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Adsense is Google’s official pay per click (PPC) advertising network, used by millions of publishers like us, and advertisers alike. Now payouts vary across categories, for example a law site would pay per click higher than a site about games, or gardening, because advertisers are willing to pay less mainly. If you are familiar with Adsense and use it regularly on a number of sites, or want to get more information on where your users click then use CHANNELS. Channels are not often utilised by publishers, because they can’t be bothered, or don’t know the meaning of the word “channel”. To be honest it is not a very good use of naming conventions by Google, because it isn’t a channel particularly - ‘ad spot’ would certainly sound better.

Dig deeper and analyse

So you have a nice site with good traffic, and have been running Adsense for a while now, you check your account most days and notice the same amounts daily on average $2-$3 or whatever it may be. Your site has a number of ads – at the top in the form of a 728 x 90 leader – down the left in a skyscraper 120 x 600, and a 300 x 250 rectangle somewhere in the middle or next to a post in this instance. You experiment over a period of time with changing colors of the text, the links maybe even switching to just image ads to attempt to increase revenue. But, the crucial thing in all this is you DON’T know which ads your users are clicking on and thus which are popular.

Channels

This is where channels come in handy. Using Google’s Adsense interface you can easily create channels with various names – in our test site we named the top advert “leaderboard”, the left one “skyscraper”, and the middle rectangle simply “rectangle”. Inside each of these ad spots you can create your advert as you normally would, choose colors of links etc. You would then add the completed ad spot to your page in the way that you had named it, so leaderboard code goes at the top of the page, skyscraper down the left or right and so on. You then sit back and watch where people are clicking.

Interpret & Refine

After two weeks watching these ad spots in your Adsense account reports, you notice hardly anyone clicks on the rectangle, in fact its estimated cost per mille or simply (how much you earn off a thousand impressions) is very low around 5 cents, so that means off one thousand times the advert is served you get 5 pennies! Woop de woop! This is useless seeing as your top banner makes $2 for the same amount on average. So what can you do to improve clicks? Well you could do as I said before – change colors – go with images only, or do what I would do, remove it and use CPM based revenue instead. By signing up with companies such as Adbrite, Valueclick, CPX interactive, or others you can place adverts that pay based on how many impressions it serves, this is calculated on per thousand quotas, and can vary depending on the ads being screened on your site etc. By mixing the types of adverts up (Google is a pay per click) you can maximise page revenue; whereas before you were averaging say $2-3 per day, you are now earning $4-6.