Tracking Ad Performance with Channels

If you are trying to improve earnings from web advertising from Google, Yahoo or Chitika, you need to be able to track where your earnings come from. Unfortunately, that isn't necessarily easy. There are products like Asrep that can show you when someone clicks on a Google ad, but the advertising networks themselves don't give you detailed information.

But they do let you specify "channels", which is simply marking ads with a code that they can report to you separately. So, if you are wondering if 120 x 600 ads do better than 160 x 600, simply add a channel to your ad code and you can then get reports that will tell you how much each generated.

Google and Yahoo make this process unnecessarily difficult. You have to tell them to create a channel (Yahoo calls these "Ad Categories") and then they assign a numeric id that you ad to your code. For example, I might create a channel in Google called "120x600" and the additional code I'd add to those ads would be something like

 google_ad_channel ="2332782590";
 

With Yahoo, I'd create an Ad Category, and the extra code might look like

 ctxt_ad_section = "12747";
 

This mapping is annoying because if your tracking gets complicated, there's nothing in your code but a number that means nothing to you unless you go back to Google or Yahoo and figure it out. Chitika, on the other hand, makes it very simple. You just add your own text designations:

 ch_sid = "bluebanner";
 

All of the networks limit how many channels you can add. It would be nice if they would simply tell you full performance details, but they don't. I'd be happy if all they did was give me a raw dump I could analyze myself, but they don't do that either. So, channels is the best we can do right now.

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