Although I’ve actually been signed up for the Google AdSense programme since September 2003, it wasn’t until recently that I started making some serious efforts towards earning some decent income from it. Up until March of 2005, my monthly income would typically reach a very unimpressive handful of dollars and getting paid seemed to be an annual event.
Since then, I’ve been making efforts to earn a more signifcant income from the Google AdSense programme. Sure enough, March 2005 saw me earning just over US$16!
Looking back, my AdSense earnings have actually been growing on a month-by-month basis and in January 2006 I actually received over US$1,700 from Google in return for showing other peoples ads on my websites.
When asked about what I’ve done to cause such a huge increase in earnings, I usually explain that it’s down to a number of factors with the key being able to track my performance i.e. what websites are earning the most, how much traffic they’re getting, where this traffic comes from, the most profitable keywords to target, etc.
In order to carry out this tracking, I’ve found a number of tools to be valuable:
- Statistics provided by Google through the use of channels.
- AWStats provides information about traffic, the keywords people are using to get to my sites, where they’re coming from and the most popular pages.
- A Perl based click tracking script that told me what adverts were being clicked and which websites they were advertising.
There was also a lot of testing involved in order to try and find the best ad types to use and the best location on the page to put them. The statistics from Google gave the conversion rate of every website over a period of time so it was easy enough to gauge the effect new layouts had on it, however, these stats were only able to provide a daily breakdown over an entire domain. For any additional information, such as the actual ads that were being clicked, I had to resort to a third party script.
The Perl based script I started using provided me with a lot more information about my websites AdSense performance because I could now see exactly what ads people were clicking on and on what page they were on at the time. This was useful because it allowed me to better target ads that converted well, but it didn’t tell me how those people who clicked had reached my site in the first instance.
Another disadvantage of using the Perl script was that it had to be installed for each individual website and the reports it generated weren’t as comprehensive as I wanted them to be. I could use a single script installation across many domains, but because it wasn’t designed to be use in that way the reports became unwieldily.
With better reporting, I’d be able to improve my AdSense performance even further, which is why I’ve just installed AdSense Gold as it’s able to tell me a whole lot more about traffic behaviour in to, within and out of my sites. It will even tell me what keywords are converting best whereas previously I was only able to tell which keywords my websites were popular for, not which keywords got the most clicks.
When you’ve got more than a handful of websites to try and keep track of, having a single installation that will cater for multiple websites is great feature!
P.S. Click here to find out how I increased my monthly AdSense revenue to a 4-figure sum.
Technorati Tags: Tracking Google Adsense Clicks, Google AdSense, Click Tracking, Google AdSense Tracking
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