Adsense & Adwords Tips and Tutorials

Adsense statistics fever?

Google Adsense is probably the most popular site monetizer in the world today. When you start displaying ads in your web site, Google provides you with statistics. The statistics themselves are rather basic: The number of impressions, clicks and revenue generated. You can also see the clickthrough (Clicks divided by impressions) and eCPM (revenue per thousand of impressions).

Google also provides you with channels, which is a way to differentiate between different ads. You can setup "custom" channels, and assign any ad to one of those channels. Then you can view your stats split between the channels. You can also define URL channels, which include a domain and (optionally) a directory. All ads in that URL (or any derived URL) is counted in your URL channel (simply put, if you define a "mydomain.com/mydir" than any ad in that URL will be counted in that channel. An ad in "mydomain.com/mydir/derived_dir/..." will also be counted in that URL).

Publishers have noticed that the changes in ad-block size, placement and colors have a huge effect on their earnings. Sometimes you can move the ad a little bit in your page, and make it blend to the colors of your site, and your earnings can double, or even more. There is no easy recipe though. While Google suggest a certain ad placement (the Google " Adsense heat-map" (HREF="https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=17954&ctx=en:search&query=ad+placement&topic=0&type=f")), it doesn't work for everyone. A serious publisher must constantly change and test her ads. Obviously channels are very useful for those tests.

Because the Adsense stats are updated throughout the day, some publishers spend a lot of time checking and looking at their site performance. Checking your updated revenue can be addictive... But using the on-line reports is somewhat time consuming. As web applications go, it is rather slow to use. There are some quicker solutions: software applications that download the data for you, and alert you when new statistics are available. These applications range from a small free plug-in for Firefox that show you the latest update, to full-blown applications which also show you graphs and averages, including support for channels and more information.

Metalgrass software's AdSenseLog is one such application. AdSenseLog supports fully supports all Adsense products (content, search, referral and channel data). You can view the statistics in a table, shown by day,week, month or year. You can chart the data using graphs of all sorts, and also view more statistics. AdSenseLog's data can be exported to HTML with one mouse click. You can setup AdSenseLog to alert you when new statistics arrive. Alerts can be a small pop-up window, a sound, an e-mail message or even an SMS message. This way you can stay updated on your site performance even with no access to a computer! AdSenseLog is used daily by web-site publishers to monitor their Adsense account, to learn about trends in their data using the charts, to prepare reports and maximize their profit.

AdSenseLog is available for a free trial, and is free if your monthly earnings are below 50$.

http://www.metalgrass.com/adsenselog

About the Author

Ron Mertens is the owner of Metalgrass software, a shareware company. Metalgrass software have developed AdSenseLog, the tools that helps AdSense publishers maximize their profit.