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In June of this year, Google added a Scorecard to the Google AdSense home page portal. The scorecard is designed to give publishers a quick snapshot of how well your ad settings, webpages and content are performing relative to other AdSense publishers.
When it launched, it had three main sections, one of those three sections were removed quietly. The section that was removed was the Google+ section.
Here is a picture of what the score card looks like now:
Here is a picture of what it looked like with Google+ data:
I wonder why they removed it, since Google+ is such a big deal for Google?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Comments:
Jerry Nordstrom
12/13/2013 01:39 pm
I'm sure there are a number of inside baseball reasons, but I think it could be pretty simple. Adsense attracts all types of publishers - a large portion of first timers with a "site in a night" set up, then you have the scalers who create thousands of websites with scraped content. If G+ branded pages was viewed as a way to optimize the performance of their ads they may be inviting the wrong people to the neighborhood? Oops too late. Social SEO.
Jerry Nordstrom
12/13/2013 01:46 pm
Barry - Your screenshot is a view of the old interface. Adsense has launched a new one a couple weeks back. The new interface is also missing G+, but it includes a report and score for "Multi-screen optimized" - Google is recommending "Adaptive" web design and points to a number of drag and drop wisiwig, responsive design vendors.
Barry Schwartz
12/13/2013 01:48 pm
Yes, I know. I am on the new one.
jeffyablon
12/13/2013 01:56 pm
Mine switched this morning; as of yesterday I still had G+ in there. And @Nordstrom:disqus is right; you're dated. As for the reason for the switch, think about it: G+ is a static metric that you either have or don't. Once people who use Adsense understand its importance the continued display of "yup, you still have it" is wasted space, whereas showing responsive data--which is a bit more fluid AND another hot button--meets Big G's goals for continued behavior modeling all the better.
Frank
12/13/2013 02:21 pm
One of the Scorecard suggestions is compressing images so they load faster. I strongly do not recommend doing this unless the images are huge. As monitors get larger and larger, over-compression will create artifacting and deterioration of images.
Rick
12/13/2013 03:08 pm
I strongly recommend listening to the scorecard and compressing images. The load time of your sites can hurt conversions rate, rankings in the search engines, bounce rate, and the click through rate on ads. What does a little bit of artifacting hurt that is provable?
Frank
12/13/2013 03:20 pm
Scripts are huge in comparison to graphics. Pages can have multiple scripts. I'm not a fan of scripts and don't use them, excepting for the Google ads. I have a graphic or two on my pages, and most are very tiny graphics. My page load times are super fast. And a tiny graphic measuring in KB's that is recommended to be compressed is total BS. As to the Google+ on the Scorecard, that should have never been a factor. It gave the impression that having + impacted your website positively. I'm sure newbies were confused. Have a great day, Rick. I do appreciate your feedback and I'm not trying to be a wuss.
Rick
12/13/2013 04:20 pm
Sure scripts can slow down a site a lot. I am always trying to figure out how to remove them or minimize them. Yeah it is definitely not necessary to worry about really small images. I just didn't want people using big images like eCommerce rotators to think huge images are fine. I have been fighting this fight for so long. I just see nothing provable that huge images that are not compressed help. Google+ was just on there to get more people to use it in my opinion. Have a good day.
Fedor
12/13/2013 06:12 pm
It never made sense why having Google+ on your site would generate greater revenue. So they add Multi-screen and removed Google+, good choice. "The scorecard is an optimization tool for publishers. We do not take any account actions based on your scores." hahaok, so what's the point again?
Jeremy Myers
12/14/2013 12:03 am
It was broken on my screen anyway for the past week. Maybe they are just fixing it and it will be back.
Mark Warner
12/16/2013 12:16 pm
Just a tip. For thumbnails up to medium sized non photographic images I have been using 256 color png and then running them through pngout. Great quality/ size ratio!
Mark Warner
12/16/2013 12:30 pm
Well the scorecard changes its mind on an daily basis with no regard to what it thought yesterday, so I don't believe anyone takes it seriously . I believe there is a VERY good reason why the G+ button was removed as when you click on it a pop up takes over a large portion of your screen. And adsense rules state that ads cannot be obscured or overlapped. So I speculate that not only is that against TOS, it may well create a suspicion of invalid clicks I removed mine for this very reason (didn't help my adsense earnings though) lol. Very difficult to have a G+ button and adsense without it doing it. Which is really stupid as they are both Google products.