Re: Anyone know how AdSense works?

From: Lee Roberts <l33roberts_at_sbcglobal.net>
Date: Thu 16 Feb 2006 09:06:13 -0600

Let's look at a couple of misunderstandings here.

NOTE: the URLs are rather long so they will probably break during the
transfer through email. My apologies on that problem.

First, when a person clicks an Adsense ad, the only referrer identified
is Google. The page the ad is on is never identified when the Adsense
ad is clicked. This is to keep people from knowing where their ads are
being served and clicked so the advertiser doesn't go to the Adsense
partner and advertise with them directly.

The following HTTP/1.1 HEADER request was generated when I clicked an ad
on a someone's Web site. Yes, I created fraud, but it was the only way
to get this information. My annotations are identified with two asterisks.

** resource being requested
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/iclk?sa=l&ai=Bh3oCXXj0Q8PGAs-qiAHgp4z2A-2ErBGdmMv1AcCNtwGgnAEQARgGINyR9gEoBUicOVDG48-2_P____8BqgEKOTkzNjk2MjcwNrIBGHd3dy5rbm93bGVkZ2UtZmluZGVyLmNvbboBCjE2MHg2MDBfYXPIAQHaASBodHRwOi8vd3d3Lmtub3dsZWRnZS1maW5kZXIuY29tL-ABApUCLvkiCg&num=6&adurl=http://www.phantasyrpg.com&client=ca-pub-3766445038620607&nh=1&jca=7077


**HTTP/1.1 HEADER request for the resource. Notice that the referer is
googlesyndication and not the Web page I was visiting.
GET
/pagead/iclk?sa=l&ai=Bh3oCXXj0Q8PGAs-qiAHgp4z2A-2ErBGdmMv1AcCNtwGgnAEQARgGINyR9gEoBUicOVDG48-2_P____8BqgEKOTkzNjk2MjcwNrIBGHd3dy5rbm93bGVkZ2UtZmluZGVyLmNvbboBCjE2MHg2MDBfYXPIAQHaASBodHRwOi8vd3d3Lmtub3dsZWRnZS1maW5kZXIuY29tL-ABApUCLvkiCg&num=6&adurl=http://www.phantasyrpg.com&client=ca-pub-3766445038620607&nh=1&jca=7077
HTTP/1.1
Host: pagead2.googlesyndication.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1)
Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1
Accept:
text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer:
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads?client=ca-pub-3766445038620607&dt=1140094948203&lmt=1140094947&prev_fmts=160x600_as&format=160x600_as&output=html&channel=9936962706&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.knowledge-finder.com%2F&color_bg=FFFFFF&color_text=000000&color_link=0000FF&color_url=CCCCCC&color_border=FFFFFF&ad_type=text_image&cc=42&u_h=768&u_w=1024&u_ah=709&u_aw=1024&u_cd=32&u_tz=-360&u_his=3&u_java=true&u_nplug=26&u_nmime=97


**redirection begins to the ultimate resource
HTTP/1.x 302 Found
P3P: policyref="http://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/p3p.xml", CP="NOI
DEV PSA PSD IVA PVD OTP OUR OTR IND OTC"
Location:
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/adclick?sa=L&ai=Bh3oCXXj0Q8PGAs-qiAHgp4z2A-2ErBGdmMv1AcCNtwGgnAEQARgGINyR9gEoBUicOVDG48-2_P____8BqgEKOTkzNjk2MjcwNrIBGHd3dy5rbm93bGVkZ2UtZmluZGVyLmNvbboBCjE2MHg2MDBfYXPIAQHaASBodHRwOi8vd3d3Lmtub3dsZWRnZS1maW5kZXIuY29tL-ABApUCLvkiCg&num=6&adurl=http://www.phantasyrpg.com&client=ca-pub-3766445038620607&nh=1&jca=7077
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Server: CAFE/1.0
Content-Length: 0
Date: Thu 16 Feb 2006 13:05:02 GMT

Second, Google can identify which page the ad was on when it was
clicked, even in a CMS. The HTTP/1.1 HEADER request for the Web page
showing the ad follows: My annotations are identified with two asterisks.

**resource requested
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads?client=ca-pub-3766445038620607&dt=1140095727750&lmt=1140095727&prev_fmts=160x600_as&format=160x600_as&output=html&channel=9936962706&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.knowledge-finder.com%2F&color_bg=FFFFFF&color_text=000000&color_link=0000FF&color_url=CCCCCC&color_border=FFFFFF&ad_type=text_image&cc=42&u_h=768&u_w=1024&u_ah=709&u_aw=1024&u_cd=32&u_tz=-360&u_his=1&u_java=true&u_nplug=26&u_nmime=97

**the HTTP/1.1 HEADER request to serve up the relevant ads. You'll
notice that the referer identifies the Web page where the ad is
located. Google then uses its cache of the page to serve the relevant ads.
GET
/pagead/ads?client=ca-pub-3766445038620607&dt=1140095727750&lmt=1140095727&prev_fmts=160x600_as&format=160x600_as&output=html&channel=9936962706&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.knowledge-finder.com%2F&color_bg=FFFFFF&color_text=000000&color_link=0000FF&color_url=CCCCCC&color_border=FFFFFF&ad_type=text_image&cc=42&u_h=768&u_w=1024&u_ah=709&u_aw=1024&u_cd=32&u_tz=-360&u_his=1&u_java=true&u_nplug=26&u_nmime=97
HTTP/1.1
Host: pagead2.googlesyndication.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1)
Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1
Accept:
text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://www.knowledge-finder.com/

**this identifies information sent from Google to the requesting browser.
HTTP/1.x 200 OK
P3P: policyref="http://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/p3p.xml", CP="NOI
DEV PSA PSD IVA PVD OTP OUR OTR IND OTC"
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Encoding: gzip
Server: CAFE/1.0
Cache-Control: private, x-gzip-ok=""
Content-Length: 2476
Date: Thu 16 Feb 2006 13:17:28 GMT


So, the only time the referer is identified is when the request goes to
Google for the ads.

The Web site this is from uses our software. The pages all have .html
extensions, but all the pages are 100% dynamically generated.

Hopefully this helps everyone.

Regards,
Lee Roberts
http://www.applepiecart.com





Received on Thu Feb 16 2006 - 09:06:13 CST