Aug 02 2007
Using Adsense Channels Effectively
If used effectively channels lend valuable information that can even help you double your revenues. I tend to use Custom channels more than URL channels to give me a more in depth report of ad performance. Google has been often criticized for offering only 200 active channels, but you get what you get! With adequate experimentation you can use these channels to monitor your site.
Custom channels can be used to track performance of:
- Ad Formats (leader board, square, medium rectangle)
- Site segments (news, pictures, articles)
- AD Colour Palettes
- Ad Placement
- Text Ads and Image Ads
When you start out your site or during a re-design, try out different ad-placements to see how your visitors react to ads. Give a particular layout at least a week’s time and then try out a modified layout with different placement for ads. Now compare the reports and see which ad-placement works best for you. For example, if you have a site with articles you would want to know if a Large Rectangle or a Wide Skyscraper performs better with your content. Even the right and left hand side placement of an ad-unit can give varied outputs. Similarly you can test and compare which colour palettes perform better. Site segmentation tells you which part of your site is earning more money so that you can add more content to it.
Be Smart
- Name your channels carefully. Give short descriptive names like News_Wide_Skyscraper. Google suggests you name your channel with the pattern: Page+Location+Ad Format+Color Palette. For example: HomeLeftNavLinksMotherEarth. Although this might be effective, I find it difficult to comprehend quickly while analyzing reports.
- Combine Tasks. Don’t classify your channel as just Wide_Skyscrapers, Top_Leaderboard. Combine two and more purposes of having channels. For example, for an ad on a news page of a site you can have channels like: News_Leader_Top, News_Square_Left.
- Use separate channels to track Link Units.
- Don’t play with channels every other day. Give them time to accumulate enough data to get a more accurate picture.
- Deactivated channels are excluded in your 200 channels limit. Use this effectively for seasonal specials or testing as you can always refer to their reports in the future. You can even re-activate them.
- If you fancy Site Targeting enable the “Show this channel to advertisers as an ad placement” option while creating channels.
- Run exclusive text and image ad campaigns in different channels and see what performs better in different areas of your site.
- Use server technology like PHP to include ads on your site. This helps you implement channels effectively and make easy changes to your ad code.
- Try to analyze why certain channels perform poorly on your site. Consider optimizing adsense on these pages or removing adsense completely from them and using another network.
Channels - They are right there in your adsense account. Use them wisely!