Saturday, March 7, 2009

Ten Ways to Improve Web Site Traffic

Improving your Web site traffic is a tricky business. You can take advantage of quite a few different strategies — many won’t cost you much whereas some won’t even cost you a dime. The trick is to find the right balance of strategies and then be consistent in your efforts to draw people to your Web site.

Consistency is also a very important factor in improving the traffic to your Web site. Every day you should be plugging away at your marketing efforts, in whatever form works best for your site. Web site marketing does require constant attention, however. Pushing for a short period of time to improve your traffic but then letting the efforts fall by the wayside does no good.
Doing so might get you a temporary increase in traffic, but as soon as you stop your efforts to bring people to your site, you’ll see your traffic statistics begin to fall again.

What follows are some of the strategies that you can use to improve your Web site traffic. No single strategy works by itself, but a combination of those shown here — and others that you figure out on your own along the way — gets you moving in the right direction.

Great, Dynamic Content
Everyone seems to be seeking the key to more Web site content. In today’s information-driven society, great, dynamic content is the key. People are usually online because they’re looking for something — relationships, information, products, or services. Content is the way they find what they’re looking for. Think about it. A decade or so ago, if you wanted to find information on anything, you had to go to the library or the bookstore to find that information.
Today, finding what you seek is as close as your computer. Just open a Web browser, type a few words, and what you’re looking for is sitting right in front of you. Very little information can’t be found online these days.

Here’s what makes one site better than another though. When I’m looking for information online, I click into and out of a site in the time it takes most people to take a sip of coffee. That’s because I know exactly what I’m looking for, and when I don’t see it, I move on to the next search result. When I do find what I’m looking for, though, I tend to stick around. I’ll read
the article that brought me to the site and then I’ll click through all the articles that are linked to it, and I might even click some of the ads shown on the page if they seem interesting. When I’m done, I bookmark the page to come back later and see what’s new.

That is what good content does for a Web site — it buys you time with your site visitors and it buys you return visits. If you don’t have content with that kind of stickiness, the first thing you can do to improve your Web site is to create that content. Just remember, don’t try buying it from a content broker — someone who commissions content from writers and then resells it to Web site or publication owners — if you really want something fresh and new because everyone
else in your area is using the same content broker.

Referral Programs
Referral programs have a couple different sides. One side of a referral program is the side on which you make money. That’s for putting referral buttons on your Web site. What if you flip that around and create your own referral program where you pay visitors to share your site with others? You can do that — and should — if you really want to build a sizable flow of traffic to your site.

Creating a referral program isn’t too difficult. The first thing you need to do is determine what you can afford to invest in the program. Typically, those who refer your site are paid anywhere from about a penny-a-click to as much as $5 per click or more. Some referral programs promise a flat fee for any referral that results in a purchase.
Your budget is the determining factor here, but remember this: The more you pay, the more likely others will want to refer your site to their site visitors. They’re sending traffic away from their site to yours, so you must make it worth the referrers’ efforts. Remember that for a referral program to be effective, it should also be simple. If you’re telling people you’ll only pay them a referral fee if they send someone to your site who then makes two purchases over a 60-day period, unless your site is truly amazing or the products that you offer are completely
unique, not too many people will refer their visitors to you. It’s just too hard for them to earn a reward for that referral.

A referral program also has to make it easy for referrers to be connected to the people that they refer. A simple form that includes a Referred By box is okay, but it’s only as effective as the memory of the person filling out the form. A link that connects referrers to your referral program so that you can track who they refer is much more effective for the people who are spreading your name around.

Setting up an easy-to-use referral program might be more difficult on your end, but it’s worth the investment. The less work that someone has to do to refer people to you and collect a reward for that referral, the more likely he’ll use your referral program.

Amazon.com has a referral program that’s an excellent example of what really works. They provide all the tools that users need to refer others to Amazon products. All the user has to do is plug a piece of code into her blog or Web site. Amazon and the visitors clicking through the referrals do the rest of the work.

Now, I know you don’t have the budget that Amazon has, but you should be able to get the technology you need without having to break the bank. A quick search on Google turns up referral marketing systems that are fairly cost effective. For example, ReferralBlast (www.referralblast.com) is an easy to use program that offers four different levels of referral programs — from a basic program to a highly customized program — that range from $99
per year to $999 per year. Another program that’s available, and that is fairly easy to use, is ReferralSoftware.com (www.referralsoftware.com). This software — unlike ReferralBlast — allows you to set up referral programs for a one-time fee of $299, after which you never pay another fee.

Links and Linking Strategies
You wouldn’t think that the links on your site would make too much difference to the traffic on your site, but they do. The Web is an interconnected group of pages. The connection from one page to another comes in the form of a link. So, both on your site and from others’ sites, links are an essential part of drawing people in.

One of the easiest ways to begin building a linking strategy is to contact the owners of Web sites that you like and ask them for a reciprocal link. Reciprocal links are when you put a link to that site on your page in exchange for a link back to your Web site. Reciprocal linking strategies are very common on the Web.

Another way to get people to link to you is to offer something completely unique on your Web site. For some, that means adding a special download to the site that’s not available anywhere; for others, it means adding videos, podcasts, or some other element that’s completely unique. Whatever your draw is, keep it unique and fresh. A podcast or video can be effective for a
few days, but after a while, it loses its effectiveness and needs to be replaced with something new.

When you have an intricate linking strategy in place (one that leads to other sites of interest and back to you from other sites), you start seeing the results of the strategy — more traffic. The linking strategy takes a little time to create, but it’s well worth the effort.

Advertisements
If you haven’t already done it, check out AdWords. AdWords is the advertiser’s arm of AdSense. With AdWords, you can bid to show your advertisements based on keywords that you select. Remember: Although AdWords is an advertising program, it’s not good just for products. You can use AdWords with your services or even content Web sites, too. The point of using AdWords is to advertise your site to users who might not otherwise find you. What you sell or provide on that site is up to you.

The cool thing about AdWords is that you can set a budget that keeps you from spending way more than you have available to spend on advertising your site.

Of course, AdWords isn’t the only game in the advertising world. You can also consider banner ads or even other pay-per-click advertising options. What’s important is that you get your Web site in front of as many people as possible.

Advertising probably isn’t the most effective method of getting your name out there — positive word of mouth and great content are your best shot — but if you have some cash to spend on getting your name known, it’s definitely a strategy that you should consider.

Blog Promotions
If you have a blog, you simply have to have a blog promotion (or 12). Really. Blogs are cool, but if you’re not out there promoting your blog every single day, your numbers will suck pond scum. One of the most effective types of blog promotion is simply to read and post on other people’s blogs. When you post on other people’s blogs, their readers see your post. They can click
through any links that you have connected to your display name or within your comments to see your blog — in fact, you have the opportunity to include your blog URL when you post on most blogs, and you should always include it. Including your blog address gives you free exposure, just for sharing your opinion.

Blogs have become so popular that even corporations now use them to advertise products, services, and events or just to keep readers updated on what’s happening with the company. The downside though is that blogs have become so popular that every person who even thinks they might possibly have something of interest to say has a blog.

Making your blog stand out from the rest of the pack is a very difficult process. Start with a truly interesting blog — will it captivate every person on the Web? No. If you can make your blog fresh though, you can potentially gain a huge mindshare in the area in which you specialize.
After you come up with that perfect blog, you have to get the word out. Start by posting comments on other blogs, but don’t stop there. Spread the word through your friends and ask them to spread the word, too. Join mailing lists and make sure your blog address appears in the signature line for every post that you make to the list (and you do have to post to the list — preferably interesting, useful posts).

Consider other promotions, such as blog tours (where a blog author appears on several different blogs as a guest blogger), giveaways, and other contests. Be creative, but also think in terms of what appeals to potential blog readers. If your blog is about a group of teens that are band groupies, a contest where the giveaway is a copy of War and Peace might not be the best idea. If the prize in your contest is a $25 iTunes card, the response could be much more
than you even dare to hope for.

As with all types of promotions, think outside the box. Better yet, think of a way to create a whole new box.

Publicity and Public Relations
All too often, publicity and public relations are all lumped into the same category of advertising. From where I sit, publicity and public relations are two different things. Publicity is free, and it includes coverage from other media sources, including newsletters, newspapers, radio stations, television, or whoever else may pick up word of what you’re doing.

On the Web, publicity usually takes the form of word-of-mouth type publicity. Someone sees your Web site and then tells someone else who happens to have a blog, so that person writes a blog post about it, which is then picked up by other bloggers, and it then catches the eye of some radio host or newspaper journalist who then runs a brief article or makes mention of your site
to their audience.

You get the picture — and that’s really a best-case scenario. Did you know that you can influence publicity, too? You can — by getting the name of your Web site in front of as many people as possible. One way to do that is to write articles that are complete and ready to run, and then distribute them to news outlets, newsletter owners, other Web site owners, or anyone else who has a publication and might be interested in your site. The catch is that to run the article you provide (for free), the publication must also run a short blurb about you, including your Web site address.

That takes care of publicity. Public relations, on the other hand, deals with how you handle people, especially in a public setting. You can put that to work for your Web site, too. Public relations can be the donations that you make (in the name of your Web site) to charity organizations, or it can be you taking the time to teach about your topic within your community. Guess what? Just putting your knowledge to use by answering questions posed by
folks in search of answers can count as public relations.

Creating a relationship with the public is what public relations is all about. When you use public relations — along with publicity — to get your Web site in front of people, you’re building your traffic levels (which in turn helps build your AdSense revenues). Creating public relations and publicity is a time-consuming process, though, so don’t make the mistake of thinking that
you can spend ten minutes here and there and immediately see results.

Professionals set aside several hours each week to devote to public relations and publicity efforts. You should do the same if you’re truly serious about creating a real brand with your Web site that people will think of and recognize when they consider topics related to your site and products. (Creating a brand simply means making your Web site or blog immediately recognizable, just like other products [Pepsi, Kleenex, Saran Wrap] are immediately recognizable.

The goal is to be the first site or blog that comes to mind when your topic or product is considered.)

Lead Generation and Follow-Up
One thing that Web site owners don’t often think of in terms of driving traffic to their sites is lead generation. Lead generation in this context is nothing more than the process by which you gather the names and e-mail addresses of people who may be interested in your Web site or blog — these are all potential visitors. And following up on those leads is how you convert those
potential visitors into actual visitors. Lead generation takes place in several different ways. For some sites, it’s a newsletter sign-up, but for others, it’s a contest or promotion that you e-mail to a mailing list you purchased from a marketing company.

How can generating leads help you build traffic on your site? It’s easy, really. If you’re collecting leads, you can keep your site in front of potential visitors more often.

That does require follow-up, though. Although some Web site owners are great at collecting leads, they don’t do much with them — you should. If you have a collection of people who have willingly given you their e-mail address, you should be using that address as often as you can to keep in touch with those potential visitors.

Many Web site owners do collect e-mail addresses (which in this case are your leads). Having folks sign up for a newsletter is one of the most popular harvesting methods out there. You can also collect the e-mail addresses of visitors when they register for your site or when they purchase goods or services from you.

However you collect the addresses, they’re no good to you if they just sit on a list doing nothing. After you have your e-mail addresses, use them to put your name in front of those people — and the more helpful you can be in the process, the better it is for your Web site.

Here’s an example: One Web site owner collects people’s e-mail addresses for a newsletter. The newsletter goes out without fail (consistency is key with newsletters) every two weeks. That same Web site owner also sends out a message about once a month that contains tips that the readers can use immediately to improve their business.

This type of extra information — service above and beyond the call of duty — is what helps build traffic for the Web site. When potential visitors turn to the area that the site addresses, that site is of course the first site to come to mind because the Web site owner has kept the site’s name in front of them as often as possible

Keep in mind this fact though: It’s absolutely essential that the communications you have with your potential visitors be useful. Sales, extra information, even contest announcements are useful. Just sending a note to say hello?

Nothing useful about that at all, and users won’t appreciate it.
The idea is to create a feeling of appreciation so that you’re first in the visitor’s mind when she thinks of the area that you serve. Being first means more Web site traffic for you.
Contests

I briefly mention contests a little earlier in this chapter. I bring them up here because contests are a great way to bring traffic to your Web site. Everyone loves a good contest, especially when the prizes are neat. Deciding what the prizes are for your contest is very important. Think of
what appeals to people who would be interested in your site. I mention earlier in the chapter that if your site’s about music, giving away copies of War and Peace just won’t cut it because such a contest wouldn’t target the specific people that you want to see your site.

When you’re considering the prizes that you should give away, consider what type of prize would draw the kind of person that would be interested in your site. If the purpose of the contest is to draw visitors to your site, the wrong prizes won’t help you at all.

Devising the type of contest to have is the next step. What is it people need to do to get the prize? One thing that many Web site owners do is require that users register for a newsletter, and then the winner is drawn from those who signed up for the newsletter. Bloggers often run contests where visitors are required to leave a comment on the blog.
After you create your contest, all you have to do is get the word out.

Announce the contest on your Web site, blog, and any mailing lists that you have. Tell your friends and ask them to tell their friends. If the contest’s good, word gets around quickly.

You’ll see a spike in the amount of traffic that you have to your site during the contest period, but if you conduct it right, an overall increase will remain after the contest is over. Take the time to design your contest to meet the specific goal of creating traffic (especially return traffic) to your site, and you’ll see the benefits of this strategy the first time you try it.

Social Media Marketing
Social marketing is a relatively new concept that’s based on a phenomenon that’s grown despite the fact that no marketing experts saw it coming, and it’s all based on social networks, such as those brought into being by MySpace and Facebook.

The idea with social networks is that you have an online community where you can connect and share with people who have the same interests that you do. For some, that might be an interest in specific people or hobbies. For others, the interest could surround employment or education.

What’s important is that a social network lets you create a circle of like-minded friends and
acquaintances — also called a community. For example, with MySpace, the concept is to build a home page where you and your friends can connect. You can also connect with others who are potential friends because they can view your MySpace page and learn about you and your interests.

If you’re marketing with social networking, create your network, and as you have something to market, share it with that group of friends in your community. They then share it with their friends, and before you know it, a network that’s far beyond the group you could reach on your own knows what you’re doing. Here’s the catch with social media marketing though: If you develop a social network specifically to sell something to the people in that network, you’ll fall
right on your face. Really. Social networks are created by people who have something to share with other people who think like them. If you barge into the network with a sales pitch and nothing more, you’ll be completely ostracized.

To be truly effective, you have to actually participate in the communities that you join. That means interacting with people and offering up something that others can use most of the time without expecting anything in return.

If you really want to see how social media marketing works, check out some of the organizations that have successful sites on MySpace or Facebook — Christian bands like Three Days Grace, for example. To get to the point where a social media marketing strategy is successful requires a lot of effort and attention, but the results can be very much worth the time you put into
developing your place on the network.

Offline Marketing Strategies
Offline marketing strategies are probably the last type of marketing you’d expect me to address when it comes to Web sites, but sometimes the offline strategies can really work — it does depend on how you go about it, though. Offline marketing strategies can be anything from press releases to T-shirts to direct mailings. Think about all the commercials that you see during the
Super Bowl. How many of those commercials had Web site addresses attached to them? Did you know that those companies paid millions of dollars to have those commercials shown?

You may not be in a position to pay millions of dollars to have your Web address plastered all over the television, but that doesn’t mean you should avoid offline advertising methods. Some of the things that you can do on a very small budget include putting magnetic signs on the side of your car, wearing T-shirts with your Web address on them, doing radio interviews,
sending out press releases, sponsoring a little-league sports team, and the list goes on nearly forever.

The trick with making offline advertising work is to make sure that you’re not investing too much into it, and that it appears in front of the widest audience possible. I wouldn’t suggest that you spend thousands of dollars on offline advertisements, but spending a few hundred here and there could increase your traffic in small, but valuable increments.

Ultimately, the best way to draw more traffic to your Web site isn’t a single way but is more a combination of all the ways listed here. You have to work to find the right balance of what works, but with enough time and effort, you can get the word out there and draw in visitors.

Ten AdSense Don’ts

The list of activities that you can use to improve your AdSense revenues is long and involved, but so is the list of strategies that you should avoid. In that list, however, some stand out far more than others. What follows is a list of the top-ten practices that you should avoid when creating your Web site and implementing your AdSense ads. Somewhere along the line someone likely told you that you should try one of the practices listed here.

Don’t do it. The results might be nice for a while. You could temporarily bump up your AdSense revenues. However, over time, the risks become much higher, and ultimately, you’ll probably end up getting caught by Google, which results in losing the privilege to show AdSense ads — and the right to earn AdSense revenues. Ultimately, it’s just not worth the risk.

Don’t Build Your Web Site for AdSense
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a dozen times in this book: Don’t build your Web site for AdSense. AdSense is about getting advertisements in front of users. Google has to get those ads out there because the advertisers that are using AdWords — the advertising arm of Google, where advertisers can place their ads to be shown on Web sites like yours — are paying the company to
do so. If you build your Web site exclusively for AdSense, the only thing that sees the ads is the crawler that periodically takes stock of your pages. Build your site for actual, real, live visitors instead. You know, those people sitting on the other side of the computer screen? They play with the keyboard and mouse, and they’re looking for something that they hope to find on your Web site. They’re visitors, and they’re your site’s target. The more specific the type of visitor, the better. When you build your site for visitors, you have to put serious thought into how the visitor will use the site. Think about what draws him to your site first. If he’s searching for information or products, what keywords will he use to search? If he’s randomly typing in a Web address, what address will he use? (Don’t laugh. It happens. I usually try the direct URL method of searching before I go to a search engine.)

After you get the user to your site, the next consideration is what he’ll do while he’s there. This is where your AdSense considerations come into play, because when the user’s on the site, you want AdSense to be a natural part of the site for him. Only when you build a site this way — for the visitor first and foremost — will you find that you have success with AdSense.
When you build the site exclusively for AdSense, you’re also in the position of being banned from the AdSense program. Google wants visitors to click ads. Your job, as someone who publishes AdSense ads, is to ensure that AdSense ads are displayed to as many potential clicks — that would be visitors — as possible. That means putting visitors first, always.

Don’t Cut Corners
This rule is sort of a fall-back to don’t build your site for AdSense. When you cut corners on your site, you take out all the elements that make people want to visit the site. For example, cutting a corner would be using the same tired articles that many other Web site owners are also using. Don’t do it. Users quickly figure out that your site doesn’t contain quality content, and they’ll
move on to the next site.

Instead, take your time to create the best possible Web site to meet the need your site was designed to meet. If you’re peddling information about kangaroo farms, be the most comprehensive site on the Web about the topic. If you’re selling pogo sticks, not only should you include a variety of different models, but you should also include information that’s of value to your customers, including how to care for the pogo stick, what types of tournaments
there might be, what associations there are, and what kind of creative activities involve pogo sticks.

Give your visitors everything they’re looking for. This creates return visitors and great word-of-mouth traffic (or buzz), which work together to increase the amount of exposure for your AdSense ads. The more times people look at those ads, the more likely they are to click them and increase your revenue stream.

Don’t Hide Your Ads
I know it sounds crazy, but some people do hide their ads. What they do is hide the text of the ad, leaving only the URL visible in an attempt to make visitors think that the URL is part of a list of links or a blog roll — the list of links to other blogs that you (as a blog owner) recommend. Do I need to tell you that Google frowns on this practice?

You might think hiding the nature of your links sounds like a great idea, especially in the context of blending your ads into your Web pages as much as possible, but it’s not. Don’t be fooled if someone tells you she’s done this and it worked well for her.

If you try it and Google catches any indications that you’re doing something deceptive like this, you’ll be banned from the AdSense program. What’s more, you could also be excluded from search results generated by the Google search engine.

If you intend to show AdSense ads on your Web site, let them be seen. You can blend them with the other text on the page or even make the backgrounds the same color as your page background. Don’t hide the text leaving only the link visible. It might garner you a few clicks in the beginning, but the end results could be disastrous.

Don’t Click Your Own Ads
Of all the no-nos you hear about AdSense, this is the most important one. Don’t click your own ads. Clicking your own ads might seem like just the thing to do. After all, you don’t want ads on your site that you don’t know where they lead, and it wouldn’t hurt to bump your income just a touch. Hold it just a minute! That’s completely the wrong way to think about it. If
everyone could just click their own ads and run up their profits, life would indeed be grand, but clicking your own ads is a form of click fraud. Click fraud is when you fraudulently drive up the number of ad clicks from people (yourself included) who aren’t actually interested in whatever the ad promises.

See, AdSense only works if AdWords works, and AdWords only works if people are truly interested in the ads that AdWords users create. AdWords users place their ads for people to see, and Web site owners who use AdSense then publish the ads for their Web site visitors to view and (hopefully) click. If no one clicks the ads, AdWords users aren’t charged a fee for
placing the ad and AdSense users aren’t paid for placing the ads. If someone does click through the ads but never makes a purchase or completes a transaction with the advertiser, advertisers will quit using AdWords and people like you who want to make money from showing ads will have no ads to display.

Make sense?

When you click your own ads, you’re not usually interested in the content of the ad. That said, I admit that I’ve clicked one of my own ads because I truly was interested in what it was advertising. Of course, I realized my mistake almost instantly, and I never clicked one again. If I see an ad I’m interested in, I go directly to the URL that’s provided.

I understand that you probably want to know where your ads lead. I don’t blame you, and neither does Google. That’s why there are tools, such as the AdSense preview tool — the AdSense extension for Firefox that lets you preview how ads appear on your page and where those ads lead to. (For more on the AdSense preview tool, see Chapter 17.)

The AdSense preview tool is a free tool, and when you use it as directed, you can click the ads on your own pages without fear of repercussions. What repercussions you might ask? Getting banned from AdSense, of course!

Don’t Change the AdSense Code
This one is right up there with the AdSense Don’t in the preceding section. Don’t change the AdSense code. Google takes creating AdSense code very seriously. Although a program generates the code for your Web site, that program is constantly tweaked and improved (just like everything Google).

The code AdSense generates for you is exactly what Google needs to provide the ads that will appear on your Web page as well as to track the results to those ads, which are important factors.

Keep in mind that AdSense works only because AdWords works (or it could be that AdWords works because AdSense works; which came first, the chicken or the egg?). The only way to prove that either one of them works is in the tracking that Google does. For that tracking to be accurate, the code provided to make ads appear on your Web site must remain intact, as written.
The only exceptions to this are changing style elements of the code, such as colors, and that should be done only with the AdSense code generator. If you create an ad and then re-design your site to have different colors, you can always go back to AdSense and edit the ad that you’ve created. If you’re thinking of messing with anything that’s not style related, however, don’t —
it’s just not worth the grief that you get.

What is that grief? Say it with me: Getting banned from the AdSense program. Don’t Use Clickbots Remember click fraud from a few paragraphs ago? Clickbots are another way
to commit click fraud. A clickbot is a script or program that’s designed to click the ads on your page, and they’re readily available on the Web, usually inexpensively.

Just because clickbots are there doesn’t mean you should use them, though. Clickbots do the same thing that you’d do if you were clicking your own ads, except on a much larger scale. They inflate the revenue that’s generated without increasing the interest in the product or service that’s being advertised. Now, a common misconception is that people only use clickbots to click their own ads — not true. Some people have been caught using clickbots to click
other people’s ads, too. These people are usually AdWords advertisers who are trying to push their competition out of the way.

See, each time someone clicks an ad, it costs the advertiser a set amount of money. A clickbot can click an ad dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of times, driving up the cost of the ad. This can affect how many times an ad is shown in a given period of time, and it can also cost an advertiser a large amount of money. After the budget limit is reached, that advertiser is out of
the way until the next billing cycle, allowing the next highest bidders to have their ads shown more often.

Clickbots form a vicious cycle that can be very costly for the person or company that falls victim to this type of click fraud. If you’re the one committing it, both AdSense and AdWords will ban you from their programs.

Don’t Get Banned for Taboo Content
Taboo content — content that Google’s deemed inappropriate for all audiences — is another way to end up on the bad side of AdSense. Examples include content that refers to
* Certain weapons, including guns
* Illegal drugs
* Alcohol
* Tobacco
* Pornography
* Designer knock-offs

If your Web site contains these types of content, AdSense doesn’t want ads displayed on it for one simple reason — image. Google, AdWords, AdSense, and all the other arms of Google have an image to uphold. Placing ads for goods or services on inappropriate sites isn’t the way to do that.
Google has to screen some of the Web sites on which AdSense ads will appear. If you have a site that’s likely to be offensive to a large number of people because it contains any of the content listed earlier, AdSense denies your request to put ads there.

Some folks think it’s smart to put the ads on their site and then later change the site and add disagreeable content to it — bad move. If you’re using AdSense and the crawler finds this type of content on your site, you’re asked to remove the content, and if you don’t, you can be banned from the program.

If your site contains any of the topics listed in this section, you might want to look to other affiliate and advertising programs for ways to generate a revenue stream.

Don’t Hold Clicking Contests
Here’s another facet of click fraud. Clicking contests are conducted when someone who publishes AdSense ads creates a contest for which site visitors must click an ad to qualify. The contest is usually monitored with a secondary script that the Web site owner creates.

This artificially inflates the number of clicks that you receive on your AdSense ads, driving up the revenues that your site generates. This is bad for two reasons.

First, you’re creating an artificial bump in revenues. That means to maintain that level of revenue, you have to come up with increasingly creative ways to get people to click your AdSense ads until you’ve reached the point of outright fraud. Never good.

Second, artificially inflating the number of times that someone clicks one of your ads causes the system to be skewed on the Google side, too. The advertisers have to pay more for advertising. Even more troublesome though is that your site could be taken as a site that generates a lot of traffic and so might benefit from a cost-per-impression ad. Great news for you if you have a ton of traffic, but if you don’t, you could end up on the losing end of that proposition. Being limited to cost-per-impression ads also means that the advertisers that are specifically targeting your site
lose out. In turn, Google loses out on potential revenues. Now, you may not give a flying flip about the other people and companies in the mix, but you should care that if you get caught using this kind of tactic to increase your AdSense revenues, you’ll lose your AdSense privileges.

Don’t Pay Others to Click Your Ads
Here’s another one that falls into the same category as not using clickbots or holding clicking contests. Don’t pay other people to click your ads. These kinds of programs are sometimes billed as affiliate programs. People who put them together offer a portion of their revenues to a person or group of people who in turn click their AdSense ads. That’s all great, and it might
even work for a little while, but eventually someone will squeal or Google will catch on.

The penalties for falsely inflating your AdSense revenues can be stiff. You can (of course) possibly lose your AdSense privileges, but there’s a darker side to click fraud if you get caught with your hand deep enough in the cookie jar.

Google has been known to prosecute people who commit click fraud, especially in cases that are considered extreme. The best strategy for increasing your AdSense revenue and maintaining that revenue long-term is to do it by-the-book. Use the strategies I talk about in
this book — all the chapters include some kind of strategy that should help you increase your revenues — and avoid anything that can get you into hot water with Google. Because you’ve gone about building your AdSense business the right way, you’ll continue to see returns on your AdSense efforts for a long time to come.

Don’t Use Any Other Underhanded
Methods
Click fraud is just one of the underhanded methods that some people use to increase their AdSense revenues. Whether you’re using click fraud or some other deceptive practice doesn’t matter though. If you’re trying to get the upper-hand on Google, you’ll probably fail.
That doesn’t keep some people from recommending the wrong methods of increasing Web site traffic and therefore increasing AdSense revenues. What do these people care if you’re kicked out of the AdSense program? You getting kicked out doesn’t affect them at all.
It’s much smarter to avoid anything that seems less than honest. I talk about some of the methods that you might see recommended — but that you should never try — in the list here:
* Cloaking: By putting one set of content in front of a search engine crawler and then presenting users with another set of content, cloaking deceives potential site visitors into believing they’re entering one type of site when in fact they’re entering another. Cloaking can apply to AdSense, too. If you’re using cloaking techniques, you could be baiting AdSense ads for extremely high-paying keywords, but the content on your site doesn’t relate to those keywords at all. Site
visitors click into your site, but because they don’t find what they’re looking for, they often click the ads that are displayed instead. Cloaking is a bad practice that Google figures out very quickly. When they do, you pay the price for your deception — as in, kiss your membership in the AdSense program goodbye.

* Duplicate content: No one wants to see the same boring stuff all over again — just like no one wants to watch reruns on TV — which is why I’m always recommending that you use as much unique, fresh content as you can generate, rather than loading up your site with content found
elsewhere. What makes duplicate content so troublesome for AdSense is that if
dozens of sites all carry the same content, a limited number of relevant ads can be shown on those sites. Duplicate content can also indicate that a Web site isn’t regularly updated, meaning that it won’t have as much traffic as a site that maintains dynamic content.

Google wants AdSense (and AdWords) to be successful. So, naturally, the more diverse the sites are within a topic, the more ads that can be shown. Although duplicate content probably won’t get you banned from AdSense, it certainly reduces the effectiveness of your site and value of the ads that are shown on the site. You know what that means: less revenue.

* Hidden text: This is yet another “helpful hint” you may have suggested to you in the context of improving the AdSense ads that appear on your site. Hidden text involves text that, while present on your site, is colored the same as the background so that it blends into the site and isn’t seen by site visitors — only Web crawlers can read the text.

Most of the time, hidden text is used to target a specific keyword that’s unrelated to the actual content of the site. People use this tactic to draw ads for higher-paying keywords because these ads are likely to pay better than the ads that appear based on the actual content that the visitor
sees. The problem here is that the ads that can be influenced by hidden text
aren’t likely to be as relevant to your site visitors, which means that they’re likely to get clicked less. That means a reduction in your revenue volume, even if the payment-per-click is higher. In the end, hidden text doesn’t work because it’s usually more effective to have more clicks at a
slightly lower payout than it is to have fewer clicks at a higher payout. Having relevant ads also means that your site will be more useful to your visitors, making it more likely that they’ll come back in the future and click your ads again.

* Spreading malware: Malware involves applications that are created specifically for some malicious intent. These days, most malware is created to help the process of identity theft. It’s not at all uncommon for criminals to pay Web site owners to spread malware, even though it’s not exactly a nice thing to do. If you’re distributing that malware on your Web site, Google wants no part of your activities.

Besides, spreading malware is illegal, and the pay-off could be jail time. Is it really worth the risk?
* Using false tactics: Any kind of false tactics that you might employ to trick users into clicking your AdSense ads is forbidden. I know, when you’re looking at click revenues of pennies a day, a lot of different strategies look appealing — especially if they increase the amount of money
that you’re making.

Just remember, it’s only more profitable if it helps you to build a longterm AdSense revenue stream. If not, and if it seems even the slightest bit out of line, don’t do it. Any risk to your good standing with AdSense means that you could lose whatever revenue stream you’ve legitimately
created.

Using AdSense Reports

Web site owners who publish AdSense ads on their sites tend to be obsessive about checking their numbers to see what levels their revenue is reaching. If you find yourself logging in to AdSense 15 times a day to see how many people have clicked your ads, there’s an easier way to keep track of things.

With Google’s set of AdSense reports, Google provides you with the tools you need to see exactly where you stand — all in just a few minutes. Some of the reports can even be automated, so you don’t even have to log on to the Web site. Setting up these automated reports can save you time; time that you can spend creating better content, adding pages to your site, or tweaking the keywords that you use to help the AdSense crawler target ads to your site.

The Overview
Google makes it easy for you to automatically know how much you’re earning on any given day, just by signing in to your AdSense account — you know, that little gold mine you keep at www.adsense.com. When you log in to the account, the first page you see is the Overview report, which provides you with a quick look at your daily earnings. In fact, right there in bold print (and
it’s probably the very first thing you see) is the Today’s Earnings heading. In green, next to the heading, you see the amount of money that you’ve earned that day.

A little farther down the page, you see a table with details about how you’ve earned that money. The table lists the different types of AdSense ads you’re showing as well as the following statistics, all designed to help you understand quickly what’s working and what’s not:

* Page Impressions: This is the number of people who have viewed your ads on a given day. This number represents all the visitors to your site, whether they stayed on the site or bounced right back off.
* Clicks: This column adds the number of times folks have clicked one of your ads.
* Page CTR: Short for Page Click-Thru-Rate, Page CTR shows the percentage of people who came to your site and then clicked through your AdSense ads to the advertiser’s page. The higher your percentage, the better your ads are performing.
* Page eCPM: Don’t ask me how they get Effect Clicks Per Thousand out of eCPM. (The acronym has something to do with the metric version of measurement, which really doesn’t matter to you one bit.) What you do need to know is that this figure is arrived at by dividing your total earnings by the number of impressions in thousands. For example, if your
site earns $100 from 10,000 impressions, your eCPM is $100/10 or $10.

This represents the amount that you’re making per thousand impressions, however, and doesn’t represent exactly how much you’re making. Instead, it’s a measurement that you can use to compare results across channels or advertising programs.

* Earnings: The actual amount that you’ve earned over a given timeframe is shown in this column. Specify the timeframe you want to examine with the View drop-down menu, shown in Figure N1. You can view results by Today, Yesterday, Last 7 Days, This Month, Last Month, and All Time.

Figure N1


The Overview page shows more than just how much money you’re making. This page also contains notes from the AdSense team, messages that you can view — stuff like the monthly optimization report that’s sent to AdSense advertisers — as well as links to quick reports. “What are they?” you ask. Read on and become enlightened.

Understanding Quick Reports
AdSense calls reports that you’ve preset certain variables for — dates, for example — Quick Reports. These reports are easy to get to. When you log in to your AdSense account, the page that you land on is the Main Report page. You’ll find the Quick Reports section at the bottom of that page.

These reports are already set up for you — basically —, so all you need to do is click the link for the report, and a new page loads with those variables already in place.
When a new report loads, notice the customization options shown at the top of the page. (They’re above the fold; you actually have to scroll down the page to see the report data.) These customization options allow you to change dates, products, and even ad unit information to further customize your report view. I give you more information on how to use custom and advanced reports a little later in this webpage.

Figure N2 shows your Quick Report options for AdSense for Content ads. Here’s what each report entails:

* This Month, By Day: If you select the This Month, By Day report, you get pretty much the same information as shown in the Overview report, such as page impressions, clicks, and earnings, but you get that info for each day of the current month.
* Last Month, By Day: Instead of displaying the current month’s data, this report lets you look a bit deeper into the historical data to see what trends might be emerging. (Okay, deep here is a relative term; I’m only talking last month.) For example, are certain days better for generating
AdSense income? If you can see those patterns and use them to develop useful theories and scenarios, you can test those theories in an effort to further increase your AdSense earnings.

If you use AdSense for Search on your site, additional reports may provide further statistics about your AdSense revenues. Even though AdSense for Search is a little different than AdSense for Content, the reports should have the same outward appearance. The functions of ads are different than the functions of searches, but you end up tracking the same information — clicks, impressions, earnings, and so on. Like AdSense for Content, you have reports for This Month, By Day and Last Month, By Day, This Month, By Channel & Day, Last Month, By Channel & Day, but you also have an additional report — Top Queries.

Figure N2

Remember, channels are just tracking capabilities. In the reports listed above, By Channel just means that each different channel — or tracking group — you’ve created will have its own section on the reports.

All the remaining report options are pretty self-explanatory, except for the Top Queries report. That report actually shows the same information as the other reports, but the information is ranked from most popular to least popular, based on search queries that visitors conduct from your site with the search box that you placed on your site.

If you don’t use AdSense for Search on your Web site, these reports just return empty, without any data.

Keep in mind that all such reports, whether they’re for AdSense for Content ads or AdSense for Search ads, come to you already pre-defined. You still have the option to change any of the variables in the report so that you can further segment (or separate) data that concerns your AdSense activities. That’s where custom and advanced reports are useful — so useful, in fact,
that they deserve their own section.

Using Custom and Advanced Reports
Custom and advanced reports start out just like any other report that you run from AdSense Quick Reports except no data is preset for display. When you select the Advanced Reports link on the Reports tab — remember, that’s where you land when you log in to your AdSense account — a page loads displaying your options when it comes to creating reports, as shown
in Figure N3. These options allow you to define custom reports that feature the information that you actually need at the moment, rather than information that someone else decides you might need.


Figure N3


By picking and choosing among the various options, you can tailor a report
to your precise needs. Your options are as follows:

* Product: With the Choose Product drop-down menu, you can specify which AdSense product you want to use as the basis for your report. Products here include AdSense for Search, AdSense for Content, Video Units, Referral Programs, and any other type of AdSense ads that you’ve
allowed. Only those products you’ve enabled in your AdSense account show up
as options in the drop-down menu. Your Choose Product drop-down menu, therefore, may be different from mine.

* Date range: If you use this section’s first radio button, you get to choose from preset date ranges that mirror those available in the quick reports (Today, Yesterday, Last 7 Days, This Month, Last Month, and All Time). But hey, why go with the standard date range? I don’t run my weeks according to Google’s schedule, so I take advantage of the customized
date ranges associated with the second radio button. The drop-down menus there allow you to specify the exact date range you want to use. If you need a report for a three-day period or a three-week period, or if you just want a report from Monday through Sunday, you can create it.

* View options: Another feature of the advanced reporting capabilities that you might find useful is the ability to change the way your data is shown. By default, the Show Data By drop-down menu is set to Page, which means that your data is sorted according to page impressions — the number of times your page is viewed, whether users click links on the page or not.
Only there’s a catch — isn’t there always? It doesn’t matter how many different ads or types of ads are shown on your page; each page counts as only one impression. If you’re thinking about your impression figures in terms of having multiple ads on your page, they may seem low.
Another choice here is to show data by Ad Unit. This data display shows your page impressions according to the number of ads that are on your page. So, if one visitor comes to your site and clicks all the 15 ads that you have on your page, you’ll see 15 page views for that single visitor.
Now you have the opposite problem from the Page option. Instead of having page impressions that appear low because each visit counts only for one impression — no matter how many ads you have — now only one visit can create multiple impressions.

Using both of these Show Data By measurements can be useful in that you can see how many visitors have seen your ads as well as how many ads your visitors have seen. If, for some reason, AdSense is displaying a single ad in the place of a large rectangle, for example, you can see
immediately what’s happening. And it does happen from time to time when AdSense doesn’t have enough matching ads to fill the rectangle, which can usually hold several ads.
A final option in the Show Data By drop-down menu — the Individual Ad option — changes your view of the data even more. When you use this display, you see how many impressions your site gets according to the number of actual ads that are displayed. Some ad displays show
only a single ad — banners are one; you get one ad in a banner, nothing else — but others, like rectangles or link units, show more than one ad.

When you view your report data with the Individual Ad option, you see multiples of impressions, based on the number of actual ads that are on your site.

At the Individual Ad level, you can see your ads by what type of ad targeting is used: contextual or placement targeting. Contextual ad placement is when ads are placed within your content because the ad jibes in some way with the subject of the content. Placement targeted ads are
those ads that are placed on your site because the advertiser chooses to have its ads shown on your page. This is an additional detail you don’t see in any other view.

You also have the option to show aggregate data or channel data. Aggregate data is just a collection of the tracking information for all your ads. Channel data is a collection of the tracking information for ads broken down into the channels that you have selected to use to track
individual ads or groups of ads.

When you’ve finished selecting the options that you would like to display for your ads, then all you have to do to see the report is click the Display Report button. The page reloads, and your desired information is displayed. Each different data display shows the impressions on your site slightly differently. Because the data is considered differently in each view, you see
changes in your eCPM measurements as well. The fewer impressions shown,
the higher your eCPM is.

Page impressions, clicks, and other report data, along with these different data views, allow you to compare ads and see which ones perform better than others. It takes some time to gather enough stats to be able to make any real determinations — if you have plenty of people visiting your site, a week might be enough; low traffic requires a little longer. With this data readily
available to you, you can test different ad placements and types to discover what works best on your Web site.

Using Report Templates
The basic reports AdSense provides are useful enough for most purposes, but at times — recurring times — you need a report with a specific set of information and you don’t want to have to re-create it every time you want to run that report. No sense in reinventing the wheel, right?
Report templates allow you to set up reports, based on your specific needs. Each time you want to run that specific report, all you have to do is select the template, rather than re-creating the report each time that you need it. Here’s the rub: You can’t create reports that are any more sophisticated than what you can do with the advanced reporting capabilities I talk about in the
previous section. What you can do, however, is create the report once, fashion a template based on that report, save the template, and reuse it whenever you want. (The idea here is to keep the template on hand so you don’t have to go through setting up the report every time you need it.) Here’s how you save a report as a template:
1. Log on to your AdSense account.
The Reports page appears, with your Today’s Earnings prominently displayed.

2. On the Reports tab, select the Advanced Reports link.
Your report options appear. (Refer to Figure N3.)

3. Create the report that you want to use as a template.
Set date ranges, choose the type of report — aggregate or channel data display — and choose the product (AdSense for Content, AdSense for Search, Referrals, and so on).

4. Click the Display Report button to run the report.
When the report has processed, you see a Save as Report Template text box at the top of the report, as shown in Figure N4.

5. Enter a name in the Save as Report Template text box and then click Save.
You see an orange confirmation box displayed if the report was successfully saved. If the confirmation box doesn’t appear, go through the creation process again in case you’ve forgotten steps or there’s a problem with the service.


Figure N4

That’s really all there is to it. After you create an advanced report, it’s saved as a template in case you want to run it again in the future. When you’re ready to run the same report again, select it from the Advanced Reports section on the Quick Reports screen. You still have to change the date range, but your other selections are automatic.

Working with the Report Manager
Each time you generate a report, it’s automatically saved to a little corner of the AdSense world — the Report Manager. To get your hands on reports saved to the Report Manager, click the Reports Manager link on the Reports tab. Reports are collected here so that you can view them online or download them in CSV (Comma Separated Value) format, the standard used by most
spreadsheet programs. To download the report, just click the CSV link, and use the Save As dialog box that appears to choose the location you want the report saved to and to choose a name for the report. When you’ve entered this information, click Save.

After you download a report and save the file to your hard drive, you can open it in Microsoft Excel or any other spreadsheet program that opens CSV files — Google Docs & Spreadsheets, for example.

For example, here’s how to open the file in Microsoft Excel:
1. Launch Excel and then choose File➪Open.
The Open dialog box appears.

2. In the Open dialog box, browse to the file you saved to your hard drive, select the file, and then click Open.
Excel’s Text Import Wizard appears, as shown in Figure N5. The file that’s provided by AdSense is a delimited file — the columns of data are literally separated. On the first screen of the wizard, you don’t need to change anything.


Figure N5

3. Click Next.
The second page of the wizard appears.

4. In Step 2 of the wizard, select the delimiter — what separates each column of the spreadsheet you’re importing — and then click Next.
In this case, the delimiter is a tab (because you usually tab from one column to the next). That’s probably already selected in the wizard.

5. (Optional) In the final page of the wizard, feel free to change the formatting of the columns that you’re importing by clicking anywhere in the column and then selecting the proper formatting from the options in the upper-left corner of the wizard.
For this file, the formatting for all the columns should be General. You can see your formatting without clicking each column by looking at the very first cell at the top of each column. This cell doesn’t appear on the spreadsheet, but in this wizard view, it shows you what type of formatting
is already in place.

6. After you check or adjust the formatting, click Finish to complete the importing process.
The Excel spreadsheet opens. If you want to keep it in Excel format, you have to resave the file as an Excel workbook.

If you really don’t want an offline copy of the report, you don’t have to save the file to your hard drive. Truth is, you can access your reports from the AdSense Web site for quite a while — about a year, in fact. After that period of time, reports get deleted from the site.

Scheduling Automatic Reports
One real timesaving feature of AdSense reports is the ability to schedule said reports to run automatically, rather than having to manually set up the report and run it on the site each time you need it. To take advantage of automatic scheduling of reports, though, you have to create a report template before you can schedule it to run automatically.

After you create a report template, you should see it as an option in your Report Manager. (If it’s not there, then the template wasn’t successfully created and you need to go through the creation process outlined earlier again.)

Follow these steps to schedule the report to run automatically:
1. Log on to your AdSense account.
The Reports page appears.

2. On the Reports tab, click the Report Manager link.

3. On the Reports Manager page, scroll down until you see the Saved Report Templates section.
The Saved Report Templates section shows you all the reports that you’ve saved as templates. Next to each report is a Frequency column, a Send To column, and a Format column, as shown in Figure N6. (More about these columns in a bit.)


Figure N6

4. Using the Frequency drop-down menu, select how often you want the report to run.
Your choices are Never, Daily, Weekly, and Monthly.
After you select a frequency, the default e-mail address is displayed for your account in the Send To column. That’s where the report will be sent unless you change it.

5. To change the default e-mail address, select an address from the Send To drop-down menu.
If the address you want to send the report to isn’t listed in the dropdown menu, do the following:

a. Click Edit Addresses.
You’re prompted to save your changes before you continue.

b. Save the changes or click OK.
A form opens into which you can type new addresses.

c. Add the new e-mail address.
You can add multiple addresses, too. Enter the addresses one per line.

d. Click Save Addresses.
The new e-mail address(es) appear in the Send To drop-down menu.

6. From the Format drop-down menu, select the format for the report that you want to send.
Your choices here are CSV or CSV-Excel. (CSV Excel is just a report format that’s specifically set for Microsoft Excel.)

7. Click Save Changes.
You’re done!

Your report is set to run automatically, but here’s a disappointing fact: You can’t automatically send the report to more than one person. You could set up multiple reports that are the same and send each one to a different person, but it’s much easier just to forward the report after you get it to those who need to see it. Maybe Google will add a Multiple Addresses feature
in the future, but for now, you’re stuck with one address per report.

Using Site Diagnostics
In order to track down all the data needed for ad placement — as well as tracking down all the data that goes into the reports I talk about in this webpage AdSense needs to be able to crawl your Web site. The crawler — not the same crawler that Google uses to include your site in search results, by the way — visits your site once each week to check for content, design, and usage information.

I cover how this works in a lot of detail in forth coming webpages, so if you need a refresher, you can flip there. I’ll wait.
Done? Good. The AdSense crawler visits your site once each week. During that visit, the crawler looks at all the pages on your Web site to ensure that your ads are properly targeted. If the crawler encounters a problem, such as a page that’s redirecting unexpectedly (and without the proper redirect information in place), or if the crawler is denied access to the site, it flags that
issue in the Site Diagnostic area of your AdSense account.

To get to the Site Diagnostic area, do the following:
1. Sign in to your AdSense account.
2. From the Reports tab, choose the Site Diagnostics link.

When that page opens, a list of problems that were encountered with your site is displayed.

If the crawler didn’t encounter any problems, the list is mostly blank, displaying only the You Currently Have No Blocked URLs message in light gray.
If you do have issues — if the crawler can’t get to your site for some reason — the reason is displayed in the table provided along with the date of the last crawl attempt on your Web site.
It’s possible (though highly unlikely) that when you updated your site, Google was trying to crawl your site at the exact same time. Sometimes, if you’re uploading files, the crawler can’t access the site at the same time. If that’s the case, the date of the last crawl reflects that.
Far more likely, however, is that a flaw in the site design or some other problem is keeping the crawler off your site. If that’s the case, the error displayed helps you to figure out what needs to be done to allow the crawler to have access.

In a lot of cases, the problem is simply that you have a robots.txt file that denies access to certain portions of your page.

Sometimes, you deny a crawler access to a page on your Web site for good reason. For example, if you have several pages that are essentially the same, you might not want a crawler to look at all the pages. The redundancy could cause your search result rankings to drop. Usually, if you’ve designed your site well and with the Google Webmaster Guidelines in mind, you have no
reason to keep the crawler off any pages of your site. Sometimes, though, the errors that the crawler encounters aren’t directly related to that robots.txt file. If that’s the case, you see the exact error listed on this diagnostics form. You can then repair the error. After you do,
however, it might take up to a week for the crawler to hit your site again. You may have to be patient to see the results of your repair.

A good example here is when a crawler can’t navigate your site because of broken links. If the crawler can’t follow the site navigational links, it will leave your site and come back at another time. If you fix the broken links, the next time the crawler comes through you shouldn’t have any problems.

Managing Your Account
No two ways about: Part of your day-to-day site administration involves managing your AdSense account. Now, with any Google application out there, managing the application or program is pretty straightforward. AdSense is no exception.

To manage your account, log in to AdSense and then select the My Account tab. From this tab, you have several options for account maintenance, including: Account Settings, Account Access, Payment History, and Tax Information, as shown in Figure N7. I cover each option in greater detail in the next sections.


Figure N7

Your account settings
The Account Settings section of the My Account tab lets you add or change e-mail addresses and passwords, update your address and payment information, and/or change your ad type preference.

To change any of the settings here, click the blue Edit link next to the header for that section. When you click this link, a new page opens from which you can change the information that’s pertinent to that segment of the Account Settings section. After you make whatever changes you want to make, click Save to update your account settings.
The Account Settings section has a Property Information area. The numbers shown here are your account IDs for each area of AdSense that you choose to use. For example, if you’re using

AdSense for Search, AdSense for Content,
and AdSense Referrals, you have three different IDs shown. In most cases, you don’t need to know these IDs. Google keeps up with them for you and includes them in the code that’s generated for the ads you display.

However, if you ever do need to know them (say, if you’re having trouble with your AdSense account and you call tech support), this is where they’re located. Don’t share those ID numbers with anyone, though. They’re specific to your account, and if you give them out, someone else could gain access to your account.

Granting and denying access
The Account Access area on the My Account tab is where you can see who else has access to your AdSense account. Unless you specifically grant an organization or another person access to the account, you should have no one else listed here.
If you’re using Blogger or some other applications (such as FeedBurner) with AdSense, that organization needs to have access. Keep in mind that the company can’t see your earning statements or make changes to your account beyond the changes that you authorize while setting up or changing ads.

They’re still listed as hosts in your Account Access area — someone who is hosting your blog, RSS feed, or other aspect of the Web site on which you have ads displayed.
You can disable any and all hosting applications at any time by clicking the blue Disable Access link to the right of the hosting company’s name. After you click that link, however, the account no longer has access to the elements of your account needed to allow you to show ads through that service;

so the ads that you have active no longer display, or if they do, they display with errors.
Unless you’ve changed your mind about having ads on your blog or in your RSS feed, you shouldn’t adjust the status of these hosts. Allow them to have the access they need to ensure that your ads continue to display properly.

You can’t add multiple users to an AdSense account. You can share your username and password with others but you can’t physically add an additional user to your account. If you have an account that you want to share with your spouse or partner (or some other member of your staff), he must use your login.

When you allow someone to use your username and password to access your AdSense account, she has all the same privileges that you do, meaning she can change your account in any way she chooses. She can change ad types and placement, she can change reports, and she can even change your password and lock you out of the account.

Use caution if you plan to share your account with someone. Make sure it’s someone you trust. Better yet, don’t share. I know, you’ve been told all your life that sharing is good. In this case though, go ahead and share reports and information gleaned from your AdSense account, but keep actual access to the account to yourself, just to be on the safe side.

Reading your payment history
The Payment History section of the My Account tab is where you can see what your current balance is or what payments have been made to you in the past. AdSense doesn’t send out payments until you reach $100, so if you’re below that level, the balance carries forward each month until you hit the $100 level. Payments can then be issued through check or direct deposit.
The View drop-down menu in the Payment History section lets you change the months for which you’re viewing your payment history. Your options are Last 3 Months, Last 12 Months, or All Time.

You should’ve set up your payment method on the Account Settings page when you first opened your AdSense account. If you didn’t, AdSense can’t pay you, but you can’t change those details on this page, either. This page is strictly a reporting page. You have to go to your Account Settings page to make changes to your payment method and information.

Next to each month listed on the Payment History page is a blue Details link. Click this link to go to a page that details how your earnings are categorized (AdSense for Content, AdSense for Search, and so on), what the subtotal is, and how much your monthly earnings are. You can also download this information to a CSV file by clicking the Download CSV File link at the top of the
Details report (or next to the View drop-down menu on the previous page, as shown in Figure N8).

Farther down the Payment History page, you also see a payment schedule. AdSense payments are sent at the end of each month and are sent either by Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT), Express Secured Delivery, or Standard Delivery. The Account Settings area is where you make changes to your payment delivery method and account numbers if you’re having payments delivered via EFT.

Figure N8

Giving Uncle Sam his due
I don’t know about you, but I hate paying taxes. I could get on a major soapbox about the whole tax system, but this isn’t the forum for it. Unfortunately, AdSense income, like every other type of income, is taxable. That means Google has to have tax-withholding information for you, so before you can be paid, you have to fill out an IRS Form W-9.
The first time that you log in to the Tax Information section of the My Account tab, you’re prompted to fill out a Form W-9. After you fill it out and submit it, you need to worry about it only if there are major changes in your life (such as a name change caused by getting married or a change in withholding status).
I’m no accountant, so I can’t tell you exactly how you should fill out this form, but I can tell you that any time you need to update it, log in to your account, go to the Tax Information page, click the blue Change Your Tax Information link, and you’re taken to the Tax Information Wizard.
The wizard asks questions about your citizenship, your filing status, and your personal information. It’s really a simple process and not nearly as confusing as filling out a Form W-9 for your employer.

Walk through the wizard, answer the questions, and then click Finished. Your information is updated automatically, and you’ll stay on Uncle Sam’s good side, at least where AdSense is concerned. Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.

Tracking AdSense Responses

Anytime you track how well your AdSense strategy is actually doing, you’re relying a little bit on science and a little bit on magic. True, the only surefire way to determine what your AdSense revenues will be is to wait until they’re processed and show up on the AdSense administration pages.

But that doesn’t tell you what works (and what doesn’t work) with the way that you’ve set up your ads or the placement that you’re using for the ads. If you want to know what trends seem to be influencing your revenue, here’s another way to go about it. Tracking your Web site traffic — more specifically, tracking what brings people to your site, what takes them away, and
what they do while they’re on your site — is the best way to get a feel for the trends that affect your AdSense revenues. To track all that, you have to put in some work or find a really good program.

Which of those options you decide to use is determined by you. What are you more comfortable with? You can track everything and extract all that information from the logs that are available on your server, or you can let someone else do all the hard work for you so that all you have to do is take a look at the data that’s been gathered. Both ways have advantages and disadvantages. Ultimately what it comes down to is whether a service (like Google Analytics) can provide all the data that you need. Such a service might not, and if that’s the case, you have only
one option: Roll up your sleeves and do it on your lonesome. Understanding Server Logs
Let me put it to you straight: The most difficult way to track traffic on your Web site is through your server logs. Server logs are also the only way to get certain types of in-depth detail about your site. I guess you need to know what sever logs are though before I get too deep into what you can do with them. A server log — more accurately a Web server log — is a group of files automatically generated by a server that tracks statistics about the traffic on your
Web site. This group of files might contain information on where a user came to your site from, what pages on your site she visited, how long she spent on each site, and even more detailed information like what country she lives in (or the country her Internet access account is registered in) and some of the specifications about the browser she’s using.

Server logs are a complicated mess of facts and information that most people just can’t read. Seriously. You have to be one step above a NASA geek to understand all the gibberish contained in a server log.

Because most people won’t ever reach that level of geekiness, some programs — log analyzers or log parsers — take all that data, analyze it, and then spit out more understandable statistics. Programs like AWStats (which is free, available at www.awstats.sourceforge.net) and Summary (which is free to try but can be costly to own, available at www.summary.net) can give
you the information you seek from the raw data that the server collects. Even though these programs are easier to use than trying to figure out server logs on your own, they’re still not the easiest programs available. With AWStats, for example, you get to track your Web site statistics, but you have to have access to your Web server to use it. It’s also requires a little more
technical knowledge than some of the other Web site statistics programs that are available — like Google Analytics. Still, if you’re ready to take on this program, it can potentially provide very in-depth analyses of the data that is collected in your server logs. I’m not ready to jump too deep into this pool right now, though. You’ll find more information on AWStats in the “Installing
AWStats” section, later in this webpage

I’ll be honest with you. Working with log analyzers can sometimes seem nearly as complicated as just trying to use the raw data coming from the server. Most log analyzers require that code be added to your Web site or Web server and then the reports have to be programmed before you can receive them.

On the flip side, server log analyzers can allow you to parse server data in ways that some other programs won’t let you. With this technology, you can design reports that meet very specific needs (if you know how). For example, if you need a report that not only tells you what page of your Web site that visitors entered on but also what time of day they came to your site most
often, you can program a report to divulge that kind of information. If you’re using a program like AWStats, the first thing to understand is that log analyzers count visitors differently than analytics programs do — one like Google Analytics, for example. AWStats looks at the IP address — the unique numerical address of a computer on the Internet, kind of like a street address
for your house — of each site visitor. If one person visits your site a number of different times, AWStats counts that as only a single visitor. By comparison, a program like Google Analytics tracks computers by placing a cookie on the hard drive. That means that if a user clears out his browser cache — that’s a record of the sites the user visited using that computer — or if the
user logs in from another computer, Google Analytics counts him as more than one visitor. Looking at IP addresses is a little more accurate because even if a user clears his cache, the IP address for his computer remains the same. (Logging in from a different computer is still a problem, but as far as I know, there’s no way around that kind of user being counted more than once with any stats program.)

Next, understand that programs like AWStats are more about the numbers than what can actually be extrapolated from those numbers. For example, with AWStats, Web crawlers are identified according to a list of crawlers defined by the log analyzer. Usually, a person creates the list, and the program then compares data against that list to determine which visits are
from Web crawlers and which are from real people. The problem with this approach is that if the list of Web crawlers is not all-inclusive, a crawler could be counted as a visitor. The result, then, is that the number of visitors can be skewed. Because AWStats doesn’t look at things like where a visitor comes from, it’s hard to tell what’s a crawler and what’s a visitor if the crawler
doesn’t appear on the list of excluded IP addresses. On the other hand, Google Analytics does look at where visitors come from. And Web crawlers have very specific origins, so it’s usually pretty easy to tell which of your visitors are people and which are programs that are designed
to crawl a Web site.

Installing AWStats
AWStats is a free program that’s available from SourceForge. To download the program, go to http://awstats.sourceforge.net. After you download it, install it.

If you’re planning to use AWStats to track your Web site traffic statistics, you must have access to your Web server. Unless you own that server (or your company owns the server), you probably don’t have that access. If you’re purchasing a hosting package from a Web site host, AWStats isn’t the right program for you to track your statistics. If that’s the case, you need to use a program, such as Google Analytics, that tracks your statistics without you
having to get access to your Web server.

Assuming you do have access to your Web server, here’s what you’d do to install AWStats:
1. After you download AWStats (from http://awstats.sourceforge.net), find the file and extract the AWStats package. Whatever extraction program (for example, WinZip — available at www.winzip.com) you use will have different instructions for the extraction process, so refer to that program’s documentation if you’re not sure how to use it.

2. If the installation process doesn’t start automatically (it should with Windows Installer but it won’t with any other operating system), locate the AWStats Tools Directory and double-click the awstats_configure.pl script to begin the installation process. Awstats_configure.pl tries to determine your current log format from your Apache Web server configuration file, httpd.conf. (The script asks for the path if it can’t find the file.)

3. If you use a common log, awstats_configure.pl suggests changing that log to the NCSA combined/XLF/ELF format. You can use your own custom log format, but this pre-defined log format is often the best choice and makes setup easier. If you answer yes, awstats_configure.pl modifies your httpd. conf file, restarts Apache to apply the changes, and then creates a
new file called awstats.mysite.conf by copying the template file awstats.model.conf.
These actions should occur automatically (though they may require your confirmation in some areas).

4. To verify that the main parameters of your new configuration file match your needs, open awstats.mysite.conf in your favorite text editor — the file should be located on your hard drive and you can use the search function of your computer to locate it — and make the
following changes, as required: Verify the LogFile value. It should be the full path of your server
log file. Verify the LogType value. It should be W for analyzing Web log files.
Check the LogFormat. It should be set to 1, although you can use a custom log format if you don’t use the combined log format. Set the SiteDomain parameter: It should be set to the main domain name or the intranet Web server name used to reach the Web site
you want to analyze (for example: www.mysite.com). If you have several possible names for the same site, use the main domain name and add the others to the list in the HostAlias parameter.

5. When you’ve finished editing these elements, save the file to its original location.
Installation and configuration are now finished and the wizard should close automatically.
You may have to wait a couple days to see results from the log analyzer — and you still have to figure out how the program works if you want to get your results! After a couple days, however, you can begin creating stats reports by going to www.myserver.mydomain/awstats/awstats.pl — it’s a Web-based program. Just remember to replace myserver and mydomain with your own server and domain information. It’s a pretty complicated process, though, so I suggest that you read more about using the program by going to http://awstats.sourceforge.net/docs/awstats_setup.html.

Because Web crawlers change, a log analyzer can occasionally misinterpret a Web crawler as a real person. It’s not a major mistake, but one of which you should be aware.

Tracking Stats with Google Analytics
If you’re asking my opinion about the best programs to use for tracking Web site statistics — go ahead! Ask. — Google Analytics is definitely #1 on my list. It’s easy to use, it’s free, you don’t need access to your Web server, and you don’t have to be an ubergeek to use it. Google Analytics also provides all the statistics that I think you need. (I’ve been known to be wrong a time or two,
but just keep that between you and me.)

Google Analytics started life as Urchin Analytics. Urchin was one of the premier Web site traffic statistics programs available on the Web — at an expensive price. Then Google bought Urchin and made the program available for free. The number of people who adopted it during the first few days of release was overwhelming. Google actually had to close the program to new
users for a time to catch up with demand. It’s no surprise that demand for such a powerful stats program was very high, especially at a cost of exactly nothing. The statistics that are available
through Google Analytics will satisfy almost everyone looking for Web site stats and are certainly enough to help you understand how your AdSense ads are performing.

Understanding Google Analytics quirks
The thing about Google Analytics that’s different from a log analyzer like AWStats is the way that visitors on your site are tracked. Log analyzers tend to track visitors by IP address. Google Analytics actually tracks visitors by placing a cookie — a small snippet of code that acts as a kind of software ID collar — on the visitor’s hard drive. Then, each time the visitor comes to
your site, that cookie is recognized by Google Analytics. The more Web-savvy among readers will immediately see the problem with relying on cookies to get the job done. A cookie is only trackable as long as it’s on the visitor’s hard drive. So, if a visitor comes to your site, clears out
his Internet history, and then returns to the site in the same day, that user is tracked as two different users. Numbers can get a little screwy.

Most people don’t clean out Internet histories on a daily basis — some never clean out them at all — but that’s one of the issues you should be aware of. Google Analytics also can be fooled by people who set their browsers to not accept cookies at all. It’s a privacy issue. Some believe that when a company (any company) is tracking their movements on the Web, their privacy
is invaded. On principle, they edit their browser preferences so that the browser won’t accept any cookies. (Editing your preferences is a snap to do, in case you’re wondering.) I don’t necessarily buy into that school of thought, but I can understand why some people would feel that way.

Regardless of whether you understand the anti-cookie stand of some folks, the fact still remains that a percentage of your site visitors may have set up their browsers to reject cookies. If that’s the case, Google Analytics can’t track those people. It’s a small percentage, but again, enough that you should be aware it’s a possibility.

Even with these issues, Google Analytics remains my favorite Web site traffic statistics program. Because it’s free and easy to install, I recommend that everyone at least try it for a month or two. If you don’t like it, you can always move on to something else.

Intrinsically, the difference between log analyzers and programs like Google Analytics mostly involves methodology. Which program you use is determined by what you’re looking for. I much prefer programs like Google Analytics over log analyzers because, as far as I’m concerned, the information that I need is covered by Google Analytics. You may not feel that way, and that’s okay. Just choose the program that works best to meet your specific tracking needs.

Installing Google Analytics
Google Analytics, like all Google programs, is easy to install. It requires that you register for the program and then install the tracking code. Easy-peasy. Here are the basics for getting started with the program:
1. Point your browser to www.google.com/analytics. The Google Analytics home page appears.
2. Click the Sign Up Now link. A sign-up page appears.
3. If you already have a Google account, sign into Google Analytics with that account. If you don’t have an account, register a new account with Google.
4. After you sign in, click the Sign Up button (as shown in Figure M1). You’re taken to the New Account Signup page.


Figure M1

5. In the New Account Signup page, enter your Web site’s URL, an account name (this can be any name you choose), your time zone location, and your actual time zone into the appropriate text fields and then click Continue.
6. In the new page that appears, enter your contact information (including name, telephone number, and country) and then click Continue. The User Agreement page appears.
7. Read through the user agreement, and if you agree with the terms of service, select the Yes, I Agree to the Above Terms and Conditions check box and then click Create New Account.
You now have an Analytics account, but you’re still not quite done. A new page appears, displaying your tracking code, as shown in Figure M2. This snippet of code is how Google Analytics tracks the visitors to your Web pages.
8. Copy the code provided and paste it into the HTML of your Web site immediately before the tag of the site. Now, you’re really finished.
After you place the tracking code on your Web site, it could take a couple days before you begin to see any statistics about the site on Google Analytics — stuff like number of visitors, where they came from, and how long they stayed on your site. Even then, the statistics aren’t really valuable beyond telling you who’s been to your site. There’s nothing historical to compare the statistics against.

Getting the real value of Google Analytics takes at least 30 days — long enough to have enough information to compare timeframes and see what a normal baseline for your site is.
After you allow enough time to establish a baseline, you can really tell what tweaks are valuable in terms of bringing in more site traffic — and seeing what may be pushing traffic off your site. For example, if you have a high percentage of your visitors leaving your site on a specific page, you know that there’s something about that page that could be turning your visitors off, so
you can tweak the page to try to hold them on the site longer.


Figure M2


Analyzing Analytics
After you set up your Google Analytics account and have a few days to collect numbers, the true value of the program starts to shine through. This section shows you how to put that value to use.

When you log on to your account from the www.google.com/analytics/page, the first screen that you see is a Dashboard overview of your available stats, as shown in Figure M3.


Figure M3


These stats are, by default, the stats most folks consider important when it comes to Web site traffic numbers. You may not be like most folks though, which is why you’re free to add other snapshots to the Dashboard if you’d rather see something there. One thing you can’t do, however, is remove or replace the Site Usage stats that you see at the top of the page. These are
fixed permanently in place. You can change the dates shown in the Site Usage section — the default dates always show the previous month. You’ll find a handy navigation menu on the left side of the page, right under the Dashboard heading. This menu collapses and expands, according to where you click it. As shown in Figure M4, clicking one of the headings in the menu expands the menu so you can see additional reports that are available under that heading.


Figure M4

Of all the reports that are available to you, the most useful ones in terms of tracking AdSense info are found under the Traffic Sources and Content headings. Under Traffic Sources, for example, you can access the following reports:

* Referring Sites: This report, as shown in Figure M5, shows which other Web sites referred visitors to your site. This is important to yourAdSense earnings because in addition to placing the ads on your page,you should also be marketing your site. One way to market your site
is through other Web sites. This report tells you how successful those marketing efforts have been.

* Search Engines: The Search Engines report shows you which search engines sent visitors to your site. Because you know that your site is search engine optimized by keyword, this gives you a glimpse into how well your keywords are helping search engines list your site in search
results.

* Keywords: The Keywords report shows which are the most popular keywords that bring visitors to your site. No better tool is out there for finding out if you’ve chosen the right keywords for your site. You can then use this information to ensure that your site is targeted accurately to the keywords that bring people in. In turn, your AdSense ads will be
further optimized to the correct keywords.

Figure M5
In addition to the Traffic Sources reports, the Content reports also contain some useful insights. All these reports are related to the content on your site, so if you want to know what’s working and what’s not, this is where to find out. The most useful reports from this section include

* Top Content: This report lists the most viewed content on your site. Do you want to know what visitors to your site are looking at or how long they’re spending on specific pages? This report tells you. The report, as shown in Figure M6, lists the top URLs. You can then click each of the
URLs to view more in-depth information, such as the time users spend on the page and the number of visitors that exit from that page.

* Top Landing Pages: Landing pages are where a visitor first “touches down” on your site. The Top Landing Pages report shows you exactly which of your pages those are. This is useful in a couple different ways.

First, if you’re conducting marketing with a specific entry page, you can track how effective that marketing is. Second, this information is helpful when you want to know what pages users seem to be finding on their own, especially if you’re not conducting any marketing campaigns.


Figure M6

Top Exit Pages: Similar to the Top Landing Pages, this report shows you information about how users move about your site. The Top Exit Pages report shows you where users jump away from your site. If you’re an AdSense user, this information can be invaluable. Most AdSense users
don’t put ads on every page on their site. Instead, they place ads on certain, optimized pages. This report, as shown in Figure M7, lets you know if those pages are where visitors are leaving your site. It’s not a guarantee that your ads are working, but it’s definitely an indicator that
your ads could be performing well. You can use this information along with the data provided in AdSense reports to see which pages seem to be working better for ads.

* Site Overlay: For AdSense information, the Site Overlay is my favorite of all Google Analytics reports. The Site Overlay report literally overlays your Web site with a graphic that shows you which links on the site are most clicked, as shown in Figure M8. Above all other reports, this one is the most telling of how well your AdSense ads actually work.


Figure M7



Figure M8

Each of these reports is presented in graphical format. At a glance, you can see the most basic information for the report. You can also dig deeper into the report and further segment the data by using drop-down menus (when provided) and by clicking blue, linked text. Each report has a different set of capabilities, so take some time to get to know the finer side of each report.
Remember that Google Analytics alone won’t tell you everything you need to know about how your AdSense ads perform. Combine your AdSense stats — the ones found in your AdSense reports, which I cover in next webpages with your Google Analytics stats and then you can get a clear picture of what’s working and what’s not.

Keep in mind that it takes some time to establish a baseline from which you can determine which efforts seem to be working and which don’t.

Channeling with AdSense
When you’re tracking what works and what doesn’t in AdSense, you soon discover that no single tracking method works best. Instead, a combination of tracking technologies helps you gather all the data you need. In addition to a Web site traffic statistics program, such as those I discuss earlier in this webpage, AdSense offers another method of tracking that can help you determine
which ads perform best — channels.

Google explains channels this way:
Channels enable you to view detailed reporting about the performance of specific pages and ad units. By assigning a channel to a combination of pages or ad units, you could track the performance of a leaderboard versus a banner, or compare your motorcycle pages to your automobile pages. You can even create a channel to track each of your separate domains, so you
can see where your clicks are coming from. While channels can be used to track performance and revenue, they won’t have any effect on your earnings or ad targeting.

The way you use channels is determined by how you want to track your ads and by the revenues generated from those ads. You can track them by ad, page, and even Web site — whatever works best for you. When you have that information, you can cross-compare it to your Web site traffic statistics to figure out even more about what’s working and what’s not.
Understanding AdSense channels AdSense offers two different types of channels: URL channels and custom channels. URL channels track your AdSense ads by URL. You can track either
single pages or you can use the top URL (www.sitename.com) to track every page within a Web site.

Custom channels allow you to track specific ads, according to parameters that you define. You can use a single custom channel to track multiple ads on multiple Web sites, as well.
When using channels to track your AdSense ads, the code that’s generated for your ad differs slightly from what would be generated if you weren’t tracking the ads with a specific channel. However, the code should still be pasted into your Web site or blog in the same manner that you added code that isn’t tracked by channels.

Creating effective channels
One very useful facet of using channels is that these differentiators allow you to track the effectiveness of changes that you might be testing in your ads.

For example, if you’re running two sets of ads on your page, one with borders and one without, you can assign different channels to these ads to see which performs better.
Here’s a hint: Ads without borders nearly always perform better than ads with borders. Taking the border away seems to make some site visitors more willing to give an AdSense ad a try — maybe because it doesn’t really look much like an ad.

The first thing you need to do when you decide to use channels is to figure out exactly what purpose the channels have.

Why do you want to use channels?
Do you want to see how well a specific ad design is performing? Or do you want to track how effective ads on a specific page of your site are?

After you determine what you want to track with channels, you can begin to create the channels that will serve your needs. You can create up to 200 different channels in your AdSense account, and after you create a channel, you can rename, deactivate, or delete it completely if you’re no longer using it.

The next few sections give you all the details.
When you start to create a new channel, the process is set to create channels for AdSense for Content ads. You have the option to create channels for Referrals and Mobile Content, too. If you choose to create a channel for one of the other types of AdSense, click the blue linked tab for that option. AdSense for Search is the only type of ad that you can’t create a URL channel for.

Creating URL channels
Creating AdSense channels is an easy enough procedure. When you’re creating URL channels, have the specific URL that you want to track. If you want to track a whole site under a single URL, the top-level Web address is the one that you need to use. If you’re tracking a specific page on your Web site, be sure you have the exact URL for the page that you want to track. With that
information in hand, here’s how you can create your first URL channel:

1. Log in to your AdSense account and go to the AdSense Setup tab.

2. Click the Channels link on the AdSense Setup tab. You’re taken to the Channels overview page, as shown in Figure M9.

3. Click the URL Channels link.
The page view refreshes to show URL channels that have been previously
created (if there are any).

4. Click the + Add New URL Channels link.
The page refreshes to show a form for entering URLs, as shown in Figure M10.


Figure M9


Figure M10
5. Enter the URLs that you want to track in the text box provided.
Make sure you only enter one URL per line.
To track a single page: Enter the full URL (example.com/sample. html)
To track a script that generates multiple pages: Enter the full path of the script, without the ? (example.com/sample.asp?keyword=one) (example.com/sample)
To track only pages across a specific subdomain: Enter the subdomain (sports.example.com)
To track all pages on a domain: Enter the domain name (www.example.com)
To track all impressions and clicks across the domain (including any existing subdomains): Enter the domain name without the www (example.com)

6. After you enter the desired URLs, click the Add Channels button. Now you have URL channels available to you if you want to use them to track your ads.

Adding older ads to a channel
After you create a channel to use for tracking, the ads that already exist on your Web site aren’t automatically tracked. Instead, you have to update those ads or create new ones. To edit ads:

1. Log in to your AdSense account and go to the AdSense Setup tab.
2. Click the Manage Ads link.
3. On the Manage Ads page, select the ad that you would like to edit.
You’re taken to a page that looks like the original setup wizard for the ad except that it’s all contained on a single page, rather than on several pages.
4. Make the changes that you want to make — in this case, you’re choosing a channel from the drop-down menu.
5. When you’re finished, click the Save button at the bottom of the page. That’s it. Editing your ads really is that easy. And if it’s new ads that you’re working with, you can find more information about creating a new ad in earlier webpages.

Creating custom channels
You create custom channels pretty much the same way you create URL channels. The difference is that with custom channels, you use a specific channel name rather than a URL. When you’re creating your custom channels, use descriptive names for the channel. For example, if you’re testing large rectangles against link units, you can create two channels, naming one Large
Rectangles and one Link Units. When it’s time to see the reports broken down by channel, there’s no doubt what each channel refers to.

Here are the steps for creating custom channels:
1. Log in to your AdSense account and go to the AdSense Setup tab.
2. Click the Channels link at the top of the tab. You should be taken automatically to the Custom Channels page, but if you’re not, click the Custom Channels link.
3. Click the + Add New Custom Channels link.
You’re taken to a channel creation page, like the one shown in Figure M11.
4. Enter the desired name for the channel and then select whether to allow the channel to be shown to advertisers as an ad placement.
If you choose to allow the ad placement option, the channel is shown as available for advertisers to place cost-per-impression ads — ads for which you’ll be paid based on the number of people who see the ads.
5. If you choose to show the channel to advertisers, the form you’re filling out expands, as shown in Figure M12. Enter the requested information and then click the Add Channel button.
If you don’t choose to show the channel to advertisers, you can move on to the next step.
You’re returned to the front channel page where you began, but now you see the channel you created listed below the + Add New Custom Channels option.


Figure M11



Figure M12

After you create a custom channel, you can go through the same process you used for URL channels to add ads customized to the channel or to edit existing ads. (See the preceding section, “Creating URL channels,” for more info.)

Tracking your AdSense results should be a regular part of your AdSense activities. Through tracking these results, you discover your successes —and failures. As with any technology, throwing it on the Web without thought of what works and what doesn’t isn’t likely to get you anywhere. But with some consistent effort, and tracking, you’ll figure out what works and what
doesn’t. Then you can make the most of your AdSense efforts.