Posted in Adsense, Analytics, Google, money | 5 Comments
Google Analytics and AdSense
If you are an AdSense publisher, you need to know about this! Google has started allowing people to link their AdSense accounts to a Google Analytics account. They are rolling it out slowly, and I just got mine hooked up a couple of days ago.
Wow! Is it great! It will tell you exactly how much each page on your site is earning in AdSense revenue. Before this, the only way to find this out was to set up a channel for each page, and if you have a lot of pages on your site, forget it.
Now you just get a snippet of code to put on your site, in the footer is best, and it will track all the pages that have that code. If you have a WordPress blog, you just update your footer once, and it will be on all your pages.
I got a huge surprise when I installed this on one of my sites. Almost 56% of the AdSense revenue on that site is coming from one page! (See the screenshot below.) And this site has hundreds of pages.
(Click photo to enlarge)
You can bet I am going to add more pages that are similar to that page which is earning most of the money.
The way you know if your AdSense account is ready to be connected, is that when you are inside your AdSense account, you will see a link saying something like “Connect to a Google Analytics account” or something like that. Since I’m already connected now, mine says “Go to your Google Analytics Account”. If you don’t already have an Analytics account, it will walk you through the steps to create one.
It is a little confusing to find your way around the Analytics account until you get used to it, but it is well worth it. Don’t worry if it doesn’t show you anything right away. Once you install the code they give you, it will take a day or so for it to gather data and give you your reports.
One thing to be careful of – if you have more than one site, you will need to add an additional snippet of code “at the top” of your site. I didn’t know what they meant by “at the top”, so I put it in the Header file, right after the <body> tag, and that is working fine.
Anyway, to get this additional snippet, in your Analytics account, go to “Analytics Settings”, then “Edit AdSense linking settings”. (Do this AFTER you have set up the sites in Analytics and have gotten the code to put in the footer.) Once you go there, it will give you a list of your sites. You pick one to be the primary site, and for the rest, it will give you the additional code to put in the header.
It is well worth taking the time to do figure this out and set it up for all your AdSense sites. Let me know if you find any surprises like I did!
- Pat Doyle
i think analytics is terribly cumbersome. there are plenty of tools out there that do the same thing yet are much quicker to load
The tools I have found, will not tell you the detail about Adsense that Analytics does – such as what pages are earning you the most money in Adsense… If you are not using Adsense, then you probably don’t need that though. I still use Statcounter for a quick overview of my stats.
I wonder when they finally build usable charts into Adsense. I’d prefer to see charts right there, not to look for them in Analytics’ menus.
Many webmasters find this google analytics very useful. They can improve every individual page of their site with this tool.
I have a few website hooked up with AdSense which have been under monitized and this tool has helped me to make some improvemtns which actually increased my conversions by almost 30%