by: PuRe
Google's Adsense program is a great way for website owners to finally make some money for all their hard work. Google Adsense ads are mainly text ads that use the powerful algorithm of Google search to carefully match and target ads to the contents of a webpage. Google has recently started including fancy graphical ads into their arsenal.
Adsense has been considered by some a revolutionary program that blurs the lines of the digital and financial divide. No longer are just large sites such as Cnn and Aol making large advertising revenue. Today anyone with great content, niche site or even a blog can become apply to become an Adsense publisher. Adsense publishers have enjoyed this program, with many people saying it has one of the highest payments per click in the industry. One complaint has been persistent since the introduction of the program, the quality of Google's Adsense publisher reports. Adsense publisher reports leave much to be desired. Google has introduced channels as a means for publishers to distinguish how many times an ad is displayed in a certain location or how many times that particular channel is clicked, but that's about it. It's not really much reporting when you compare it to other programs.
People ask me all the time, how do you do so well on your adsense campaign? Normally I kept that information secret, as a recipe for a successful campaign, but today I'm going to share it with you. One thing I hated so much as an Adsense publisher was that I never new exactly what ads were being clicked, specifically what was my visitor interested in? Using channels didn't let me determine specifically which page the ad was on that they clicked the ad on. Using Google reports, I couldn't determine who was referring valuable traffic to me, was it the search engines, was it link exchanges, directories? Google's reporting, outside of how much I made, really didn't report anything. Not doing anything about it and being ignorant of all this important information was my worst mistake. Google has all these stats because they know it's important, so why shouldn't the publishers too?
Ok, it's getting close to the part where I tell you my secret to Adsense success. I'm pretty skeptical about buying software that I can't change or modify to fit my own purpose, so I guess I'd say I'm an open-source man.When I finally found an open-source program that claimed it could give me the stats I was looking for, I gave it a real look. It's called Asrep , written in PHP and Perl (yes, that's two choices). Asrep is the premier adsense monitoring script. It's the swiss army knife every Adsense publisher should have in their back pocket.
First, before I get into anything, the small code that you add does not alter any Google code, and it does not violate their TOS, we actually asked, yes, you can exhale now. How exactly does click tracking affect your Adsense revenue your probably thinking? I'm getting to that answer, just bare with me a little longer. Normally on any given day I'd log into my Adsense account and be happily surprised, not alot of clicks but I did make a good amount from them. I wish I knew what that ad was, or even what keyword caused that ad to show, because I'd certainly want to target those higher paying ads for my site. Now you don't have to wish, with Asrep you can actually get detailed reports on just about any Adsense information you could want to know. When I say all the information you'd ever want to know, I mean all. I'm talking about serious reporting Google hasn't even thought of giving publishers, for example the click thru rate of a particular referrer. Yeah, you heard that right, now you can actually find out which traffic is being converted into clicks.
Still being ever skeptical, I decided I need to take a little test drive of Asrep, seeing is believing. It took all of 3 minutes to install, and another nice thing is that it works on multiple domains too, so you don't have to do multiple installations. You'll be able to get Geo-Ip information so you can determine where your visitor is from. This program is perfect, for those who are scared about losing their hard-earned account to Click Fraud, or even the suspicion of it. We all know that click fraud is one of the plagues of our industry and once your site is suspected of it, you might as well throw in the towel. Don't be the victim, now you can be proactive in combating click fraud be letting Google know about repetitive clicks from a certain IP address, before Google lets you know!
Now that you can see which traffic gives you the best click thru rate you won't have to waste your time with bad ad campaigns. Now that you know which pages give you the most clicks you can improve their look and target more traffic to them. Now that you know which ads give you the most revenue per click, you can target them better with your page content. It's all about the Adsense Reporting and thats my secret recipe to running a successful Adsense campaign, that and staying on top of Adsense News.
I hope this article helps out everyone who have been considering running Adsense on their website.The Author PuRe runs an Information Technology Community site at www.pureehosting.com