The Feedproxy service is basically a clone of FeedBurner that hooks directly into AdSense. This allows the site owner to theoretically monetize a feed. It theoretical of course because someone actually has to click on the ads. In addition to AdSense integration, Feedproxy also implements the Google Analytics charting engine so the reports look better. Aside from that, it’s identical to FeedBurner… for now.

As I started down the path, I came across this brief article. The process was straightforward enough, but I thought I’d expand the step-by-step instructions, add a bit about AdSense setup, and then give you my initial impressions of the service:

Step-by-Step Instructions

1. Log into AdSense.
2. Select the AdSense Setup tab
3. Choose AdSense for Feeds from the list of available services

4. Way down at the bottom of the page, hit the link for “Move FeedBurner feeds to your Google Account”

5. You’ll be asked to log into FeedBurner and then presented with the list of all your feeds. I didn’t see a way to opt out of moving some feeds so I just went ahead and moved all the feeds on my account.
6. Wait.

7. Once the feeds are moved, Google gives you a confirmation. At the bottom of page, your feeds will appear along with links to the new feed URLs. Do not leave this page.
8. Open a new tab in your browser and log into your Wordpress (or other blog tool admin).
9. I use the FeedSmith plugin so updating the URL for the feed was as simple as copying the link from the page mentioned at step #7 and pasting it into Settings->FeedBurner.
10. Rinse and Repeat for Remaining Blogs

When you’re done, move onto setting up your AdSense ads…

AdSense Integration with Feeds

One of the most compelling reasons is the integration with AdSense. AdSense integration provides you with a simple, automatic way to monetize your feed. Ultimately, if you have enough subscribers, you may want to sell ads in a different way but for the beginner or small player AdSense is the quick and easy way to go.

After Google migrates your feed, you can set up AdSense units tied to individual feeds or across all the sites you manage. Standard AdSense options for type and color should be familiar to AdSense publishers, with a special twist added for frequency, post-length, and position.

Frequency – This option allows you to define how often ads show up in the stream. You can choose to show ads after each feed item or skip to the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th item. I chose to show the ad after every second item.

Post-Length – Allow you to limit ads so that only appear after posts of a certain word count. I suppose this would be useful if you had many small posts and didn’t want to clutter your feed.

Position – As you might expect, this allows you to decide where the ad shows up in relationship to the feed item. (top or bottom)

Don’t get antsy after you hit SAVE. Google says it takes about 10 minutes for the ads to show up. Took a little longer for me.

Initial Impressions

Instead of logging into feedburner.com, you log into http://feedburner.google.com. Everything basically looks the same (for now). However, the chart looks like a Google Analytics chart. I’ve included a sample below from one of my sites:

One of the reasons I made this switch is that I was hoping to have more accurate stats. I can’t tell you if the new service is better at updating or not, but I can say that the reports look better.

I also make use of FeedBurner’s email forms. I’m glad to say that I didn’t need to change anything here. The forms work as they should, confirmation text was retained from FeedBurner too. Hooray!

I’ll post a follow-up in a few days to let you all know if the reliability improved.

The plug-in is really sweet because it allows you to tell AdSense about the relative content on your page (thus improving the ad targeting):

Section Targeting is a way of embedding special tags inside HTML to give Google’s omnipresent spider a better idea of what’s important on your page. This is a really simple plugin that wraps posts and comments inside these tags, in the hope that they’ll lead to better search rankings.

Even if you don’t use Wordpress, the idea of section targeting is powerful.

Why Google AdSense Injection?

We all know about television ads where the natural volume has been cranked up. It’s jarring, but you look (I tend to follow-up looking by turning the television off). Recently, I’ve noticed some start and stop ads on television. The commercial will begin, run 2-3 seconds and then “skip” back to the beginning. The effect of this “random” problem focuses attention on the screen and the content. Of course, like the volume trick, viewers become desensitized and eventually their attention goes elsewhere.

A better technique would be to randomize the stop and start, the jitter. Only show the jitter X number of times per 30 minute block of television and position the jitter in different places during the commercial.

Online, we can’t really stop and start a webpage, but we can randomize the way we show ads. This is where the AdSense Injection plugin comes in. As Hammer notes on his website, a random dispersement of ads within content is likely to drive higher clicks by evading what is known as banner blindness.

Why AdSense works

Google AdSense puts little text, image, and now video ads on your website. The ads are served based on the relevancy of your site content to the advertiser’s copy and content. As a site owner, you get paid when visitors click on the ads, and visitors tend to click when the ads are relevant.

So, how does AdSense know what to serve?

When a visitor happens by a page with AdSense ads, it triggers a the Google Mediabot crawler to visit the page and grab the content. AdSense looks at the position of the Google AdSense include code to visible content along with overall page content to determine the right ad to show. Soon enough, relevant ads should show up on the site. This is why your first tests may show some odd results.

If don’t have an AdSense account, you can sign up using the ad below:

Why Randomizing with Google AdSense Injection is Good

I talked briefly about changing up the location of ads could be important in getting visitors to read them as opposed to passing them by. I’ve also talked about how AdSense determines which ads to show. So, if we mix these things together (randomizing and importance of placement), we should get more relevant ads that get a visitor’s attention which should lead to more clicks and revenue for you as the site owner.

Options in the Plugin

Hammer’s AdSense injection plugin automatically places AdSense blocks in your content. This means you don’t have to go back and edit all of these entries you’ve saved before (very good). You can also skip editing your theme (also good).

When you configure the plugin, you decide how many ad blocks to show and how many ads per block. The plugin does the rest.

Other options include:

• Setting the color
• Choosing a variety of ad block sizes to randomize
• Ad positioning
• Pages where you DO NOT want ads
• Ad visibility for certain users

In addition to these options, version 2.0 of the plugin also allows you to turn off AdSense injection for an article by including noadsense in content (enclosed in an HTML comment). I’ve used that option on this page in fact since I am also displaying and AdSense signup ad above.

[Get the Wordpress Google AdSense Injection plugin from Dax Herrera]

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