Google Integrates AdSense For Feeds, FeedBurner, Analytics

The desire to integrate products is strong at Google; it’s not hard to imagine that the company would eventually like to offer one great, big search/video/email/advertising ball.  And today, it took a tiny step along that path by rolling together some analytics products.

A post on the AdSense for Feeds blog announced, “If you use either AdSense for feeds or Google FeedBurner to track item clicks and also use Google Analytics, as of today, you will automatically start to see your feed item click analytics show up in Google Analytics with some additional information added to help you understand how distributing your feed with FeedBurner leads to traffic on your site.”

The post then continued, “Specifically, we will help you classify your links by tagging the Source as ‘feedburner,’ the Medium as the channel in which we sent out your feed such as ‘feed’ or ‘email,’ and the Content as the actual endpoint application in which the user viewed your feed content such as ‘Google Reader’ or ‘Yahoo! Mail.’”

More distribution endpoint labels are on the way, too.

Hopefully this update will help people earn a little extra money heading into the holidays.  At the least, it may simplify FeedBurner and AdSense for Feeds users’ lives a little, which would also represent a nice treat this time of year.

Have You Read This?

> Google Launches Analytics For Mobile Apps

> Correcting Your Web Analytics Mistakes

> FeedBurner/Google Alum Goes To Twitter

Unemployment and AdSense May Cause Headaches

Unemployed bloggers are apparently at risk of losing their unemployment checks (or at least having them drastically reduced) if they include ads on their blogs. That is exactly what happened to a woman named Karin, from New York, according to a recent Forbes piece.

A graduate from the University of Virginia School of Law was laid off by a law firm in New York, but was able to receive $405 a week in unemployment benefits from the state. To make a little extra money to help pay the bills, she started a blog and used Google AdSense. To make a long story short, her benefits were cut to $300 a week. It had taken her 3 months to earn $100 with AdSense.

She was sent a form to fill out and send to her "employer," and when she called the Department of Labor to get some answers about that, she was told that she shouldn't have claimed the AdSense payment to begin with because it was considered "residual," which would not make her ineligible for benefits. Fair enough. Unfortunatley for Karin, it only got more complicated from there.

"The call prompted Karin to file another claim with the state and to attach a letter stating she was running a blog and that the Google AdSense revenue it generated was her only source of income," explains David K. Randall of Forbes.com. "A few days later, she received a letter from the DOL informing her that it had launched an investigation of her "business" to determine whether she remained eligible for benefits."

"Karin called the DOL again and says this time she was told that the state considered her self-employed, which would require her to claim earnings each time she received an AdSense check," continues Randall. "She called back to get another opinion, and Karin says this time she was informed by yet another state official that she needed to declare that she was working every time that she updated her blog."

Karin is apparently not getting benefits as long as the investigation is going on, and she hasn't even made $250 from AdSense.

The situation would likely vary from state to state, but at least in New York, unemployment and AdSense blogs seem to equal nothing but headaches for everybody involved. Mike Masnick at TechDirt does a pretty good job of assessing the situation. "It's really stunning how various labor departments are simply ill-equipped to handle a modern labor force," he says.

Masnick has his own horror story about out of state labor departments seeking money for an employee that his company hasn't employed in years. They money sought after is apparently for time that this person wasn't working there.

Google Makes Online Stores Incredibly Simple

Google Labs has launched an interesting new gadget that allows users to create a Google Checkout store in gadget form to use on their blog or web site. According to Google the process is as simple as three easy steps:

1. Sign up for a Google Checkout account

2. Fill out a Google Docs Spreadsheet

3. Set up and insert you gadget

Sounds easy enough. Easily create an online store using a Google Docs spreadsheet. Interesting indeed. "No complicated coding or technical tasks are required," says Google on the gadget's homepage. "You can get your first online store up-and-running in under five minutes."

As business owners and non-business owners alike look to sell stuff online to make some extra money in a less than ideal economy, a simple way of setting up a store can be just the ticket. With this gadget, once users sign up for Google Checkout, they can list their products in the spreadsheet and manage their inventory right in Google Docs.

The gadget itself can be embedded anywhere, which could be incredibly useful, particularly to those sellers who operate more than one site. In fact, online business owners are often encouraged to blog. Wouldn't it make sense to have the store embedded right on the blog, for easy access? I think it would in many cases.

The gadget comes in three different sizes - large, small, and tiny. Here is how they look in comparison to one another:

 

When it comes to making the spreadsheet available to customers, you can do this by clicking "share" in the upper right-hand corner in Google Docs Spreadsheets. Then you choose "publish as a web page" from the drop down menu, and make sure that the "automatically re-publish when changes are made" option is checked. Then just click "start publishing".

If you have any trouble using it, Google runs down the whole process here. They have also set up a Google Checkout store gadget forum.

It should be noted that this gadget being a project of Google Labs means that it is still in the experimental stage. Does that mean you can't use it? Of course not. Let's not forget that Gmail just left its "beta" status this year. But with the gadget being a lab, just know that it could have bugs.