Block Your Ads. Get Better Stats.

As part of the added value of ProductCritic over other review aggregator competitors, we add reviews and products manually (instead of using a spider or bot to scrape review sites). We believe that the quality of review summaries, the overall coverage on a product, and the summary review scores (and therefore, resulting ProductCritic Score) are much higher than with automatic scraping.

On any normal day of working on ProductCritic, I probably reload the page 20-30 times depending on how many products and reviews I'm adding. This has a negative affect on the stats that you see on Google Adsense and Analytics because your pageviews are added to the total thus giving you inaccurate statistics. Since I'm such a stats addict, I wanted to remove my own pageviews of the site.

Since I use Firefox, I installed the Adblock add-in. It's a great add-in for blocking all ads or specifically chosen ones. I actually don't block ads from other sites because I want to see what ads other sites, blogs, and competitors are displaying. As long as you enable your filters correctly, the Add-in works great because I can choose specifically just to block my own Adsense or Chitika ads but still see those ads that are located on other sites. Furthermore, it is very easy to enable/disable the blocking of ads just by right-clicking the "Adblock" link located at the bottom right of the browser window (which allows me to easily see the ads on ProductCritic if I want to).

Once you install Adblock, you will need to add filters. Here is what you need to add to your filters in order to block Google Adsense and Chitika ads:

google_ad_client="pub-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads?client=ca-pub-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX*
ch_client="productcritic";
http://mm.chitika.net/minimall?*&client=productcritic*

*Note that you'll need to replace the bolded parts above with your own client number or text. Don't forget to keep the "*" that's at the end of some of those lines as they act as a wildcard (which tells the filter that you don't care what is after that text).

So far, it's been working great for me as my Adsense and Chitika stats for Page CTR and Page eCPM are much more accurate (since my own pageviews are not watering down the results).

Finally, an added bonus of blocking your own ads is that you don't accidentally click on your ads (which can get you kicked out of the Adsense program by Google). Overall, a fantastic add-in and another reason to use Firefox as your default browser.

Faking Context Sensitive Chitika Ads

As you may have seen on the main site, we have added Chitika ads in combination with the Google Adsense ads that were already on the site. Like I mentioned in a previous post, if you use Adsense, you are not allowed to have other ads on your site that are context sensitive (i.e. what is displayed in the ad is deduced automatically from the ad provider spidering the page).

We like the Chitika ads because they are dynamic (roll over them and the tabs change) but in addition to the ProductCritic Score, I keep getting asked to add the price of a product. While we have thought about doing that, it will still take awhile before we can add that functionality to the site. Instead, Chitika can help people who want that info (and help us at the same time).

To make it useful though, we needed to ensure that the Chitika ad was relevant to the product page. Since we already know what product we are displaying, it's as easy as adding a line like this to the Chitika script:

var ch_queries = new Array( "Canon A640" );

This tells the Chitika ad to use "Canon A640" as the keyword. This works great on the site and maintains our Terms of Service (TOS) with Google Adsense because we're the ones who are telling Chitika what product to put in the ad vs. Chitika determine that contextually.