It turns out, in the month of January, Pinterest referral traffic was greater than referral traffic from YouTube. And from Reddit. And from Google Plus. All combined.

Witness.

More on Pinterest:

Video: How To Use Pinterest (Tutorial)

Pinterest 101: How Can Geeks Use It?

Pinterest Invasion by Men Continues Unabated

Pinterest Top Five Most Repinned Items

Pinterest Traffic Spikes

Dear Pinterest: Can We Talk?

"It’s only been two and a half weeks since f8 and in that time more than 100,000 sites have tapped into the social graph by implementing Facebook’s social plugins," a representative for Facebook tells WebProNews.

"From news and publishing, to entertainment and sports, a wide range of industries and verticals have integrated with Facebook’s tools to boost engagement and give people a more personalized experience online," she adds.

She also shared some interesting stats from some noteworthy sites who have implemented the plug-ins and/or Facebook log-ins:

- Globe and Mail – 80% increase of Facebook referral traffic

-  The Washington Post – Facebook referral traffic has increased by 290%

- IMDb.com – Daily referral traffic from Facebook has doubled; users have generated more than 350,000 likes

- NHL.com – Seeing an 80% increase in referral traffic from Facebook

- Scribd – Referral traffic from Facebook has doubled as authors gain followers among groups of Facebook friends

- Personera – Facebook users generate 50% more pageviews, spend 25% more time on site, and have a 20% lower bounce rate

- Simply Hired – Users who log in with Facebook are twice as engaged as non-Facebook users

"We think the story behind these stats is more important than the stats themselves," says Facebook’s Justin Osofsky. "As we’ve found on Facebook, people share, read, and generally engage more with any type of content when it’s surfaced through friends and people they know and trust."

Facebook’s integration with Yelp drew a bit of bad press, as it exposed a security flaw, but that was quickly patched. Still, some are wondering if we will see these types of things start happening more often as more sites implement Facebook functionality.

We’ve written about Facebook’s announcements and these plugins numerous times, but while we’ve been mostly talking about their implications and what they could mean for your business, some sites are already seeing a great deal of value right of the bat.

Have you seen an increase in traffic from Facebook since adding its new plugins? Comment here.

Mallary Jean Tenore at Poynter.org spoke with Jonathan Dube, vice president in charge of ABCNews.com about the implementation of the plugins, and he said, "We’ve seen an over 250 percent increase in referrals from Facebook to ABC News since the launch of the Social toolkit on ABCNews.com."

"We’ve opted to place the Facebook recommendations higher than the most popular recommendations, and the reason we’ve done so is because we believe that recommendations from people who are friends of yours are probably more likely to be stories that you’re interested in than a general ‘Most Popular’ list," said Dube. (HT: lostremote)

Sidenote: Of course there are plenty of ways to use Facebook that existed before the company’s recent announcements. WebProNews discussed some of these with Greg Finn of 10e20 at SMX West a while back:

More WebProNews Videos

While publishers are ecstatic about the opportunities they are getting from Facebook’s new plugins and Open Graph initiative, not all of Facebook’s users are so upbeat. Privacy concerns have of course been in the headlines a lot since F8, and they have even led to Facebook losing some of its users.

Border Stylo’s Dan Yoder has an interesting top ten list of reasons to delete your Facebook account, and some of Google’s team have publicly opted to deactivate their Facebook accounts, but whether this is due to actual concerns or to personal protest to a growing competitor is hard to determine.

It’s hard to say if Facebook will lose enough users to amount to any significant number, but my guess is that it won’t – at least not anytime soon. I’d be surprised if they are not gaining more users than they’re losing. As Facebook takes over more and more sites, non-Facebook users are more likely to get sucked in.

Out of Facebook’s 400 million+ users, I’m guessing a substantial amount of them like the social network too much to give it up, and aren’t really concerned about sites having access to information like what bands and movies they like. Many are way too invested in Farmville to stop now.

Have you considered shutting down your Facebook account? Let us know.

Original article: Google is changing referral URLs on results pages. What up until now has looked something like this:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search

will now look more like this:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

Google says that if you don’t analyze your own traffic logs, use Urchin web analytics software, or develop web analytics software, this information probably won’t affect you. Google Analytics is not affected.

"The key difference between these two urls is that instead of "/search?" the URL contains a ‘/url?’," says Brett Crosby of the Google Analytics Team.  "If you run your own analyses, be sure that you do not depend on the ‘/search?’ portion of the URL to determine if a visit started with an organic search click. Google Analytics does not depend on the ‘/search?’ string in the referrer, so users of Google Analytics will not notice a difference in their reports, but other analytics packages may need to adapt to this change in our referrer string to maintain accurate reports."

Web Technologist Niall Kennedy does a good job of simplifying the situation. "The way your website interprets traffic from one of its top providers will change later this week," he says. "You will need to adjust scripts and check for updates to analytics software where appropriate. If you notice a huge drop in measured search referrals from Google don’t panic. Just make sure you are measuring the correct actions."

He also suggests that Google is probably making this change to better track search actions and shield URL parameters from sites downstream.

Google says the new URLs will initially only occur in a small percentage of searches. You can expect to see both versions while the changes roll out. Google will be offering a software update for Urchin soon for those using UTM-based tracking. More details here.

The arrival of the Google Affiliate Network, aka a rebranded Performics product, represents the search advertising company’s newest area of focus. Such a shift apparently means moving resources from elsewhere, with the AdSense Referral program a casualty.

Google announced the retirement of AdSense Referrals on the Inside AdSense blog, pegging an end date for the last week of August. They are promoting the Affiliate Network as a replacement, or AdSense itself if a site has less than three AdSense units on a page.

Site publishers will want to make sure they have all of their referral reports stored away safely, and that referral code gets removed before the end of the program.

Google also disclosed the end of the Pay Per Action beta, again with the Affiliate Network suggested as a replacement product for advertisers. They also recommended their Conversion Optimizer as a way to manage those cost per acquisition ads placed on Google’s networks.

Lets take a little look at why they might have done this.

Google Is A Business

It is actually quite a large business, and each division within a division is probably accountable for their own earnings. The Adsense referral program for new business is probably individually accountable.

Current (Old) System Earnings

Based upon quarterly and yearly reports, Google on average pay publishers only 29% of advertising revenue. Larger publishers probably get a larger piece of the action, so it is quite possible a new publisher only receives 25%

For every dollar earned, Google receive $4

Referrals Changes the Math

For the first $5 of earnings in 6 months, they pay a referral fee of $5, thus Google only make 50%

If a publisher earns $100 in 6 months, Google pay a referral fee of $250, thus of the $400 they receive in advertising revenues, they pay out $350… plus there is a bonus

For 25 people who make $100 within a 180 day period you get a bonus payment of $2000, that is $80 per person

In theory, Google could pay out $430 for every $400 received

This is potentially a loss leader…

In practice only a small number of people make it even to $5, and even less to $100 within 180 days. Darren mentioned in his article that he has never achieved the bonus, though if he comes close, those $250 fees for the ones that do make $100 must be reasonably lucrative.

The New System

The Adsense Team are reverting back to $100 for $100 earned in 180 days with no bonuses.

Also the countries are now restricted to North America, Latin America, or Japan – for the referrer.

What Darren and Shoemoney didn’t pick up on is that is existing referrals don’t qualify by the time this is introduced, it seems like you will only receive compensation based upon the new structure, not the old. That is significant if you were in some way paying for advertising based on anticipated earnings over 6 months based upon prior statistics.

Gaming Adsense With Referral Hydras

For me the obvious reason why they would restrict this to only partners in certain counties is fraud, or gaming the system. Google is made up of regional offices, so it would be hard to separate Eastern Europe from the rest of Europe, or Australia from others in the Pacific region.

If you look at this from the point of view of a person in a low income country, there is a potential $430 that could be earned instead of $100 for the clicks you might receive on a website you own that has reasonable traffic, all you need is new Adsense accounts.

Here is how such a system could work

1. Find 25 people who would be interested in earning $100 from Google just for providing their personal details

I can’t honestly imagine this wouldn’t be hard in many developing countries

2. Place the advertising units from those referrals on your own websites such that they will earn $100 within a month
3. The person referred gets $100 in Adsense earnings
4. You get to cash $330 instead of $100

Rinse and repeat

If you don’t want to give $100 away, you could always set up shell companies., but I don’t think it is really worth the effort, it would be easy to find people willing to earn $100 for doing nothing.

If you are just doing blackhat stuff this provides an unlimited supply of fresh Adsense accounts, and you earn everything 100% "legitimately" as just the referrer.

Can It Really Be That Many People Doing This?

If you were a slightly shady blackhat, wouldn’t you like to keep your Adsense earnings 100% clean, and earn 3x as much?

Especially if you were living in a slightly poorer country, or had contacts in one… China, Russia..

Would This Hurt Google Financially

Certainly if it got out of hand. Most of these referrals would earn their $100 and then drop off the face of the earth after they cached their checks.

Could It Be Another Reason?

I am sure growth rates outside 1st World countries are fast enough without the financial incentive for referrals, and there is always a question of scaling up support costs, and the lack of competitive advertising.
With low paying clicks outside the English speaking world, those that are active Adsense publishers are often more inclined to experiment with more grey or blackhat methods, because they don’t necessarily have to create their own content to make money.

Too Good To Be True

I always looked on the referral program to be full of holes

• You don’t know who you referred so you can’t help them, unless it is by arrangement
• You can’t honestly declare you make money by referring people, it is against the referral program terms, though they encourage word of mouth marketing.
• The reporting was always a little on the basic side
• The time period for qualification was far too long and it seems that has come back to bite people

For a negative change such as this, you would expect a full 6 months notice, or for referrals who qualify within 6 months to be paid at the old rate.
For referring publishers outside North & South America, and Japan, they are effectively being told that all those referrals they have made that haven’t quite earned $100 by the end of January will not be paid.

I am glad I haven’t promoted Google Adsense for 2 years.

Comments

*Originally published at AndyBeard.eu

Google AdSense Referrals Hiding From Publishers

The referrals product made available by Google offers webmasters another revenue stream beyond the conventional ad placements. Referrals to AdWords, Checkout, or other specific Google (or non-Google) products pay the publisher for referring a converting visitor.

Since the rewards for referrals can be generous, the referral code has been in demand. However, a few webmasters have encountered issues with deploying the latest version on their sites.

Google’s Rajiv Sud posted some reasons on the AdSense blog why this may be happening. As with some other things in life, size matters:

(M)ost horizontal referral ad units smaller than 180×60, square referral ad units smaller than 125×125, and text links are only available at this time for Google products such as AdSense or AdWords. This means that if you generate code for referral ads in an unsupported size, you won’t see any referrals shown on your webpages.

A number of other reasons could affect the placement of referrals on one’s AdSense units. Google only permits three referral units per page, for example. Exceeding that number would keep those lucrative referrals from appearing.

Sites that display content Google deems mature or sensitive won’t spur the generation of a referral ad. Such sites would have to stick with conventional AdSense units.

There are other problems such as how people interact with your RSS content, but even being able to determine which sources of traffic result in subscribers would be a huge commercial advantage for bloggers, allowing them to focus their efforts on traffic generation strategies that will grow their business.

Hamlet Batista has been doing some digging, and has worked out how to track RSS subscribers based upon the source of traffic, and it even works with Feedburner’s RSS to Email feature.

This is a little technical, and you will have to setup goal tracking as well in Google Analytics, but I am sure for many of my readers this will be something they will be making a high priority.

How to track feed subscriber referrals with Google Analytics

It is likely that this method can’t detect a signup if a user first clicks through to read a feed on Feedburner, and then chooses a subscription option.

As Hamlet says

Of course it is possible that someone might click on the subscription and not complete the process, but I think that knowing where the attempts are coming from should be useful at least. It will help you discover the blogs/sites/forums where you need to concentrate your networking efforts.

Even for those bloggers who concentrate on email subscriptions, I am sure this will still help with another piece of the puzzle.

Comments

*Originally published at AndyBeard.eu

All Of AdSense Gains Referrals 2.0

Referrals works a little like pay-per-action, by Google’s description. Publishers picks the ads they want to display, and when a visitor clicks the ad and performs a specified action, the AdSense publisher gets paid.

The new version, Referrals 2.0, should improve upon the beta version.

Benefits of the new version of Referrals will have an expanded product inventory to aid in the selection of ads that fit the publisher’s site. There will be an option to refer products by category and keyword. AdSense does the work in selecting ads to display.

That also comes into play with ad unit optimization. When creating a new referral ad unit and selecting the ‘Pick best performing ads’ option, AdSense will look for the most relevant choice of ads that should perform best on the site.

A significant difference between referrals and typical AdSense units comes from the policy side. While making any reference to regular AdSense ads violates policy, site publishers are free to highlight and promote referral ads.

“One-to-one communications make the difference in the B2B industry,” says eMarketer Senior Analyst Lisa Phillips. “Word-of-mouth can be generated from trade events such as shows and conferences. The Internet helps to sustain marketing momentum.”

Internet channels also look like they’re playing a strong part in influence business buying decisions. Who’s influenced by what they see on the web?

• Online magazines influence 36.5%
• Search engine natural listing 24.1%
• Technology blogs 19.6%
• Media/analyst blogs 10%
• Paid search ads 6.8%
• Vendor blogs 4.6%
• Unsolicited email 4%
• RSS feeds 3.6%
• Podcasts 2.7%

Seems to demonstrate that you can’t buy influence, it has to be earned from a third-party.

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