AdSense Channels | Vital Statistics for Increasing Profits

Any good marketing plan includes a way to track the success of your campaign. The same is true with Adsense. You will want to know what's working and what's not for a variety of factors, including ad placement, ad color and ad size. Adsense Channels is that tool that will provide the vital statistics you need for increasing profits.

Adsense offers two resources to track and improve your ad performance: the URL Channel; and 2) the Custom Channel. Understanding both of these resources will improve the overall performance of your website, as well as the performance of your Adsense ads.

The URL Channel
Let's begin with the URL channel. This channel allows you to track the success of individual pages (URL's), or groups of pages, within your website. The reports will give you an indicate the performance of your ads based on ad placement, ad color and ad size. By sampling URL's through out your website you will be able to test click-through-rates (CTR), make changes, and test again.

To add a URL, you simply:

1) Log in to your Adsense Account

2) Click on the Adsense Setup Tab

3) Click on the Channels link

4) Select the AdSense for Content sub-tab

5) Click on the URL Channels link

6) Click Add new URL channels

7) Highlight and Copy URL (www.mycoolwebsite.com)

8) Paste URL in URL's to track box

9) Click Add channels

Your new URL channel will begin tracking data almost immediately.

Custom Channels
Custom channels allow you to track the performance of each individual AdSense unit, and help you answer questions like:

Is the medium rectangle or the wide skyscraper more effective on my homepage?
Will my ads work better if I change the colors?
Will my ads be more effective with a border? (Typically, ads perform better without borders.)

Let's say that your website, www.CoolStuff.com, currently has 3 ad units and 1 link unit on each page of the site. You want to know which units are most effective. To do this, you will create a separate custom channel for each of the four units.

You will begin by logging in into your AdSense account and then following these 10 steps:

1) Log in to your AdSense account

2) Click on the AdSense Setup tab

3) Click on the Channels link. Make sure that you've selected the Custom channels subtab.

4) Click the Add new custom channel, and then type the name of your custom channel in the box.
Names like HomeTopBannerCoolStuff, or HomeBottomLeaderCoolStuff, both of which follow a pattern - Page-Location-AdUnit-Website, will help you when you begin to review the performance reports for your ads.

5) Click Add channels

The next step, after naming each ad unit, is to create channel-specific ad code. To do this you will:

6) Click on the AdSense SetUp tab

7) Choose AdSense for Content

8) Choose the ad type, format and color palette as would do for a basic ad

9) In the Channels section, select the name of the channel(s) that you would like to add by clicking the Add>> link

10) Click continue. Your choices will be reflected in the AdSense code

All you have to do now is copy and paste the code into your web pages. Google will begin to track these ads almost immediately.

Once you have collected 15 days of data from your AdSense URL Channels and AdSense Custom Channels (the minimum for a statistically significant survey), you can begin to review what's working and what isn't. With a few changes here and there, you will be able to dramatically increase your overall ad performance.

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