Measuring and optimising Google AdSense campaigns
Once you have AdSense set up on your site, the service has a number of tools to help you measure how effective the ad campaigns earning revenue for your site are performing and insights into how to make them perform better.
Understanding advertisers, ad auctions and types of ads
First, it is important to understand how an ad gets selected for display on your website and how much the advertiser will pay. Usually this is done through the real-timeReal-timeEvents that happen “live” at a particular moment. When one chats in a chat… To determine who wins the auction, Google assigns a quality score for each ad based on a few factors including the ad’s past performance. Google creates an AdRank which takes into account the quality score and the maximum CPCCPC (Cost-per-Click)CPC or cost-per-click is the cost of advertising based on the number of clicks… It can be a metric that… Watch this 5-minute video for all you need to know about Ad Auctions (and remember that in YouTube you can always click the CC button to close caption into another language). Advertisers who are part of AdWords also choose one of three types of ways that they want to target their ads: To get an overview of how well your ads are performing, click on the Performance Reports tab in your AdSense interface. Here you can see your estimated earnings, page viewsPage ViewsWhen the page is actually seen by the user. Some platforms, like Facebook cache… You can also compare two date ranges. This can be useful if you made a change to your ads or site layout and want to see how that might have impacted the performance of your ads. One thing to note is that currently all the AdSense reports are based on the United States Pacific Time (PT) time zone and a day is considered to start at 12:00 am PT and end at 11:59 pm PT. There is no option as of yet to change this. Under the Performance Report tab, the left sidebar provides you with a variety of report types. To makes sense of the reports, you’ll want to familiarise yourself with common digital advertising terms such as ad click-throughClick-throughThe measurement of a user clicking on a link that re-directs the user’s… A custom channel is a group of ad units defined by you for reporting purposes. For example, you might create one custom channel for your homepage, and one for a section front and another for a layout that you are trying out at the top of a page. When creating a custom channel, you can also check the option for “Show this custom channel to advertisers as a targetable ad placement”. This important option allows you to optimize placement targeted ads by creating a channel which groups ad placements by topic, ad format, or location on a page – all important distinctions for advertisers looking to buy a specific location or reachReach1) unique users that visited the site over the course of the reporting period,… These are custom channels for reporting on your ads based on the directory structure of your site. By entering a top-level domain nameDomain nameThe unique name that identifies an Internet site. Every domain name consists of… If you are using Google Analytics for your website, you can also link your AdSense data with your Google Analytics account, which will give you even more information about who is clicking on your ads. For example, you can see the geographic region where they’re coming from, what referring site sent them to your site, and how long they stay on your page before clicking an ad. To see your AdSense data, either click on the Content section in the Google Analytics navigation sidebar for your AdSense reports, or click the AdSense Revenue tab for a breakdown of your traffic by AdSense impressions, clicks and revenue in many other reports. Google has a tutorial on how to link your AdSense and Analytics accounts. Linking AdSense to Google Analytics is just one way to measure the performance of your ads so that you evolve your strategy to get the highest possible returns from your ads. You’ll want to interpret your data and make small, informed changes to improve your advertising strategy. There are several different ways to optimise the performance of your ad network advertising. According to Google: Google has a number of suggestions for the best layouts to drive ad performance. Of course, the best way to optimize the amount of money you get for ads is to allow as many advertisers as possible to enter the ad auction, simply and easily. However, you could have ads placed on your site that are offensive or ads for your competitors that you would want to block from advertising on your page. To block or limit ads, you can click the Allow & Block Ads tab to include specific URLs, topics, sensitive categories, or even specific ad networksAd networksAd networks provide an outsourced sales capability for publishers and a means… You also do have the option, on your settings page, to hold all ads for a 24-hour review period before they show up on your site. However, the default is to run ads immediately which will maximize your potential revenue by opening up the competition to more ads. The Google Affiliate Network is a free service to connect accepted publishers to high-quality advertisers, currently supporting websites from 80 countries. It allows for a more flexible pricing scheme, determined between you and the affiliate. But it also requires more pro-activity to keep up your relationship with the affiliate advertisers. See the publisher optimisation checklist for an overview of how to stay on top of things. The DoubleClick Ad Planner is a free service that allows advertisers to quickly find websites that match their target audienceTarget audienceThe intended audience for an ad, usually defined in terms of specific… The first step to create your profile is to claim your website in the Ad Planner. See instructions for how to claim your site. Find more information on DoubleClick Ad Planner. This new service allows you to do some advanced A/B testing on your website. You can create up to five different versions of a webpage and when someone visits the site, they will be shown one of these options. Then you can report on these different webpage options against your Google Analytic goals to understand how different layouts impact your click-through rate (see future issues of the Digital Briefing for more about Google Analytics and goals). Learn more about the Google Content Experiment, or get an overview on how to setup a content experiment. DoubleClick for Small Businesses is free service (if you serve less than 90 million monthly ad impressions, not including AdSense ads) provides you with several features to take greater advantage of your AdSense account. If you are at a point where you have begun to receive requests from advertisers, or you manage multiple ad networks, or you just need greater control over your ad delivery, the service will help you to do all of that. For example, you can limit the amount of times a user sees the same ad within a given period, or enable real-time competition between Google AdSense, Affiliates and third party ad-networks, or you can create mobile-specific targeting options. See a full list of features. To get a more in-depth view of AdSense, you can go through the thorough online lessons at the AdSense Academy. AdSense has fairly strict policies against certain practices that would encourage fake click-throughs. A big one is masking ads – you cannot make it difficult to distinguish ads from your content. You also cannot use any language to encourage people to click on the ads, or place misleading labels above ad units such as “Favourite Sites” or “Today’s Top Offers”. Google advises to avoid partnering with untrusted or low-quality ad networks, search engines or directory sites in an effort to increase traffic. Lastly, there is a strict rule against clicking on your own ads – even if you’re interested in an ad or looking for its destination URL. Instead of clicking on the ad on your site, Google advises you to use a search engineSearch engineA website that provides a searchable index of online content, whereby users… Article by Shubha BalaMeasuring performance
Measuring performance: Reports
Custom channels
URL channels
Google Analytics
Optimising your ad performance
Limiting ads through blocking
Other Google ad services
Connect with high-quality advertisers
Learn more about the Affiliate Network.Keeping up-to-date information in DoubleClick Ad Planner
Test different designs and pages
Special service for small business
Other AdSense products
Warning: How not to increase revenue
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