Monitor your Adsense performance and channels

Once you added Adsense adverts to your site’s pages, you need to constantly monitor and optimize ad performance.

As explained in the Google Adsense Instructions and Tips and Tricks posts (to be added shortly), you need to constantly monitor your Google Adsense ads performance data and optimize location and colors. You cannot really control Google Adsense ad content. This is based on your keywords and the advertisers keyword selection. Example: The main keyword for you is “SEO” so you will receive Google Adsense ads set for this keyword by the advertiser.

You have limited controls over the ads served and the advertisers. You can go to your Adsense control panel and select “Setup” and “Review Adverts” and stop certain advertisers or ads to display on your site and you should do so.

We usually block all those advertisers we feel do not fit. Mostly we block them because the ads do not match our visitors main language or location. German users, as an example, will not click on English language ads. Or sometimes we feel that the target groups for site and ad do not match. If this is the case, we block the ad or advertiser from our sites.

You also cannot really control the CPC (= Cost per Click, what Google Adsense advertisers pay) or EPC (= estimated Price per Click you will get from Google Adsense) you get for your Google Adsense ad clicks. As we explain in our Google Adsense post, you should check how much Google is charging for specific keyword searches and try and use high paying keywords with low competition. How to do that we show in our “Keyword Selection” post – to be published soon. Beyond that you have no control over how much you will be getting per click.

But you can optimize Google Adsense performance by finding the right location and color combination for your adverts.

First step in optimizing Adsense performance is to separate the adverts, so that you can monitor the Adsense performance. For this purpose Google Adsense offers the ability to add adverts to a channel. How this is done, we also explain in our Google Adsense post.

How should you set up channels?

To create a channel for each and every advert would be ideal, but if you have a lot of Adsense adverts per page, a lot of pages and/or sites, you either run out of channels or get too much information.

Therefore you need to group Google Adsense adverts:

High volume/pageview pages: Create a  channel for each ad
Low volume/pageview pages:
Group Adsense adverts of the same color and/or location together

Example:
High volume index page: create separate channels for EACH advert.
Low volume topic pages, create channels for each group of adverts.

Beyond high volume pages you should not create single page channels. You can monitor page/Adsense adverts performance via your Google Analytics (see the upcoming post about Google Analytics) account. Even better you can and should link your Google Analytics and Google Adsense accounts (how-to will follow shortly) and view how each page does with adverts independently.

What you are really concerned with is LOCATION and COLORS of Google Adsense Adverts. So group adverts in the same location and/or colors in a channel.

Beware of changes! When you change an adverts color and or location, remember to add it to the matching channel.

TIP: Include in your channel name abbreviations of their specification, so you can later on sort them easily:
Site abbreviation, e.g. SEO
Topic: e.g. ecard
Next: type/size, e.g. LDB for leaderboard
location: e.g. top
colors: e.g. bblw for black text, blue link and white background
Example: “SEO ecard LDB top bblw” for this sample Google Adsense ad

When you are done, your channels will be sortable  which makes it much easier to analyze and optimize Google Adsense performance:
Site – Topic 1 – leaderboard – location – colors

Tip 2: Use the same abbreviations for identical elements, including site, topic, type location and colors. For colors use the sort order (e.g. text, link, background and frame) so you can sort them later as well. Use an identical delimiter between the elements, e.g. “-”, so youcan later split them up in Excel columns for independent reporting.

Now you need to monitor the CTR (= Click Through Rate) for each Google Adsense channel:

Which Google Adsense channel performs best, which Google Adsense channel performs worst? Do you see a pattern? Which group of Google Adsense ads are the best performers? Do Google Adsense leaderboards do better than Google Adsense link blocks? Are wide banners better in your sidebars better or worse?

Do matching or opposite colors perform better for your Google Adsense ads?

Keep an eye on your pages eCPM. Some ads might have bad CTR but good CPM, so you make a lot more per click and this might compensate for the bad CTR. Try to make small changes to these Google Adsense ads to try and increase CTR.

Most Important! Keep a log of your changes! Otherwise you will NEVER be able to tell which change is for the better.

Use Chaos theory to advance. Instead of changing everything at once, make single changes and monitor Google Adsense performance. If it’s better, try something else next. If it’s worse, go back before changing something else. Give your change some time (at least 2 weeks) before you compare results.

If your sites data changes dramatically, e.g. last Christmas our visitors roared 20x within a few weeks. Our CTR dropped considerably. So keep an eye on your other pages as well. If the whole site’s CTR and/or eCPM changes significantly, you cannot compare Google Adsense ad changes without considering the overall change.

And here is where our tool recommendation comes in. We use ADSENSELOG from METALGRASS Software to monitor the performance of our Google Adsense adverts. AdsenseLog will retrieve regularly, according to your schedule, the up-to-minute stats of your Google Adsense adverts and provide you with multiple analysis options and even warnings. AdsenseLog will tell you if one channel is perfoming better than others, if channel performance has dropped or increased.

Downloady our free trial version of AdsenseLog to monitor Google Adsense performance.
Klick on the image to visit Metalgrass and download a free trial version of AdsenseLog. It is free until the first month you earn $ 100 from Google Adsense. So if you are just starting out, you won’t have to pay until your income supports the payment.

I’m a data and stats junkie. I look at AdsenseLog at least oce an hour. Usually every 30 minutes after the update.

Every month I use the function to export reports to Excel. In Excel I can mix them with the reports from Google Analytics and Google Adsense und I’m starting to understand where on my page users click on which advert.

This helped me to increase my income by a factor of 10x over the last 12 months. And we are still growing.
Click here to download the free trial copy of Adsense Log now:

Downloady our free trial version of AdsenseLog to monitor Google Adsense performance.

You will need AdsenseLog later on in this course on Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization. We will show you how to understand your channel performance and how to use AdsenseLog to optimize.

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