Google Advertising Tools, 2nd Edition

Chapter 9. Making Sense of AdSense

Putting AdSense code on your web pages is only the beginning of making money with Google AdSense advertising. Once you’ve added AdSense for Content and the other AdSense products explained in Chapter 8 to your pages, you need to know how well your AdSense revenue is doing in relationship to how well it could be doing. Monitoring your performance so you can make changes to make more money is a very important part of successfully working with AdSense.

This chapter explains the reporting and performance tracking tools available in the AdSense program and what you should be looking for in terms of performance.

Fundamentals of Navigation

When you log into AdSense from the AdSense home page at https://www.google.com/adsense/ (after your account is up and running and you have ads on your site), the first thing you’ll see is the Reports Overview window, with the current day’s earnings displayed, as shown in Figure 9-1.

Figure 9-1. You’ll see your page impressions, clicks, and other data related to today’s earnings

Scrolling down the page shown in Figure 9-1, you’ll see links to optimization tips (Figure 9-2) and links to premade custom reports (Figure 9-3). Note that these custom reports open in the Advanced Report window preloaded with the specified content.

Figure 9-2. AdSense automatically provides optimization tips

Figure 9-3. Quick ...