Custom Channels With AdSense

Custom Channels can help your marketing way. Custom channels can be used to help you track which ad colors, formats, and placements are most effective on your site, or to provide answers to questions like: Which ad units are the highest earners on my home page? Leaderboard at the top of the page? Rectangle in the middle of an article? Skyscraper on the right side of the page? Link unit under the left navigation? Do my ads perform better with or without a border? How does revenue for each of my AdSense for search boxes compare? To get the most out of custom channels, it's best to track every ad unit. This way you'll have a core set of reports that you can use to aggregate data from all of your ad units, or to combine in different variations to gain deeper insight into your site's AdSense performance and to answer the kinds of questions listed at the top of this section. Creating Custom Channels Understanding how you can use custom channels to answer the questions above will be essential in optimizing your AdSense ad unit performance. Let's take a closer look in the following example. Scenario: Nikhil owns a blog about medical information. His homepage currently has three ad units and one link unit, and Nikhil wants to find out which of the units is performing most effectively. To do so, he'll create a separate custom channel for each of the four units to monitor their performance. Creating and implementing custom channels requires a more involved process than that for URL channels. No worries - we'll show you how to create custom channels in 4 easy steps: Start off by logging in to your account and clicking the AdSense Setup tab, followed by the Channels link. For this scenario, we'll be looking at AdSense for content custom channels, so make sure you're on the right product and channel subtab. Then click the Add new custom channel The next step is naming your channels. It's important to be precise and consistent when naming custom channels. The more information you provide in the name about where and how the ad unit is being used, the easier it will be to identify later, when you're generating your channels reports. For the example used here, we suggest names like: HomeTopLeaderMedicoCareEarth HomeMidRectMedicoCareEarth HomeRightSkyscpMedicoCareEarth HomeLeftNavLinksMedicoCareEarth You'll notice that all of these names follow the pattern Page+Location+Ad Format+Color Palette. This is a pattern useful, but feel free to use whichever method works best for you. Enter the channel names into the new channel box and click Add channels. Now you can create your channel-specific ad code. Once your names are in place, click the AdSense Setup tab, then choose AdSense for content as the product. Continue to choose the ad type, ad format, and color palette as you would normally, then in the Channels section, select the name of the channel(s) you'd like to add by clicking the Add>> link (you can add up to 5), and click Continue to see your choices reflected in the ad layout code. Finally, you'll copy-and-paste the code into your webpages. The channel identifier within your code will immediately begin tracking performance. If you already have ad code on these pages, you should replace it with the new channel-specific code. Repeat the process for each of the ad units you'd like to track.