Monitoring and Managing Your Google AdSense Account
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
The first thing you see when you log in to your AdSense account is the Overview page of the Home tab. This is a great place to start, full of the most essential data you need to evaluate your AdSense performance.
But that’s not all you’ll find on the Home tab. When you want to monitor and manage your AdSense account, Home is the place to be.
Viewing Key Metrics
If you view only one page on the AdSense site, it should be the Overview page on the Home tab. This page, which is what you see by default when you log in to AdSense, displays essential information about your account’s performance, including earnings generated.
What information is displayed on the Overview page? Let’s take a look.
Earnings Overview
Want to know how much money your AdSense ads are generating? Look at the earnings overview at the top of the data on the Overview page, shown in Figure 4.1. Here you can view
- Estimated earnings for today so far, yesterday, this month to date, and last month.
- Finalized earnings, including any unpaid earnings (money you’re owed but haven’t yet been paid) and the most recent payment you’ve received from AdSense.
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Figure 4.1. Viewing the earnings overview.
Note that the estimated earnings displayed here are just that—estimated. AdSense’s final earnings take into account any invalid clicks made to ads running on your site, and adjust the earnings amount accordingly.
Performance Summary
The middle section of the data table on the Overview page, shown in Figure 4.2, is the performance summary. This data provides a quick overview of your AdSense performance, broken down by product (Content, Feeds, Video, and so on).
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Figure 4.2. Viewing the performance summary.
The performance summary data table contains the following information:
- Product, the specific AdSense product being tracked
- Page views, the number of times pages with ads have been viewed
- Clicks, the number of times ads on your site have been clicked
- Page click-through-rate (CTR), the percentage of times viewed ads have been clicked—calculated by dividing page views by clicks
- Cost per click (CPC), the average amount per click paid by advertisers
- Page revenue per thousand impressions (RPM), the average amount of revenue generated by each 1,000 page views—calculated by dividing estimated total earnings by page views
- Estimated earnings, the total amount of ad earnings generated in the specified time period
By default, this data table is sorted alphabetically by product. You can, however, sort by any metric just by clicking the column header; click the header twice to reverse the sort order.
Also by default, the performance section displays results for the past seven days. To examine another time period, click the Edit link above the table, and then select from Today, Yesterday, Last 7 Days, Last 30 Days, This Month, or Last month.
By the way, if you’ve linked your AdSense and Google Analytics accounts, you can use Google Analytics to track your Google AdSense performance. Just click the View Performance in Google Analytics link.
Top Channels
If you have AdSense ads on multiple websites or blogs (what Google calls channels), you can view performance by site in the Top Channels section of the Overview data table. As you can see in Figure 4.3, this section of the data table displays your top performing sites, along with seven-day earnings for each site. This section also displays the change in earnings from the previous seven-day period.
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Figure 4.3. Viewing performance by channel.
To view channel earnings for a different period, click the Last 7 Days link and select from Today, Yesterday, Last 7 Days, Last 30 Days, This Month, or Last Month. To view the full Custom Channels report (not just the top channels), click the View Full Report link.
Quick Reports and Saved Reports
In Google AdSense, the most commonly used reports are dubbed quick reports. These include the following reports:
- Overview (this month)
- Overview (last month)
- Custom channels (today)
- Custom channels (yesterday)
- Custom channels (this month)
- Custom channels (last month)
These quick reports, as well as any custom reports you’ve saved, are available from the Quick Reports section of the Overview page, shown in Figure 4.4. Just click a report to display it onscreen.
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Figure 4.4. Accessing quick reports and saved reports.