How to use Channels Effectively to help you Increase Your AdSense Revenue

Channels help you determine specific data points about performance of pages, pages with highest AdSense clicks and effectiveness of Ad units in your site. There are many ways in which you can leverage the AdSense channels to measure the performance of different pages vs ad units, find the CTR of a specific or group of pages, track the performance across different domains and add up all these data points to determine the pages that offer maximum contribution towards your AdSense earnings. Using channels does not directly increase your adsense income but using it in such a way that you get to know about various performance data points can help you towards doing effective AdSense optimization resulting in significant increase in your adsense profits.

What are channels?

Channel is a good way of mapping certain ad units, pages or groups of pages, sub-domains, domains to a friendly name which you can use to distinguish between the Ad units served across your site(s). You can create a channel name (say channel name is mysite_adunit_200×200) and map it to certain adsense code, say 200×200 ad unit, then use it on every page of your site at the top. After which when you look at your AdSense reports, the data about your adsense earnings, impressions, CTR and eCPM will be shown channel wise. So, if 200 ads of that 200×200 ad unit were served and out of which 5 people clicked on the ad, then it makes a lot of sense to use this data against other channels that you can compare with to track performance of other ad units on the pages of your site. Does it make sense?

Let me use another example. I run a forum based website and would like to use AdSense to track performance of ad units. I use a 480×60 unit on the top of every page and a similar 480×60 ad unit at the bottom of every page. I will now create two channels by names sitename_480×60_top and sitename_480×60_bottom, respectively. Going forward, this will help me in understanding which ad unit is performing best in terms of click through ratio and eCPM. I can then start experimenting with different ad units and name them accordingly to track their performance over time. The result will be lot of data that I can use for AdSense optimization for a forum.

Types of Channels

There are two different types of channels. URL Channel and Custom Channel. While URL channels can be used to track performance of ad units across your site, sub domains or a specific page, using Custom channels will let you track performance of specific ad units across different pages, one specific page, group of pages, adsense for search etc.

Using Channel Effectively

While there are no adsense secrets to using channels, there are some simple and logical tips that you can follow for effective performance tracking.

1. Use logical channel names that will let you distinguish between ad units of one type with ad unit of another types.
2. Use URL channels as much as possible to determine the performance of individual pages or group of pages.
3. Use URL channels for subdomains to get a quick understanding about performance between your sub domains
4. Follow a universal channel naming convention across all channels. One good example of a naming convention is shortsitename_adunittype_text(and|or)image_pagename_location, so examples would be bh_480×60_ti_thispage_top [where bh = bloghash.com, ti = text and image, thispage = a shortname of this page and top = location of this ad unit i.e top of the page]
5. If your site has less than 200 pages, I suggest you use a channel name for every page on your site. This will be very time consuming process but your efforts will be paid off very well.
6. Don’t create many channel names just because you have many available [200 of them], this will give you unrealistic performance report if you were to see a historical trend for a longer duration.
7. You can create, deactive, rename and delete channel names. So use them wisely.

Some Ideas with Channels

If you know how to code in PHP or other scripting languages, instead of embedding AdSense code on every page, use a simple PHP function to display adsense on the pages of your site. Use a mapping of URLs and channel IDs such that depending on the page that you are accessing, assign a channel ID in your adsense code using PHP. This is a simple trick to achieve with PHP. Since you have only 200 channels to use for your content pages, use this trick to measure the performance of as many page as you can.

I have implemented channels, now what?

Now that you have some data available for analysis, here is what you can do with it.

1. Measure the variation in performance of ad units over time.
2. Experiment with different ad units on pages with highest performance to determine the best performing ad units.
3. Measure the performance between different pages, sub domains and domains and place additional ad units of different advertisers such as amazon, text link ads or banners of some high paying affiliate programs.
4. Based on data available for high performing pages, determine which adsense keywords are attracting people from search engines to those pages or groups of pages on your site.
5. If you can, create a simple graph with available data to show top 20% performing ad unit and pages, look at it the other way, see the top 20% pages and ad units which are NOT performing well. Now, optimize the ad units formats and ad unit placements for only these pages to see an immediate impact on your adsense earnings.

It gets better only with experiments to determine the best suited ad units and effective placement of adsense ads on the pages of your site.