Placing AdSense blocks on your site is just the first step to using them effectively; get the best information about their performance by using channels.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
— William Gibson, Neuromancer
AdSense users can choose between setting up URL channels and custom channels for their ad units. Arlene Lee of the AdSense Optimization Team explained the difference between the two in the blog post.
URL channels track ad performance on single pages all the way up through domains. They are easy to set up and do not require the publisher to change the AdSense code at all.
The channel reports show how optimization of different channels has impacted AdSense performance. Lee cited as an example someone tracking a blog about cars and a blog about boats, each set up as a separate channel, as how URL channels can work.
Custom channels come into play when a publisher’s page has multiple ad units in place. Lee explained:
To implement them, you’ll need to generate new channel-specific ad code. Let’s say you have a page with two ad units – one on the left side and one on the right. You can create a custom channel for each one, giving them distinct names such as Left_Ad’ and Right_Ad’. After you’ve regenerated the ad code for each ad unit and pasted it back into your HTML source, you can view reports for each ad unit separately.
Optimizing may be intimidating to some publishers, but it is essential to wringing the most performance out of AdSense. Even the most basic tweak publishers use, that of matching the color scheme of the ad unit to the page, can help; Google shows you how.
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
