I’m managing a website for a customer and they want to have the AdSense program running on their site. Piece of cake I thought… First off I created a new AdSense account for the domain with my customers contact information and linked it to my own Google Account. I used my own Google Account because I didn’t wanted to bother my customer with the technical setup e-mails I expected to arrive. So my thought was to transfer the AdSense account to him at a later stage. BIG MISTAKE! That’s not possible.

But since I hadn’t activated the AdSense account yet – only created it, I thought I could just start over and create a new AdSense account for the same domain and link it directly to my customers Google Account. This was not possible. My customer got an e-mail saying the supplied information was identical with information on a previously created AdSense account linked to the Google Account [xxxxx]@gmail.com. It’s interesting to notice that “[xxxxx]” in this cause was not my own Google Account e-mail address, but actually belonged to a colleague of mine!

Why did Google write that e-mail address to my customer? My colleague had not previously created an AdSense account in my customers name. My colleague does not even have AdSense activated on his Google Account. I on the other hand have both. How did Google come up with his e-mail address instead of mine?

Closing an AdSense account

Anyway. I thought it would be best to close my newly created AdSense account and begin the whole process again. Now how do you close an AdSense account? Officially Google will tell you that if you’d like to remove products from your account, you just have to follow these steps:

1. Sign in to your Google Account.
2. Visit the My Account page.
3. Click the Edit link located next to ‘My products.’
4. Select the product you’d like to remove from your account.

The truth is that I’m using 15+ Google products and not one can be removed this way. The only option I have after clicking the Edit link is to close my entire Google Account all together!

Reading the help page again I find that the small print say:

Currently, it’s not possible to remove all products listed on the My Account page. If you’d like to remove a product from your account that isn’t on the My Account page, please visit the Google Help page, where you can find extensive product-specific information.

Ahh… So I just need to find some AdSense specific information about how to close my AdSense account? The hunt continues…

After a lot of searching I find this form: Closing my Google AdSense account. I submit the form, wait and later receive a nice e-mail telling me that they are unable to cancel my account because I currently have “payment holds”. I must admit that I’m not entirely sure what that is, but since I haven’t ever used or earned any money with this account, I didn’t think “payment holds” should be an issue. They tell me, that if I want to give up my rights to get my money (what money?), I must fill out another form almost identical to the one I filled out before. The new form have the same name but the URL is slightly different: It ends with “cancellation” instead of “request_cancellation” and have this extra check box:

Why didn’t they just show be this form to beging with?

Well, after filling out the form I got this e-mail:

Hello,

Thank you for taking the time to write to us. As per your request, we have
permanently closed your account.

Finally!

Trying once again

After finally having closed my originally created AdSense account, I tried to start over and once again apply for a new one – this time also making sure to choose my customers Google Account as the one the AdSense account should be tied to.

But now I was told that my customer already had an AdSense account and I therefore couldn’t open a new one. What!? After looking at the e-mail Google had previously send my customer (the one weirdly specifying my colleagues e-mail address), I found that the AdSense account creation process actually had been put on hold and that the only option to get it started again was to delete my own (or my colleagues?) Google Account. There was no apparent way to let Google know that I just canceled the AdSense account “manually”.

Stuck

Now what? I can’t create a new AdSense account unless I close my own or my colleagues Google account – and I don’t want that! I’ve tried to reply to the e-mail my customer got from Google, asking them to continue the process – but so far no response. And why do they think that my colleague have created an AdSense account using my customers credentials?

Dear Google, please help me!

P.S. Sorry that the first post I write here in a looong time is a rant. But at least I’m getting started ;)

Due to time and scope limitations, there has been focus on the “low hanging fruit”. Here are some screenshots that I used originally to point out usability issues:

(click on image for large version)

Lessons learned

• Screenshots: Addressing usability issues directly on screenshots is a low-cost, effective way of communicating. Also it gives other team members a tool to show to the superusers/ambassadors, in order to explain the problems.
   
• Constraints: The usability improvements have suffered from many constraints: Choice of technology, choice of very complex existing data model, lockdown to a very old design that required all action buttons located at a menubar on the top of the screen.
   
• Legacy design decisions: Not redesigning but trying to keep the pages appear the same is a limitation that made us drop quite a lot of the usability improvements. So it was a shame that it was not possible to convince the project owner to be more free on the design: Fixed width and more focus on the primary actions would have been good.
   
• Using statistics to underpin our conclusions was very effective. We had stats from 98,000 timereports submitted by 3,500 people in 5 companies in 4 countries. We used these statistics to base some of the conclusions on: Which fields could be hidden by default? How many projects did people usually choose from, etc.
   
• Behaviour over opinions: The statistics were very effective, focusing the different organizations to work in the same direction: Previous there had been discussion over the theme: “But our organisation /team /project is special”. They stopped because the numbers could prove that some organisations thought all employees did a certain thing always. The numbers could prove that only for instance 30% of the employees had the issue. So we could argue that changing would only benefit 30% and hurt 70%.

There will probably be more improvements in the usability area, but for now, this was what we were able to do with the limited amount of time, resources and wishes for usability improvements that were possible.

Some colleagues and I will work on a new and improved time reporting system user interface that will look perhaps something like this:

(Design by my co-worker Jonas Moll. Click for large picture)
Some day we may take this design and make a new timereporting interface that’s much more intuitive and faster to use for the typical usecases. Hopefully — and if time permits — we can start this up as an alternative frontend to an existing system, and maybe it can evolve to an easy-to-use state-of-the-art timereporting system.

So small steps in the right direction for a better, more usable world.

Google Webmaster Tool is a great tool for webmasters who want to see and manage how Google crawls their site(s). If you have a Google ID you can add all the sites that you control to a dashboard. From here you can see intimate details for each site. After adding justaddwater.dk I found that Google was encountering some HTTP errors when crawling our site. This of cause is very important since other users unfortunately also encounter these errors.

When diving into the errors I can see that some links to our site point at stuff that is not there. I unfortunately cant see where these links come from. They could be external or internal I guess, but I have to manually look at my site to see. Adding a “source” for the link would be very easy for Google and be a great benefit to the webmaster.

Besides web crawling problems, the tool also gives loads of other interesting information. I suggest you take a look your self, but to just summarize I quote Google:

Statistics

Top search queries
See which search queries most often returned pages from your site, and which of them were clicked.

Crawl stats
See your distribution info for your site, including the current PageRank for pages on your site.

Subscriber stats
If your site publishes feeds of its content, this page will display the number of users who have subscribed to these feeds using Google products such as iGoogle, Google Reader, or Orkut.

What Googlebot sees
See details about how the Googlebot sees your site.

Index stats
Learn how your site is indexed by Google, including which pages are indexed, and which other sites point to your site.

Links

Pages with external links
See which pages on your site have links pointing to them from other sites.

Sitelinks
See which links on your site have been identified as candidates for appearing directly in Google search results.

Pages with internal links
See which pages on your site have links pointing to them internally from elsewhere on your site.

Sitemaps
Add and manage your sitemaps (including code sitemaps).

Tools

Analyze robots.txt
See whether your robots.txt file blocks specific URLs as is, or with modifications you make. Test against various Google user-agents, too.

Enable enhanced image search
Enable Google’s enhanced search for images on your site, including advanced labeling techniques for images hosted by Google.

Manage site verification
See all verified owners of this site, and optionally reverify them.

Set crawl rate
See statistics about how often Google crawls your site, and optionally adjust that speed if desired.

Set preferred domain
Associate a preferred domain with this site, to always or never show the leading “www.” in Google’s search results.

Remove URLs
Remove content from the Google index, including expediting that removal.

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