on things that you should be monitoring, why they are important and how to use that information to change your product. I see the analytics and the monetization section actually being quite tightly integrated when we can land it.

[conradfr]

You forgot the part where Adsense suddenly bans your account, refunds your money to advertisers and gives you no real appeal possible.

[JeremyMorgan]

Someone had to say it.

Though I've never been banned, I know quite a few friends who have over the years. A couple of them deserved it (asking for clicks to support etc) but some of them not so much.

Like one guy getting banned because there was a thread talking about guns in his forum. His forum was definitely G-Rated, which is a requirement for adsense, but this one thread got him booted, and all his earnings yanked. Had they warned him (which they do more of now) he would have just deleted the thread but instead it was shut down with no appeal.

Stuff like that needs to be addressed more and looked at. After all what's the business sense in having LESS advertisers? I can see weeding out obvious offenders but as of now it seems they are a little to quick with the ban button.

[stevenh]

Google does not provide a list of words, phrases, or topics to check for and filter out if you want to stay with AdSense. You just have to guess.

It's not fair for Google to keep the specifics surrounding their content enforcement rules on AdSense secret. The only time a publisher catches a glimpse of what those rules might actually be is when they are already on the verge of being banned for violating them.

This is Google we're talking about. Why can't Google have AdSense analyze the scraped data they already extract from your site on a daily basis, or inject a text content analyzer into the AdSense javascript payload 0.5% of the time to make those browsers report back with a locally-calculated percentage estimation as to whether that page should really be displaying ads at that particular moment, or anything else to programmatically detect that a given page is violating their secret rules, and then automatically disable ads on that page?

Does Google really expect every single one of their human publishers using AdSense on a site with user-generated content (such as articles with comment sections, link aggregator sites with submission queues, forums, interactive drawing boards, chat rooms, etc.) to hire extra hands to monitor all of that user-generated content 24/7, and to only manually whitelist ads on a per-page basis, and to stay forever vigilant and rush to disable the ads as soon as another comment has been posted which might now render the entire page inappropriate?

What I find most ridiculous of all and completely fail to understand is how Google will exert such strong pressure on publishers to censor user-generated content on websites utilizing AdSense, while simultaneously being perfectly happy with placing unskippable 15-second ads on nearly any given YouTube video, ranging from webcam rants containing no less than 20 F-bombs to things so disgusting that I'm concerned articulating them here even euphemistically will result in me being automatically banned from HN. Even if a video contains nothing foul, the comments underneath certainly will most of the time. If anyone tried that with AdSense, they'd be banned within days. How are AdSense publishers supposed to rely on their intuition regarding what they think Google will find acceptable, when the current state of YouTube clearly demonstrates that Google considers almost anything to be acceptable?

[ianlevesque]

I don't agree with it but it's probably cheaper for Google to lose a few customers to false bans than pay humans to review all the cases.

[tn13]

They dont care about the publishers who make $500 a month or even a day. There are dozen a dime such publishers.

[chvid]

It scares me that Google does not have the common sense to treat small(?) publishers decently.

Given how I was treated over petty amounts on a website sideproject. Why would I use you guys as a payment processor or to sell software I had invested years in?

Todays amateurs are tomorrows professionals.

[notduncansmith]

Hear, hear. I've had way too many friends get their Adsense accounts banned to ever want to get involved with that mess.

[scrollaway]

Here's some feedback: I think it's incredibly cool you put that site out on Github even though you clearly did not have to. Keep doing that. :)

[kinlan]

Thanks! The repo is starting to gather a lot of infrastructure cruft that we need to sort out, but we are getting there :)

[justboxing]

Hi, (to original authors of the site)

Could you guys publish square ads with dimensions that instagram images and videos have, i.e. ad units that are 612 px square, 306 px Square and 150 px square, so the 1000s of Instagram client apps that use their API can monetize their apps and sites?

These ad sizes would be really awesome because we can then blend the ads with the Instagram posts and it would all be very frictionless and seamless from the end user perspective and monetization might increase for google and the ad sense publishers.

Thank you!

[kinlan]

I'll speak to the ads team tomorrow. Not sure I will get an answer but I have been working with them a bit now.

[companyhen]

I think the content was nice and informative. A little bit of common sense, but that never hurts to include.

If you're interested in chatting on gmail I have a couple questions about monetization. Mine is <my username> @gmail.com if you want to shoot me one.

[throwawayads]

Glib marketing to cover up the extremely aggressive, dirty tactics that Google employs with Adsense: https://medium.com/@ad_insider/googles-latest-monopoly-trick...