Google's New Free Search-Based Keyword Tool

10. February 2009

Have you seen Google's new keyword tool?  I'm surprised I haven't read more about it throughout the affiliate blogosphere. Anyway, If you haven't seen it yet, check it out:  http://www.google.com/sktool

Google

 Google Flu Trends

12. November 2008
This is kind of neat. Google is using search data to chart Flu trends in the United States! They say they have found that the volume of searches for particular keywords are a great indicator for how much Flu activity there is in certain regions.  Here is a quote from their site "We've found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional systems".  Gnarly! Cool

Google

 Spy On Google Ad Manager Sites

28. October 2008

Google_Ad_Manager Here's a quick way to get a little extra information about ads on sites being served via Google Ad Manager. Just add "google_debug" to the pages query string. Here are some examples on a couple of my sites:

This is meant to be a debug window for web masters running Google Ad Manager on their sites. But, if you notice an ad on a page and see that it'sbeing served via Google Ad Manager, you can quickly add "google_debug" to the page's url and get a lot of information about the ad. Like:

  • The number of milliseconds it took to generate the message
  • A log of all outbound URLs
  • All generated HTML rendered inside an iframe
  • A log of all returned ads

If you look closely at a few of mine, you can see the affiliate urls I'm using. Not that you can't get those anyway with a HTTP debugger like Fiddler , it's just more fun to do it use the Google debugger and you don't have to click the ad to get the data like you would with an HTTP debugger.

Alternatively, if you'd like to return the ad content but not render ads, add '?google_debug&google_nofetch'. This is particularly useful to test third-party latency, as only Google Ad Manager tags, and not third-party tags, will be called. Example:

You can also have your ad contents returned in a new window by adding '?google_debug&google_norender' to your URL. By doing so, you can test your ads outside of your page environment. Example:

Google