When I do AdSense consulting, one of the first things I ask my clients to do is to collect data about where their AdSense earnings are coming from, if they're not already doing so. There are generally two ways to do this. The first is to use a third-party tracking script like AdSense Gold. The second is to use AdSense channels. Many people seem to think that tracking scripts are superior to channels because they'll show you which specific ads are being clicked (in most cases — due to the design of Firefox and other Mozilla-based browsers, click-tracking scripts won't work with those browsers), but they forget that those tracking script leave out some very vital information — how much money you're earning for those clicks! So today I'd like to talk some more about channels, and specifically about using multiple channels per ad unit.
AdSense Channel Types
There are two kinds of AdSense channels:
- The custom channel (the original type of channel) lets you associate an ad unit with an arbitrary name that you select. You must then insert a tracking code (that Google generates for you based on the name of the channel) into the AdSense code for each unit you want tracked.
- The URL channel tracks ads based on their URLs. You create a channel for each domain or path within a domain that you want tracked. All ads that fall within the domain/path are then automatically tracked. No changes are needed to the AdSense code.
You can have up to 200 channels active at any time, split between both channel types.
Specifying Multiple Channels
Originally, you were limited to using no more than one custom channel per ad or link unit. (I should point out here that channels are really the only way you can track link unit performance. Tracking scripts can't tell you anything about link units other than to say that a click occurred, but since the “money clicks” don't happen on your pages, you can't track them.) Now you can use up to 5 custom channels per unit.
Channel specification is very easy. If an ad or link unit has a custom channel associated with it, you'll see a line like this in the generated code:
google_ad_channel = "4442062868";
The 10-digit value you see is the internal tracking code that Google assigns to the channel I'm using in this example. If you select multiple custom channels, the code looks like this:
google_ad_channel = "4442062868+3717851170+4320910808";
Each channel code is separated from the others using a “+” character.
If you're creating new units, selecting multiple channels is easily done from the AdSense console. If you're modifying existing ad units, you need to go to the console to generate the tracking codes for each channel and then modify your units accordingly.
How To Use Multiple Channels
So how do you use multiple channels to gather more information? There are different strategies to take, but here are my suggestions:
- Define a custom channel for each ad and link unit format you use. Thus you might have the “a336x280″, “a234x60″ and “l725x15″ channels defined if you use the 336 by 280 and 234 by 60 ad unit formats as well as the 725 by 15 link unit format. You'd assign the appropriate channel to each of your ad and link units. This will give you an idea of how well the formats work across all your sites.
- Define a custom channel for each ad position on the page. For example, if you use the traditional AdSense heat map you might define channels for header, footer, left sidebar, right sidebar and main content. Or if you just have a two-column format, it might be header, footer, sidebar, main content left, main content right, etc. Whatever works for you. These channels will tell you which ad placements are working for you.
- Define URL channels for each of your sites so you can track earnings on a per-site basis.
Now take the remaining sites and use them for detailed site analysis. Create a channel for each format-position pair you use. In other words, create something like “a336x280-main” for a 336 by 280 ad unit in the main part of the content. Assign them to the appropriate ad units. If you have enough channels, you can even create channels like this for each of your sites.
That's the basic strategy. The point is to gather as much detailed data as you can both across your entire network and on specific sites. So you can find out what's really working for you and what's not. This is very useful when you're trying to get a specific site's earnings up, as you can create special channels just for that site without interfering with the stats gathering for all your sites.
Hope this helps!
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AdSense by reading Uncommon AdSense, my latest book about AdSense.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.