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.
