Google AdSense is a great free ad service that will help you make money online with your blog. But in order to blog for money you have to know all the different options that are available like:
AdSense for Search and
AdSense images to name just a couple. It’s also important to know where you should
place your AdSense ads to maximize your money making potential. But how do you know which ads are making you money and which aren’t? That’s where Google AdSense Channels comes in.
Google AdSense Channels
An AdSense Channel is simply a way to track the performance of your ads. For example, let’s say you’re using two different AdSense ads on your blog – AdSense Ad Unit and an AdSense skyscraper image. One day you log into your AdSense account and find out that you’ve made $5.00 from 10 clicks. Well guess what? You have no idea which ads your readers clicked and therefore have no way of optimizing your blog to become the money making machine you’re dreaming of!With AdSense channels, you can create (for example) a 180 x 600 text only ad and assign it to a channel you call “Right Vertical Ad”. When you log into your account and see that you’ve made $5.00 you can easily figure out which ads were the moneymakers because you split them out by channels. So now you’ll have a channel called “Right Vertical Ad” that will tell you how many people clicked, what your click-through rate was, and how much you earned.
AdSense Channels for Multiple Sites
In addition to tracking individual ads on your blog, Google AdSense Channels will allow you to track multiple sites as well! So if you have a blog about fancy cars and another about video games, you can create channels that will track both sites. Now you’ll not only know which ads are more profitable… but also which site!Hopefully you enjoyed this introduction to Google AdSense Channels. It’s a topic that’s extremely important to your success online. It will allow you to track and tweak your blog so you can make money online the right way -- by being smart.In my next article, I’ll discuss how you can easily create channels so you can start tracking your ad performance right away.
What are channels?
Channels enable you to view detailed reporting about the performance of specific pages and ad units. By assigning a channel to a combination of pages or ad units, you could track the performance of a leaderboard versus a banner, or compare your motorcycle pages to your automobile pages. You can even create a channel to track each of your separate domains, so you can see where your clicks are coming from. While channels can be used to track performance and revenue, they won't have any effect on your earnings or ad targeting.
There are two types of channels from which to choose: URL channels, and custom channels.
URL Channels
Use URL Channels to track your performance without modifying your ad code. By entering a full or partial URL, you can begin tracking the performance of particular pages in your site. You can enter a top-level domain name to track all of the pages on that domain, or you can enter a partial URL to track all of the pages below a certain directory. Entering a full URL will track the performance of that particular page.
URL channels are only available for AdSense for content pages. If you would like to track your AdSense for search performance, please use custom channels.
Custom Channels
Custom channels allow you to track the performance of specific ad units based on your specified criteria. By pasting channel-specific ad code into your pages, you can track a variety of metrics across a range of URLs. Use custom channels to track the performance of different ad formats, for example, or to compare different page topics to one another. To learn how to create and assign custom channels, please read
How do I create custom channels? You can also turn any custom channel into an
ad placement on which advertisers can choose to place their ads.
With up to 200 AdSense channels, plus 200 AdSense for search channels available for each publisher, you can use channels to gain the insight you need to optimize your site's performance. It's easy to add, deactivate, or rename your channels, and customized reports are simple to generate.
Google adsense channel strategies
Google AdSense enabled
AdSense Channels back in
March 2004 to give publishers a more controlled method of tracking ad performance. Since then, they have
expanded the use of channels for that purpose.
Since then we really have not discussed the different methods of using Channels to track efficiently and accurately.
A
WebmasterWorld thread has a collection of methods of using channels to help publishers track their advertisements success.
Here are some channel strategies mentioned in the thread that you can use for your AdSense campaigns:
Ad Type Channels (is it adlinks, search, adblock) and always defining size and kind of the ad IE: "adlinks 4 ads 728x15"
Language Channels (to track what users are making you earn money) IE: "spanish", "french"
Position Channels (where is the ad positioned on page) IE: "top", "left column", "bottom"
URL Channels (what page is paying) IE: "mydomain.com/home", "mydomain.com/product1.asp"
Color Schema Ad Channels (what color palette are ads using, you can put palette's name or description) IE: "contrast, red", "mypalette1", "site similar look and feel"
Visitor Type Channels: Loyal users, new users
Ad Size Channels, to define the various sizes of ads and see which works best
Those are just some of the AdSense channel methodologies used and discussed in that forum thread.
Adsense channels setup:
In
What are Google AdSense Channels? you learned that a channel will help you monitor which ads and which sites are making you money. By tracking your individual ads and their placement, you're able to increase your chances of blogging for money. I'm going to show you how to create an AdSense channel so you can start monitoring your progress today.
Creating Your First Customized AdSense Channel
The AdSense setup tab will present several sub menus for selection. We're interested in the Channels today, so click on that now.
We're going to create a customized channel and to do so you'll click on the Add new custom channels option.
You should now be on the Add channel screen, which contains a single textbox labeled Name. This is where you're going to type the name of your channel for the ad that you will monitor. You want to make this as clear as possible so you know exactly which ad on which site you're tracking. So for example, let's say you're using a vertical ad unit that is 160 x 600, sits in your right navigational menu, and contains text only. A logical name for this channel might be something like “right menu vertical (txt)”. Later on when you check your report, you'll be able to easily identify which ad belongs to the channel. If you happen to have two sites with the same ad in the same position, simply differentiate the two by your site name - maybe something like: “emb rght vert (txt)”. If I had another site about baking cookies, this label tells me that the ad it's tracking is Earn Money to Blog (emb) not my other site Baking Cookies Blog (which doesn't exist by the way - sorry).
Assigning an ad to a Channel
At this point you've successfully create a customized channel. Let's stay with the earlier example and pretend you want to track a 160 x 600, text-only ad unit that sits on the right side of your navigational menu. In order to accomplish this, you need to create the ad unit and assign it to the channel. In
Google AdSense for Search you learned how to create a custom ad and plug it into your Blogger blog. The steps for this are similar with the exception of the channel option - we skipped over that last time but today you're going to utilize it.
Head to Get Ads and choose AdSense for Content.
Keep the default Ad unit selected and choose Text ads only from the drop down list and hit continue.
Now we're at the familiar customization screen - Go ahead and select the 160 x 600 vertical ad, also known as a Wide Skyscrapper. Feel free to customize it how you wish, you can even choose a different format if you feel comfortable at this point. This is just a simple example.Now that your ad unit is customized, click continue. The following page will list your customized channels (you can create as many as you want). If you've been following up to this point, you should have a channel called “right menu vertical (txt)”. Simply add that to the selected channel and continue.
Ok, just give the AdSense unit a name (I tend to keep the default) and continue on to the next page. Simply copy your AdSense code and plug it into your Blogger blog...you're done! If you're not completely sure how to integrate this code into Blogger, please check out
Google AdSense for Content (Images only). That article should get you up to speed.(Please be aware that your new ad and channel will have a bit of a delay. In my experience it takes about 10 minutes or so for the ad to start displaying on my page.)Creating a customized AdSense channel is very important to your success. If you want to make money online by blogging, you need to monitor your sites progress. AdSense channels will allow you to do just that. In my next article I'll explain how you view your new customized channel. Creating your channel is half the battle, but you have to know how to read it so you can make the proper adjustments. And making those adjustments will help you blog for money.
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