Get APLawrence.com by RSS2005/07/31 Tracking Google Adsense
Update: Google now has integrated Adsense into Analytics - this is great news!
Web advertising is an important tool for web site owners. Whether it's an adjunct to income from the site or the sole source of income, more and more sites have signed up with Google Adsense. Some sites do very well and obtain significant income from these ads, and others don't do so well. Part of that is just traffic: it usually takes many thousands of visitors per day to see any real dollar volume. Another part is subject matter: ads for $10.00 items don't carry the income potential that really expensive items do. But aside from all that, with all else being equal, the choices the web site owner makes about the type of ad, its colors, and where it appears on the page have a large impact on the potential for making money.
I do not really understand why Google doesn't seem to want to be helpful about letting you analyze where your Adsense revenues come from. You'd think it would be to their advantage to help you increase earnings by choosing the right kinds of ads for your site. Seems pretty simple, doesn't it? The advertisers do better, you do better, Google does better - looks like a win-win-win to me/
Yet, they don't do much in that regard, and you have to do quite a bit of extra work to determine this information on your own. That's probably the most strange part about this: they don't prevent you from getting this data, in fact they even suggest that you should track that information, but they don't make it automatic or particularly easy.
According to Google, the large 336 by 280 rectangle is the best size for ads. I like that size because it blends in well with text, but for this site, the little "link unit" ads that appear underneath the comments on most page here are the best performers. Google doesn't allow me to tell you how well they perform specifically, so I'll just say that 25% of total ad revenue comes from those link unit ads.
How do I know that? Because I've defined a "channel" that I plug into the Google code for that type of ad. It's just a matter of visiting Adsense to define a channel name, and seeing what magic number they assign. It's then added like this:
google_ad_channel="1682167576";
Add other channels for the other types of ads you run and you can then get reports from Google that will help you determine which combinations of ad sizes, colors, placement etc. are most effective. Google says that some people have tripled their income through this sort of tracking and analysis. I suppose that's possible; my own gains have been more modest, around 33% increase. That may mean that I already was on the right track before I started fine tuning, or it may mean that I just haven't hit the best combinations yet.
As tempting as it is, you can't fiddle too quickly. When you make a change, you need to watch it for a good period of time to be certain what it has done to your earnings. There are always good days and bad days. I became momentarily excited when Saturday stats were tripled after a simple change, but it turned out just to be an unusually good Saturday: the following week showed no significant change.
It may not be fair to say that Google does nothing. They have offered webinars on this subject and have transcripts available on-line. They have Optimization tips also. The channel tagging capability is the only way to zero in on specific statistics, and obviously it would be difficult for Google to offer canned reports for every possible combination you might deploy. But I think they could offer the basics: perhaps just a breakdown by link unit ads, skyscrapers, rectangles and banners. Just enough basic information for a 10,000 foot view without defining channels. I think that would be helpful for the folks just starting out with Adsense.
For more advanced users, they might offer a complete click dump: the page at your site that generated the ad, plus the size and color information. We could take that raw data and massage it to create whatever reports we wanted. That kind of info is really impossible to obtain now. You can create "URL" channels that track sections or even specific pages, but there are limits to how many you can define, so that's not useful for a very large web site.
However poorly Google does this, it's better to know something than nothing. Track what you can, keep track of performance, and remember not to become complacent. What works well today may not work well next week. You need to be continually alert and ready to react.
Unless and until Google provides better reporting, one way to obtain better information is to use a third part tracking tool like http://aplawrence.com/foo-web/asrep-review.html">Asrep, which uses Javascript and Perl scripts to actually show you where clicks come from.
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