Tracking your adsense ads performance.

Let's imagine for a second that you now have your site online, your Adsense Ads are in place, and you have a decent amount on content posted. Now comes the time to start "Tracking" just how good those all important banner ads are performing for you. Are they making you money, or are they just sitting there doing nothing like a lame duck? Well, it's time to find out!

In your Google Adsense account, you have the option to use what's known as (Channels). Which allow you to track individual "Web Pages", or even individual "Adsense Ads" you have displayed on your site. This is one tool that Google offers you to use that most people don't bother with - in their rush to get ads posted fast. Even Google themselves strongly advise that you should make full use of "Channels", so you know exactly how your site is performing, letting you know if changes may be needed to improve your overall income earned from click-throughs.
Channels - as already mentioned above can be used to track each individual "Web Page", or each "Adsense Ad Unit" that you display. Here at "adsensearticles.org" I use this very same tool to track each (Adsense Ad Unit) located here. So I get a really good idea of knowing which banner is making me the most money, and which of course are not. I highly recommend you do the same thing also. And instead of tracking each individual web page you might run (which can be an impossible task really if you have hundreds of pages). Instead, track each banner unit.

One important factor you need to remember though when tracking Ad Units is this, make sure you have the "same number" of individual ad units in total spread across your whole site. For example: If you had 50 of one banner type, and 2 of another banner type on all your site pages. It stands to reason, the first banner type used that has 50 displays will perform much better than the later one (that is only displayed 2 times). Doing this would not give you a real indication of how your ads are performing. So make sure - if you have 20 web pages, and use 3 different banners unit types. You have each one displayed 20 times (one time on each of your 20) web pages. So they are equal in numbers. By doing this, you will get a more realistic tracking statistics on your Adsense Ads performance.
Just to give you an idea, I can see from my Adsense Account that my "Half Banner" seems to be performing very well (which I'm surprised at)! So it just goes to show why you need to see this detailed data using adsense channels. Because you might have one type of adsense banner on your site that your thinking of removing for another type, which is actually out performing the others you have displayed. Which you would finish up "wrongly" removing.
Google Analytics (which doesn't come with your Adsense account) - is another great tool which they offer you to use for free, which can be used to view "detailed statistics" about your site in general. Such as, "how many new visitors you had today, how long they stay on your site, which keywords did they use to find your site, what browser did they used". And much, much more! When combined together with the use of "Channels", you will get an even better overall picture of your site performance. You can get a free "Google Analytics" account by simply going to the Google Analytics website and registering an account.
To sum up:
You should now understand how vital it is to use "Channels" to track your Adsense Ads performance, and also be aware that you can also use "Google Analytics" to get an even more important information - to help boost your income even further. We can now move on to "Article 6", which will cover Promoting your Adsense site.