Adsense channels

Channels are Google's AdSense performance tracking tools and are essential for AdSense publishers. Tracking is an effective means to get in control of your AdSense performance, so as to direct your work towards the money-producing parts.

Benefits

By setting up channels you can locate and watch the performance of your site's ads as a whole or grouped. You can analyze at any moment, in a report, your ads efficency as money-makers.

• You can watch each unit ad ranking and see how you can improve the click rate.
• Allows you to improve and customize your content scientifically and not based on assumptions. Experience shows that more than once sites/pages generating the most money were overlooked because of lack of such information.
• Channels can be of great help if you are running a PPC campaign to attract traffic. Thus you can track if you're doing efforts in the right direction.
• You can test and track results while doing ads customization.

Let's see how many types of channels you have at hand and what you can do with them.

Channel Types and Settings

You have AdSense for content and AdSense for search. So, you get to set up channels to monitor your ads' performance and that of the search boxes on your site.

There are:

• Ad channels:
• URL channels -- you enter a full or partial URL to track the performance of pages, sections or whole sites. No need for code modification.
• Custom channels -- you paste ad code that is specific to your settled channel, thus you can track several metrics in your sites.
• Search channels: These are custom channels and they help you monitor the performance and earnings generated through your search boxes.

You have the possibility of creating up to 100 active ad channels and the same for the search channels, separately. You may keep historic data on as many channels as you like, as long as they are not active. The deactivated channels do not count for the total number. You can reactivate your channels at any time, on condition they do not overpass the total amount of 100 active channels at a time.

Reports

You can check the performance of your ads/search boxes by accessing the Reportssection in your AdSense account.

Data is available in the aggregate or per channels. Aggregate data can be seen per page or per ad unit.

Reports show:

• impressions
• number of clicks
• CTR
• eCPM
• earnings

For further filtering and analysis you have the possibility of downloading reports in CSV format.

Inconveniences you might encounter:

• Complaints have been made about the limited number of allowed active channels.
  Solution: you may activate your channels by rotation. And supplementary you may use an AdSense tracking tool.
• Not enough data.
  Solution: you have the possibility to use some other tools to track AdSense activity to obtain further reference on the origins and tracking of clicks.
• Stats update frequency -- updates are not made in real time. Delays of over 12 hours may be registered.
  Solution: you have the possibility to use some other tools to track AdSense activity to see your ads activity in real time.
• Data overlapping -- reports of performance for All Channels will add data from URL channels to data from customized ones (depending on how you've set up your channels), so the totals will substantially differ from the real data.
  Solution: To obtain accurate totals, check the option Aggregate Data.
• Channels do not offer the activity tracking of each ad on a page, but the smallest tracked section is the ad unit (which usually contains more than one ad).
  Solution: AdSense tracking tools offer a "per ad" activity analysis.

For a more detailed view on your AdSense ads performance, our recommendation would be to combine the use of channels and tracking tools and to centralize and analyze the resulting data. Channels offer important data and exclusive information on earnings and eCPM (as Google is the only one who holds such info). Other AdSense trackers can be used to complete the image of your ads' performance with data on the referrer, the search keywords leading the surfer to your ads, etc.