Tracking Ads with channels

You can have different kinds of ads on your web pages. Ads can vary by sizes or placements etc. For example on a page you have a leader board ad and a medium rectangle. How do you find out which size is performing better?

On another page your have one medium rectangle above the fold and one medium rectangle below the fold. How do you find out which one of them is producing better results?

There is where channels come to rescue. You can create a separate channel for each tracking criteria.

There are two types of channels:

• URL channels

• Custom channels

URL Channels

For example you have ads on “Home” page, “Articles” page and “Discussions” page of your website. You can create three channels for your website. The will be:

Example.com/index.htm

Example.com/Articles

Example.com/Discussions

Adding URL Channels

Inside your google adsense account, go to Adsense setup> URL Channels> Add new URL channel

After you have created URL channels you can check the reports in your google account how the channels are performing.

Go to your google account > Reports > Advanced Reports > select a date range >Group by  date / channel / both

This is an example of how the report will look like:

Custom Channels

While the URL channels track the data for the whole page, based on the URL, the custom channels track data based on the ad units.

While you can create different custom units based on different combinations, it is suggested to create the channels based on the following factors:

• Size of ad units

• Placement

• Content

Here are a few examples:

Size

I have ad units of size 300×250, 336×280 and 160×600 on my pages.

I will create a channel for 300×250, one channel for 336 x280 and one channel for 160×600.

Placement

I will create one channel for ad unit above the fold, one channel for a ad unit below the fold, one for a ad unit on the left bar and one channel for a ad unit in the right bar.

Content

I have three types of content pages on my site: sports, business and photography. I will create a ad unit for each type of the content.

Now say after a few weeks of tracking I found that my  ad unit of  336x 280 is performing better than 300×250. I will consider changing the size of the later to 336x 280 and track the performance again. This way you have to keep on testing the changes to get the better results.