Firefox Referral Tracking Issue Confirmed As “Bug”

This is a follow-up to the post I made March 21, Firefox Referrals A Waste Of Space?

FirefoxThe last response I received from Adsense Support was “I’ve escalated your issue to one of our account pecialists for further investigation. We’ll get back to you shortly.” That was on Monday, and I still have not heard back from them.

However, a few days after the issue with Firefox Referral tracking first appeared on March 19th, I sent an email to my “inside” contact at Google. To protect his identity, I will refer to him as “Mr. G”. I was beginning to think that Mr. G would not respond to my message, but to my surprise, his reply popped-up on my iPhone this morning just before lunch. In part, he said:

I was told that there does seem to be a bug which is currently being addressed. I’ll forward you any response I get about the solution they implement.

So based on this exclusive information from “Mr. G” - Google is aware of this issue, it is a “bug” and it is not caused by “invalid clicks” as I was originally led to believe in my first response from Adsense Support.

So the good news is that it is a bug, which means the good people at the GooglePlex should have it worked-out soon. The bad news is that it is a bug, and it will be a while before it gets fixed - meaning many publisher’s income will continue to suffer until then.

UPDATE: Within days of this post, Adsense fixed whatever the issue was, and Firefox conversions and earnings are now back to normal.  This has been confirmed by many other webmasters at the DP Forums.  Google never made any announcement about the problem. 

Adsense Firefox Referrals A Waste Of Space ?

Google Adsense Success StoryI’m sure that most readers of my blog know that my nickname is “The FireFox Referral King”. For those of you that don’t know, it’s because when GrownUpGeek.com was only a few months old I had extraordinary success with Adsense Firefox w/Google Toolbar referrals. I had such great success that Adsense published the site as an Adsense Success Story. They also went on to include GrownUpGeek.com as an example of how to implement Firefox referrals in their online help pages. Since then, the type of traffic coming to the website has changed resulting in lower referral earnings - dropping from $150ish per day back in 2006 down to around $40-$50 per day for Firefox conversions for the last year or so. Even though earnings aren’t as high as they were way back then, I’ve still been pretty happy with the $40ish/day steady income from Firefox referrals..

So when overnight my Firefox referral earnings drop from $40 down to $5 for 3 days in a row I immediately assume something is wrong - several other publishers have posted seeing the same drop of 80%-90% in referral earnings at DP Forums and in the Adsense Google Groups, so clearly something has changed.

I sent an email to Adsense Support yesterday asking about this sudden, unexplained drop in earnings, and in less than 24 hours I had my response, which in part says:

Thanks for your email. I understand you’re concerned that you haven’t
received any earnings for some of your referral conversions. After looking
into your account, I noticed that you have some conversions that our
monitoring system considered to be invalid.

The email then went on to explain how important it is for Adsense to monitor activity, and that I can “Rest assured that your account is still being properly credited for all referral conversions we consider to be valid, as stated in our Terms and conditions.”

Well, I can’t rest assured of anything when i see an overnight drop in conversions of over 90% - CLEARLY SOMETHING IS BROKEN. I replied to the apparently automated response asking for a human being to look into the problem, but I don’t expect I’ll get much of a response. If referral conversions aren’t back to normal or near normal in the next few days I’ll be forced to drop them and replace their prominently positioned spots with something else. I will continue to recommend Firefox to visitors as it’s a great product, but if Google doesn’t want the Toolbar conversions anymore, I will probably just send everyone to Mozilla.com for a toolbar-free Firefox download.

Anyone else notice a drop in Adsense Firefox conversions?

UPDATE: Monday, March 24: I got another response from Adsense Support indicating they have escalated the issue to an account specialist for further review.

UPDATE: Wednesday, March 26: This issue has been confirmed as a bug.

Adsense Ads For Firefox Out Performing Firefox Referrals

Firefox Referrals vs Adsense For Content

Many of you know me as The Firefox Referral King, because my website was published by Google as an Adsense Success Story back on 2006. Since then, the sources of my traffic, the type of traffic and demographics of my visitors has changed, and I’m no longer making ~$1,500 $2,000 a month from (only) Firefox referrals. I still make a tidy sum from Firefox referrals, but probably only around half of what I was getting throughout most of 2006.

Back then (and still) I drive a lot of traffic from other pages on the site to my main “Firefox Information Page” where visitors can download Firefox via my referral link. I do this by adding a WordFilter (Drupal.org/Wordfilter) that converts any instance of the word “firefox” or “Fire fox” into a link to my Firefox info page. Anytime a member makes a forum post that mentions Firefox, a link to the download page is automatically created.. I also get a lot of direct traffic to the page, and use other methods to push visitors to the page, but that’s not what this post is about.

My Firefox info page has an Adsense for Content leaderboard across the top that’s always gotten a few (low paying) clicks per day. Beginning in December of 2007 I started noticing something odd - the ePC for those content ads was beginning to rise. More and more often I was seeing an ePC of nearly the full payout of a Firefox Referral, and occasionally even more than the $2 referral payout. It seems that the Arbitragers have been paying more and more to drive traffic to their own Firefox download pages and they are paying dearly for it. As a result, for the last two months or so, the Adsense for Content ads on that page have been earning as much, if not more than the Firefox referrals from that same page.

Realizing that my Firefox conversion percentage has been dropping and that a click on an ad is now virtually guaranteed to pay nearly as much as a full Firefox w/Toolbar conversion, I changed the Firefox referral on the page from a button, to a text link, making it just a bit harder to find. This resulted in an even higher CTR on the Adsense ads and even higher earnings. My next test will be to remove the Adsense Firefox Referral link altogether, leaving only the Adsense ads for Firefox downloads. My guess is that earnings will be even higher.

My point? If you have a Firefox referral ’squeeze’ page with a low conversion rate, try throwing some Adsense blocks on the page and see if they earn as well or better than your referrals.

Avoid The NoFollow

I do followEveryone knows (and if you don’t know, now you do) that commenting on other blogs related to your niche is a good way to get your name out there and drive a little human traffic to your site/blog.

Many new bloggers/webmasters assume that these “free links” to your blog will also help to increase your Google SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages) and your Google PR (Page Rank). Well guess what? Many, if not most of these comment links will not squirt any PR-juice your way thanks to the NOFOLLOW tag - this is because by default, most blogs/forums automatically use the NoFollow tag. Recently though, many bloggers are getting on the DOFOLLOW bandwagon and removing the NoFollow tag passing the PR-Juice to all those that make comments on their blogs. This is a bit of a double-edged sword because although removing the no-Follow tag encourages visitors to post comments on your blog, it also invites spammers, so if you remove doFollow be sure that you’re using Akismet or some other method for filtering out the spammy comments.

OK - So… Whether or not you remove the doFollow tags from your blog, how do you know if the blogs you visit or comment on have the noFollow tags removed so you can benefit by posting comments? You can do it the hard-way by viewing the page-source and checking for the noFollow tag, or you can do it the easy way:

How To Display The noFollow Tag In Firefox: This is how i do it

If you use Firefox you can easily show all links with the noFollow tag in a different color, making them stand-out against links that do not have the noFollow tag by doing the following -

You can change the RGB colors to any valid RGB code to make the noFollow tags display in any color you choose. If you did it right, you should see a difference in the two links below:

This link does not have the noFollow tag: Wikipedia.com

This link does have the noFollow tag and should look different: Google.com

Happy-Blog commenting!

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