Patent Law

Migrating FeedBurner Feed To Google And Adding AdSense Ads

By Erik J. Heels

But what will happen to my FeedFlare?

I'm writing my latest nothing.but.net column for the ABA Law Practice magazine. I'm tentatively writing about Google-related stuff. In preparation for the article, I'm migrating my feed from FeedBurner to Google and then adding Google AdSense ads to my feed.

Because it doesn't matter where your content appears.

I'm curious to see how various ads perform: ads on my home page vs. ads on the footer of posts vs. ads in my feed. I don't make a huge amount of money from ads, but I like to keep up with the technology.

Unfortunately, Google's launch of AdSense for Feeds for the masses (it was previously available only to select publishers) has been problematic. In this case, Google did a sub-par job of launching AdSense for Feeds and communicating basic "how to" information. And you really don't want to screw up your feed. If you haven't yet outsourced your feed, then the process will be easier. If you have outsourced your feed to FeedBurner (i.e. had them host your feed by "burning" it for you), then it will be harder to make the transition. (Sucks being on the cutting edge.) Here are the basic steps:

1. Request that Google transfer your FeedBurner feeds to Google.
http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?answer=99648&hl=en

2. Read the confirmation email that you get from Google. It's not entirely correct or clear. Here's what mine said:

From:    AdSense Support 
To:      Erik J. Heels
Date:    Mon, Sep 1, 2008 at 3:14 PM
Subject: Re: migrate Feedburner account to Google AdSense

Hello,

Success! As you requested, we have migrated your FeedBurner account
to your requested Google Account.

You may now access all of your feeds by visiting this address:

http://feedburner.google.com

You will no longer be able to sign in to feedburner.com, but that's
okay: from now on, there is no reason to do so. Also, your old
FeedBurner feeds, found at feeds.feedburner.com, will automatically
redirect to their new addresses on the feedproxy.google.com domain.
You may still want to update any links or buttons on your website
to use the new feedproxy.google.com address.

All of your feeds have been moved into this new account, and an
initial batch of your most recent 30 days' traffic stats has been
loaded up. (Your entire stats history, should it go beyond the last
30 days, will be added at a future date. If you see "0" for the
most recent full day, don't panic! It may take 24 hours for that
day's full dose of stats to appear in your new account.)

*** MyBrand Instructions ***

Do you use MyBrand, FeedBurner.com's service for mapping your own
custom domain to FeedBurner's feed server? It is very important you
read the following instructions.  Your MyBrand URL (example: feeds.
joepublisher.com) will stay the same, however you will need to make
changes for traffic to smoothly transition to your migrated feed(s).

The following topic from Google Apps for Administrators provides
general instructions for changing CNAME entries with many popular
domain hosts:

http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47283

You will want to map feeds.YOURDOMAIN.COM to ghs.google.com.

*** End of MyBrand Instructions ***

Finally, to set up AdSense for feeds, you now need to visit AdSense
at http://www.google.com/adsense and choose the AdSense for Feeds
option under Manage Ads > Get Ads. (Ads won't appear in your feed(s)
unless set up new ad units for them there.)

Sincerely,

The Google Team

3. Go to http://www.google.com/adsense and do the rest.

A few interesting notes about the email:

1. I don't use the MyBrand stuff, and it looks like Google just included this info for everybody. This could cause confusion for users who inadvertently follow these instructions.
2. The email says that you'll no longer be able to use or login to your FeedBurner account, but that's not true. If you bookmarked (as I did) the FeedBurner login page (http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/login) (instead of the home page), then you'll still be able to login and access your FeedBurner account. But if you login from the FeedBurner home page, you will be redirected to your Google Accounts homepage. Very confusing.
3. Speaking of redirecting, your old FeedBurner feed URL will now be redirected to its new Google feed URL. So my old FeedBurner feed URL (http://feeds.feedburner.com/erikjheels) now redirects (presumably by 301) to my new Google feed URL (http://feedproxy.google.com/erikjheels). It would have been helpful to know this up front. Now I should update my blog's static pages with the new feed URL.
4. No mention is made of the other FeedBurner services. What happens to my FeedFlare (which automatically inserts links to social networking sites and the like in the footer of my posts on my website and in my feeds)? What happens to my Headline Animator (which creates animated gif "ads" for your blog like this one)? Do I manage these from FeedBurner? From AdSense? Where do I get stats? From Google Analytics? Has anybody thought this through?
5. Google should have followed accepted netiquette and used example.com as the example domain instead of joepublisher.com and yourdomain.com, both of which are parked domains.

There's lots more about how to migrate your FeedBurner feed to Google AdSense on other blogs, and there are also plenty of warnings about problems with migrating your FeedBurner feed to Google. So beware. You don't want to screw up your feed.

Full post as published by Erik J. Heels on September 23, 2008 (boomark / email).