Andy Coates Blog

No matter how much research you do when deciding where to put your Adsense ad's I can guarantee that you will end up tweaking them to gain optimum performance (Click through rate). You can do this through trial and error, monitoring your income one week, moving adverts around and monitoring it the next and so on. This can be very time consuming and in effect you are working blind as you may have many pages with adverts on and you can never tell which ones are working or not! This is where Adsense Channels come in to their own, you may have seen these whilst generating Adsense code but never used them. I was guilty of exactly the same thing when I first started using adsense but believe me once you start using them you will reap the benefits straight away as you will be able to track which adverts are being clicked and which ones are just taking up space on your page.

Too many ads can be a bad thing

One of the biggest mistakes some bloggers make is putting too may adverts on one post. Adsense calculates the cost depending on how may other adverts are on the page, if there are the maximum adverts on a page then you will be receiving the lower payment. If you can see which ad units aren't being clicked you can remove them increasing the value of the ones which are receiving clicks. The old saying "less is more" is very true here!

How to use Adsense Channels

After you have logged into your adsense account click on the adsense setup tab and then click on channels where you will be given the option of creating your own channel. A channel is just a way of tracking adverts, you can assign a single adblock per channel or several adblocks per channel. Here in the picture below i have added a channel for yesterdays post about Deep Linking as i want to track what clicks I get from that particular adblock.

Once i have created a channel with a memorable name I can then go and setup my adsense as normal, choosing the type of advert i want displayed. Eventually you will come to a section where you can add custom channels, if you click on this and then click add you have now assigned this advert to this custom channel. Now Carry on as usual, copy the code and paste it into your blog.

To view you channels is really simple, you've now done all of the hard work the rest is pretty much straight forward. Log into you account as you would normally, click on report and you will see an option called "top channels" click on this and this will display the page impression, CTR and "hopefully" earnings for this particular advert. MY monumental earnings speak for themselves! lol. Clicking on the option called " view all AdSense for Content channels" will give you further report options but I will leave you to figure that one out yourself!

I wouldn't bother setting up channels for each and every adblock as this will be very time consuming, I'd suggest using this on what you think may be a popular post or create a channel to keep track of an older post which may be getting allot of hits. Remember if you do this you will need to recreate the adcode and past it back into your post. This is a great feature and will help you easily tweak those earnings.