Tracking the Single-Page AdSense site

Since readers seemed to like the single-page AdSense site topic, I thought I'd talk about it some more. Today let's talk about ad placement on the single-page site.

AdSense Channel Setup

All AdSense publishers can use channels for minimal ad tracking. You should create one URL channel for the entire site (which is just the one page) and one custom channel for each ad and link unit on the page. This will let you see two things at a glance: how much the page as a whole is making you and how much each ad/link unit is making you.

To make things easier, choose descriptive names for your ad channels. I use a prefix based on the domain name — so “NoDebtIsGood.com” becomes “NDIG” — followed by the unit size and position. So I end up with channel names like “NDIG-728-90-middle” and “NDIG-336-280-top”. It's more work to setup channels like this — don't forget to create new channels when you vary the ad formats and placement — but for a single-page site it's not very onerous and it'll let you gather some good stats.

Once you've created your channels, let the site run for a week or two and review what's happening. Figure out which of the ad placements is working best for you. Are people reading the entire article on your page and then clicking an ad at the end? Maybe you should remove all the ads except for the last one. Are they not clicking the link unit? Maybe remove it. Whatever you do, be sure to make only one change at a time. Removing or adding a unit, or changing the format of a unit, or changing the position — these should all be done separately, otherwise you won't know what caused earnings to increase or decrease. And by using descriptive channel names (you have 200 of them to use, plenty for a single-page site) you can easily look over a month's statistics and see what works and what doesn't for your site.

Ad Tracking Scripts

Another thing to do is to install an ad tracking script. Whether you use a hosted service like AdSenseDetective or scripts you install yourself like AdSense Tracker, you can find out much more about the ads than you can with Google's channels. You can see which specific ads are being clicked, you can see when they're being clicked, you can see which page led the visitor to your page, and so on. Useful information to have.

Note: the tracking people will tell you that you just need their scripts and to abandon channels entirely. They're wrong, though, because the tracking scripts can't track everything. They can't track clicks on link units. They can't track clicks from certain browsers due to limitations/bugs in those browsers. And it's not a bad idea to have copies of the base data in two places.

Less is More

One thing you'll probably discover is that “less is more”: fewer ad units on the page will probably make you more money. This is especially true in keyword markets where the top two or three ads pay a lot more than the rest. But your mileage may vary — that's why you're doing all this testing…

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

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