AdSense Publisher Toolbar v1.5 Update

We’ve been hard at work on the publisher toolbar, and I’m happy to announce that we’ve pushed a new version containing the most commonly requested feature: support for selecting a range other than a 7-day daterange for the custom and URL channel summary.

There’s more, of course - go see the AdSense Publisher Toolbar on the Chrome Web Store for more.

Specifically:

• A new, first-install page explains the product features a bit better;
• A First-install page added that explains product features in more detail, linked from help.
• An overlay notification is added when overlays are disabled on a domain, to help users find the feature.
• Choose your own reporting window on custom and url channel reports.
• Uses your current Google account login, rather than OAuth.
• Supports multiple logins.
• Fixes for timezone issues. If you still see problems, please report them.

Looking forward to hearing feedback.

AdSense Dashboard 2.7

So as a part of the V1 launch of the API, there are a few things that are happening.

First and foremost, we don’t need to hide the fact that the API exists anymore; this means we can move to OAuth2 for our authentication. This miiiiiiight be a little flaky; I’ll be watching for problems with authentication, and if you have problems, tell me. Also, we’ll be moving to an explicitly read-only auth scope, and a human-readable scope at that, so that users can feel confident that we can’t do anything untoward with their data.

Next, this is the first pass on a multi-pass redesign of the look and feel. Specifically, we’re going to be surfacing a lot more data - so we need ways of making all that data work. As such, we’re moving to ViewPager, the same pager UI you see in Market and Google+.

Gotchas:

• Auth might be a little flaky. Working on it.
• Graph rendering is really slow, especially now that there are six of them on screen.
• There are a lot of UI tweaks needed, here; the app isn’t the prettiest thing in the world.

I’ll continue to work on this over the next few weeks, but again, I’d like to thank everyone for helping us test the AdSense Management API - we wouldn’t have been able to launch it with the level of confidence we have today without each of you.

Thank You, Beta Testers!

So the secret can now be told - AdSense Dashboard has been a skunkworks project to test Google’s prototype AdSense API.

Together, we generated enough traffic to verify the production-readiness of the API; thanks for enduring the occasional downtime as we got the API ready for the masses and for its public release, and thanks to the AdSense API team for doing such amazing work under difficult time schedules and a rather large amount of pressure from me on the shape and form of the API.

This isn’t the end of AdSense Dashboard - in fact, it’s just the beginning. But for now, the limelight belongs to our API launch.

Read the complete Adsense API Announcement

If you’d like more information on the API, you’ll find the public documentation is now available. Now that we’re public, I’ll be changing the auth method from ClientLogin (which reported “AdSense” as the permissions it wanted when you attached an account) to the OAuth endpoint for the API, at which point it will tell you that it wants read-only access to the API, further limiting the set of permissible actions that can be taken by the code.

Thanks again to everyone who’s installed the product and helped us test our API.

AdSense Dashboard 2.6

I’ve been pumping out dashboard changes for the last few days, based on feedback, bug reports, and general email discussions with users. Keep them coming - if you use the app, I want to hear from you.

Users on Eclair/Froyo got bit by a pretty nasty bug in the HTTP stack built into the phone; the common fix appears to be to not use that API on those platforms, so that’s what I’m doing.

New stuff:

• Support for disabling auto-refresh.
• Bugfixes for Eclair/Froyo. If it’s not fixed for you, I want to hear about it.
• Device-specific compatibility bugfixes around currency and rounding.
• Google TV support. This is a bit slapdash - I’ll improve it as I improve the tablet layout.
• New widget (released as part of the 2.5 chain) by a contributor/coworker.

There’s a lot of activity going on this weekend and early next week; I intend to do a lot of ‘remastering’ of the numeric portion of the display to show more comparative data - today versus yesterday, today verus one week ago, this week verus last week, this month versus last month, etc., for a broader set of metrics than we currently include.

That will also be extracted into widget form - choose an arbitrary 1x1 fact.

Lifetime spend, custom channels, and url channels will also show up, in all probability.

Your feedback isn’t just welcome - it’s wanted. Ping me with your gripes, comments, suggestions, and requests.

Adsense Dashboard 2.0

Ok, admittedly, I’m spending an awful lot of nights on this not-a-20% project.

• Prettier 3D graphs
• Support for switching to 2D graphs
• Oooodles of end-user controls and settings
• The ability to disable chart series
• Checkboxes in the legend on the full-screen graph
• A widget for your home page that updates once an hour.
• Totals and averages on the data view.