Internet Business Daily

I will be the first to admit that I barely used advanced reporting from Google’s Adsense program, but now I have realized that there are many features in there worth taking a look at. Google Adsense controls about 70% of online advertising, so Adsense is essential to any successful internet home business.

Back to the topic, let’s get started with advanced reporting. You can find it in the reports tab, under the obvious ‘advanced reporting’. There are a few key features, which I will discuss.

Specific Time Range
The first great feature is choosing a specific date range. Let’s say for example you had great traffic over a 3 day period and you want to check out the adsense stats, this makes it very easy for you to see the numbers only over those 3 days. This can be very helpful with analyzing special times of the year, such as a holiday or season.

Show Data By
Another detail you can have in your advanced reports is how the data is shown. This is a little confusing, but can be very important. The default option is to have the data shown by page. What this means is that all the data, including ecpm, and impressions are only counted per page. Every time someone lands on one of your pages, that counts as one impression. Another way to show the data is by ad unit, which means each ad counts as one impression. When someone lands on my page, Google will count that twice because there are generally two ads on each of my pages. The last option is to show by individual ad. This option gives you the advantage of seeing the difference between your site and contextual ads.

Targeting Type
Contextual ads account for the regular ads that get targeted to your site through the Google formula and you get paid every time someone clicks on the ad. On the other hand, site ads get targeted directly to your site and usually are on a cpm (cost per thousand) basis. These can pay more or less depending on the advertiser. One of the sites I manage for my company gets half of it’s performance (ad network) revenue through site specific ads.

The last few options you have are to sort the data by channel or date. You can have any combination of the channels you setup and a specific date range. By doing this you can see which of your ad units are performing the best, and which are being targeted directly by advertisers most often. These pieces of information can be very valuable when optimizing your ads.

These tips should be very helpful in gaining a deeper understanding of how Google Adsense works, and which ad units perform best on your site. Checking your adsense account daily may take some time out of your busy schedule, but you will easily be able to optimize your ads based on performance.