Google Adsense for Feeds

Google emailed me today to let me know that they have migrated my account from FeedBurner to my Google account. This is good news as it allows me to use Google’s new Adsense for Feeds option. This means that I now access my feed stats at feedburner.google.com instead of FeedBurner.com but the look and feel of the control panel is the same.

Here’s the confirmation email they sent me :

Hello Kevin,

Success! As you requested, we have migrated your FeedBurner account to
your requested Google Account.

You may now access all of your feeds by visiting this address:

http://feedburner.google.com

You will no longer be able to sign in to feedburner.com, but that’s okay:
from now on, there is no reason to do so. Also, your old FeedBurner feeds,
found at feeds.feedburner.com, will automatically redirect to their new
addresses on the feedproxy.google.com domain. You may still want to update
any links or buttons on your website to use the new feedproxy.google.com
address.

All of your feeds have been moved into this new account, and an initial
batch of your most recent 30 days’ traffic stats has been loaded up. (Your
entire stats history, should it go beyond the last 30 days, will be added
at a future date. If you see “0″ for the most recent full day, don’t
panic! It may take 24 hours for that day’s full dose of stats to appear in
your new account.)

*** MyBrand Instructions ***

Do you use MyBrand, FeedBurner.com’s service for mapping your own custom
domain to FeedBurner’s feed server? It is very important you read the
following instructions. Your MyBrand URL (example:
feeds.joepublisher.com) will stay the same, however you will need to make
changes for traffic to smoothly transition to your migrated feed(s).

The following topic from Google Apps for Administrators provides general
instructions for changing CNAME entries with many popular domain hosts:

http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47283

You will want to map feeds.YOURDOMAIN.COM to ghs.google.com.

*** End of MyBrand Instructions ***

Finally, to set up AdSense for feeds, you now need to visit AdSense at
http://www.google.com/adsense and choose the AdSense for Feeds option
under Manage Ads > Get Ads. (Ads won’t appear in your feed(s) unless set
up new ad units for them there.)

Sincerely,

The Google Team

Using Adsense for Feeds

With my feedburner account moved to my google account, I can now add adsense to my feeds more easily. And because they are integrated, you don’t have to copy and paste any code anywhere, you simply set it up and hey presto, your feeds now have adsense ads.

Heres a screenshot from the add feed area :

You can choose the frequency of the ads, the minimum post lengthfor an ad to appear and the position and colors of the ad too. You also have the ability to add a channel specifically for your RSSfeed ads and make it targetable.

Once you have set your adsense for feed up, it should go live within 10 minutes.

Here’s how it looks at the bottom of the Blogging Tips feed :

As you can see, the advertisement is placed below the copyright feed and above the social media links. I might try it at the top of the feed after a week or so to see what’s the best area for the ad.

Overview

I’m quite impressed with how easy it is to add advertisements to your feed once you have migrated your account from FeedBurner. I don’t expect to make a lot of money from this ad area but it’s still an extra source of income and because it’s part of the feed, it should be placed on blog scrapers sites as well. I’ll monitor the money generated from the BloggingTips over the next few weeks and let you know how profitable it is