One of the easiest ways to shed more light on your AdSense performance is to link your AdSense account to Google Analytics.
If you use Google Analytics already you’ll know it contains a wealth of actionable information about your website. Linking your AdSense account means you can view reports with AdSense data included – essential information for any AdSense publisher.
How to link your AdSense and Analytics accounts
Each AdSense account can only be linked to one Analytics account. Slightly confusingly though, one Analytics account can include profiles that link to several AdSense accounts.
Before you start, make sure your Google AdSense login has permission to access the Google Analytics profile that you want to link it to. If you use the same login for both then this doesn’t apply. If you use different logins and your AdSense login doesn’t have the necessary permissions then log into your Analytics account and follow these instructions:
- To create a link then log into your Google AdSense account.
- Click the gear icon then click settings
- Click access and authorisation in the side menu, then Google Analytics integration
You will now be presented with a list of profiles you have access to. Simply click link next to the correct profile.
More help on this can be found here :
Identify your highest paying content
Navigate to AdSense > AdSense Pages and then create an advanced filter to include those where AdSense page views are a significant number (what is significant will depend on your site traffic and the period of time you are looking at). Sort the results by AdSense CPM and you have your highest yielding content. Now go and build traffic to those pages!
Understand who actually clicks ads
One of my ‘go to tricks’ is creating a custom segment for users actually clicking ads. This is easily done – just copy the settings below or click here to get the segment.
Comparing the behaviour of those who click ads compared with those who don’t can really help build revenue.
- Where have those users come from?
- What where they looking for?
- What did they do on the site?
Understanding the patterns of those that click lets you make your site more attractive to those audiences and bring more valuable users to the site.
Limitations
In Google Analytics ‘Classic’ you could add AdSense metrics to almost any report. This was an amazing way to surface insights about your account. One easy example was viewing content receiving views by AdSense impressions to identify areas that might be better monetised. That is still possible in Universal Analytics, but you often need to be a little more creative and use tricks like the custom segment above.
DFP users or those utilising Custom Search Ads might also find the reporting limited, but these are changes that we hope will be forthcoming.
Whatever the limitations, there is still great value in being able to look at AdSense data in the context of analytics.
Mat has been supporting content creators on the web since 1996. As Co-founder of OKO Digital, Mat became the first person in the UK qualified to AdSense partner status and repeated this first with Google Certified Publishing Partner programme.
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