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How to Learn Where Your AdSense Clicks Come From

Do you ever wonder what pages on your site generate high AdSense dollars? Whether your daily earnings are $1 or $100, this is likely something on your mind. If you can tell which pages earn more money, you can replicate those conditions on other pages.

Fortunately, Google provides a way to monitor AdSense activity per URL. This is exactly the solution you need: URL channels.

My month-long AdSense experiment

For the past month, I’ve added every blog post as a URL channel. This allows me to look back at all my blogging for March and see what articles actually earned AdSense dollars.

The results have been really interesting. I’m all for transparency, but Google does restrict AdSense publishers from disclosing some information. To be on the safe side, I’ll summarize my findings.

• Only 6 out of 37 posts earned AdSense dollars. This is only posts I published in March. Previous posts continue to earn money, and I’m sure other March posts will garner a few clicks as time goes on.
• One post had a really high eCPM, about twice the eCPM of other posts. I had posted the exact eCPM, but a friend kindly pointed out that violates the Terms of Service. Sorry.
• I found out that one post was converting well. I wrote another post on that topic, and it’s doing equally well. They both rank high in Google searches, so the “long tail” should be nice.

Create an AdSense URL channel

Here’s how to create your own URL channels in AdSense:

1. Copy the URL of the page you want to track.
2. Login to your AdSense control panel.
3. Click on AdSense Setup > Channels > URL Channels > Add New URL Channels.
4. Enter the URL(s) you want to track, leaving off the “www” prefix.

I made a handy screen cast of this process, to make sure it’s clear:

The future

Honestly, I’m going to continue creating these channels. AdSense allows 200 custom and URL channels. Thus, I should be able to continue creating channels for another couple of months, before I have to start deleting them. At that point, I’ll delete posts that still haven’t earned anything.

What do you think? Am I crazy to spend the time doing this? Have others been doing this since blogging day 1? Please leave a comment or drop me a line.

[tags]adsense, google adsense, ads, advertising, ecpm, ctr, url channel[/tags]

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