Oct 1 2006

How to track clicks from different ad blocks or sites in Google Adsense

Posted by visio in Seo Articles
1 Comment

Wouldn’t it be cool if I could tell which of your adsense ad blocks on which of your sites produced the most clicks? “Man I wish I could tell which site is producing the most revenue. I use the same Google Adsense account for multiple” sites. Now you can stop worrying about adding a new adsense account for every ad block or every site because you can now track each click for each ad block on each of your sites very easily. It is so easy a cave-man could do it.

First of all I do recommend setting up multiple Adsense accounts for more than one site if they are large sites which produce alot of conversion. This makes life easier especially if you plan on tracking each ad block for each site. But if they are small site which get average traffic one adsense account will do if you don’t mind digging through your reports lol

How Can I Track Multiple Sites?
Okay this is very easy to do. Frankly I am surprised so many people ask me how to do this when it is so easy. Just goes to show people would rather Google how to use a Google program than read a guide lol
Of course you need to login to your account – good time to mention something. If someone claims to have a way to track Adsense, Adwords etc and they ask you to use a script of theirs for something simple like this be leary as the data could be used to kill you – Click Adsense Setup. We are going to use Adsense for Content. But before we go there we must create some channels so just below where it says “Adsense Setup” Click Channels. Then Click Url Chanels(See Screenshot)

Click Add New Url Channels(See Screenshot) – Enter your URLs you want to track and click Add Channels.(See Screenshot) Remember www.mydomain.com will track mydomain.com as well as forums.mydomain.com & tools.mydomain.com. You do not need to put in the url for each unless you want the data for each url to be seperate. You can also track individual pages as well as directories and sub-pages.

Now once your back to the URL Channels pages with your new urls added. Click the URL check box to select all the urls. Now select the ACTIONS drop down menu and click Activate Checked.
the data will immediately start being shown as soon as you recieve your first click after setting up the channels.

Do URL channels provide historical data?
URL channels will only start tracking the performance of your pages once you have activated the channel. Creating a new URL channel will not provide historical performance data for the pages it is tracking.
So it is best to setup your URL Channels right away. You can still view your data as a whole for all your sites Simply selecting all time from the Date range selection box on your Advanced Reports page to view all your data. Or you can switch to certain url data.

How Do I track Clicks for Individual Adsense Ad Blocks?
From the Adsense Setup > Channels page click Custom Channels. (See Screenshot)
Click Add New Custom Channels(See Screenshot) Enter descriptive names for your channels. Names such as Channel1 will be useless as you will not be able to remember what ad block they were for. So use names such as:

HomeTop
HomeMiddle
HomeRightSkyscp
HomeLeftNavLinks

You can add multiple channels per line so create one for each ad block you plan on creating. If the ad block will be on your forums and will be at the top below the logo then use a name such as ForumSkyscpHeader
Again these names can be anything but be descriptive or you will forget which ad block they belong to.

For this demonstration I will be creating the channel: DemoHomeSkyscpHeader
Select the check box next to DemoHomeSkyscpHeader and select the ACTIONS drop down menu and click activate.

Click products in the Adsense Setup menu at the top of the screen. Select Adsense for Content. We are going to use a Ad Unit and use images and text. Scroll down to the bottom where the More Options form is. Under Custom Channel > Click No Channel Select and select our previously named channel. (See Screenshot)
Then click continue. Select the ad code and insert it into your forum page just below the header because that is what we named it. Don’t use this code for any other place or the statistics will not be generated solely on the forum clicks.

Create a new channel for each ad block you want to create and then name it appropriately and put the code into the place the channel specifies. Data will start showing up as soon as you receive the next click. Again historical data will not be shown for NEW channels. If you create a channel called forumsHeader and delete it and then decide later to re-create it the previous data will appear again.

How do I view data for each channel?
Goto Reports in the Adsense home page and then select Advanced Reports. Click Show Channel Data and select which channel to show data for the click Show Report. You can view data for multiple channels, all channels, 1 channel or all data for all fo your sites and ad blocks.

Use URL Channels to track your performance without modifying your ad code. By entering a full or partial URL, you can begin tracking the performance of particular pages in your site. You can enter a top-level domain name to track all of the pages on that domain, or you can enter a partial URL to track all of the pages below a certain directory. Entering a full URL will track the performance of that particular page.

URL channels are only available for Adsense for content pages. If you would like to track your Adsense for search performance you will have to use custom channels.Custom channels allow you to track the performance of specific ad units based on your specified criteria. By pasting channel-specific ad code into your pages, you can track a variety of metrics across a range of URLs. Use custom channels to track the performance of different ad formats, for example, or to compare different page topics to one another.

But don’t tell me you don’t know that after reading my article

Have a Adsense Question you would like answered?
Send me a email or comment on this post. I will create a article about it asap.