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Dave, as per your suggestion and encouragement, I have taken the plunge and signed up for Google AdSense. Now I’ve added it to my site and am getting some traffic and an occasional clickthrough. But I really don’t understand the nuances between all the data shown in the report; can you walk me through the overview report in AdSense?
When I first signed up for AdSense I also found the reports pretty hard to figure out, I admit, but talking with a lot of folk, including AdSense guru Joel Comm (who sells a slick ebook called Google AdSense Secrets that’s well worth the investment if you’re serious about reinventing your Web site for better AdSense revenue) I think I’ve started to figure things out.
To be able to write this particular answer, I checked in with my colleagues at Google (it’s helpful to have written a popular book about Google, I must say) and received permission to publish my actual AdSense reports here on the blog. So let’s start there:
When I first signed up for AdSense I also found the reports pretty hard to figure out, I admit, but talking with a lot of folk, including AdSense guru Joel Comm (who sells a slick ebook called Google AdSense Secrets that’s well worth the investment if you’re serious about reinventing your Web site for better AdSense revenue) I think I’ve started to figure things out.
To be able to write this particular answer, I checked in with my colleagues at Google (it’s helpful to have written a popular book about Google, I must say) and received permission to publish my actual AdSense reports here on the blog. So let’s start there:
This is a snapshot from a few days ago at <ahem> some point in the day (while I have permission to share my actual earnings, it doesn’t mean that I want to
image: http://cdn-4.askdavetaylor.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif
:-) so it gives you a sense of my overall traffic levels, percentage of ad blocks that receive clicks, and overall earnings: at this point in the day I’d already earned just a smidgen over $100.
Let’s go down the left side first. Notice that Google splits out revenue by category, so here I have AdSense for Content (which includes this very content page that you’re reading that has an AdSense block included), AdSense for Search (which is when I host Google searches on my site and then share in the PPC revenue if anyone clicks on an ad in the search result page), and Referrals (get someone else to sign up for AdSense or download the Firefox web browser with Google’s toolbar already included and you can earn a small bonus).
I’ve talked about this before, but again notice how for me, as for most people I know in the AdSense program, my revenue comes exclusively from AdSense for Content. Referrals are a bit more subtle, I admit, because people need to both sign up and earn a certain threshold amount before I’ll get paid, so the sign-ups I get will hopefully pay out down the road.
Also, if there’s one thing that you need to be conversant in as an AdSense for Content participant, it’s channels . Channels let you differentiate between your Google ads on different areas of your site or, if you’ve more than one site like I do, between sites. The figure shown is aggregated across all sites that I have in the AdSense program, so if I burrowed in further you could see that some sites have much lower traffic but superb per-click earnings, while others have huge traffic and almost no clicks at all. But channels are a different posting, so let’s stay focused on this report.
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