Google Advertising Tools

Chapter 9. Making Sense of AdSense

Putting AdSense code on your web pages is only the beginning to making money with Google AdSense advertising. Once you’ve added AdSense Content and AdSense Search to your pages, you need to know how well your AdSense revenue is doing in relationship to how well it could be doing. Monitoring your performance so you can make changes to make more money is a very important part of successfully working with AdSense.

This chapter explains the reporting and performance tracking tools available in the AdSense program and what you should be looking for in terms of performance.

Ad Performance

When you log into AdSense from the AdSense home page at https://www.google.com/adsense/ (after your account is up and running and you have ads on your site), the first thing you’ll see is the Reports Overview window, with the current day’s earnings displayed, as shown in Figure 9-1.

Tip

Clicking one of the AdSense for content or AdSense for search links shown at the bottom of Figure 9-1 opens the Advanced Report tab for content or search preloaded with the specified report.

Click the top channels link shown in Figure 9-1 to see the statistics for your top-performing channels (Figure 9-2).

When you click the Advanced Reports-Ad Performance link (Figure 9-1) or the view all AdSense for content channels link (Figure 9-2), the Advanced Reports window opens, as shown in Figure 9-3. This is used to monitor your performance in the AdSense Content program.

Figure 9-1. When ...