Add Ads Using Google Adsense to Add Influency

Regular readers realize (radically): really, reality rocks.

Sorry about that; I was getting all alliterative writing the Optimization elements of this piece, and couldn’t stop.

Yesterday, Google made a little tweak that most people won’t notice. On the Adsense dashboard, where people and businesses that run advertising using Google’s marketing machine see their results, the Google scorecard changed. “Google+” was deleted from the Adsense scorecard, and has been replaced by a metric Google’s calling ‘Multi-screen”. And this, friends, is an Influency discussion.

And it’s an odd choice, so let’s think about it.

Google+ is a big deal. But no, Google+ isn’t Google trying to out-Facebook Facebook; while Google+ is certainly ‘a social network’, what it really is, according to Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, is an incredibly broad way of Google keeping tabs on all of us. And at a very simple level, Google removing any reference to Google+ from anything, or reducing their efforts to get the most Influence-y of us to use Google+ in all corners of our activity seems counterproductive.

Here’s why it makes sense: Very simply, once the kind of people who understand Google well enough to be running Adsense ads have placed Google+ linking on their web sites, there’s nothing left to gain from tracking the continued existence of that code. Influency is about wringing every ounce of Influence possible from every pixel on your visitors’ screens, and Google was wasting a prime opportunity to model user behavior with that “is your Google+ information set up right?” reference in the Adsense dashboard.

So what about Google’s Multi-screen Adsense metric?

As the world gets more mobile and more people are visiting web sites from smartphones and tablets, having optimized versions of your web site that adapt to the device people visit you on grows in importance. And while there’s lots to discuss regarding the right way to handle multi-screen issues, Google’s statement here is pretty simple: you’d better be doing multi-screen, whether by app, Responsive design, or via a mobile-optimized version of your web site.

You never realized that having advertisements on your web site was more important than making the money they generate, did you?

While I’ve long said that there’s nothing so complicated about the elements of Influency that you can’t handle them yourself, it’s becoming less true as things like video creep into the equation; the sheer number of issues that matter is becoming overwhelming unless working at Influency is what you do all day, every day. This, of course, is why people contact us to talk Influency. But whether you get with us or not, please do cast an eye at the direction in which our traffic overlords are pushing us.

And make sure all of your dots are blue, and stay that way. You know; until Google changes the color.