Integrate Google Adsense with Google Analytics
Way back in October Google Adsense's blog officially launched integration for Adsense with Analytics so you'd actually know when your blog posts or pages are getting clicks and be able to optimize even more. I don't know about you, but I found the Adsense channels not very interesting and sometimes more confusing.
The Problem with Adsense channels
Yes, if you set up a channel for a site you'd know that a site was getting clicks, but without knowing which URLs or URIs were getting the clicks, there wasn't much you could do.
One big question I have is if people are clicking just on product info pages, category pages, coupon pages, blog post pages, etc.? If people are only clicking on ads on certain pages then I could perhaps use a larger format on them and remove ads from the pages that don't get clicks.
I'd also be able to compare the content and see if a certain writing style or a specific topic or category were getting clicks IF I could see those statistics.
From October my excitement turned to worries of vaporware. It is hard to stay focused and excited after seeing almost half a year go by without an update on the Google Adsense blog. In fact, I had forgotten about it until yesterday I saw the link in my Adsense statistics telling me I can integrate... It took me a while to remember what that was about and I spent this morning adding Analytics code to my header and footer only loading when no Wordpress cookie is set since normally the logged in user is me 99% of the time.
The Google Adsense Analytics integration solution
Google Adsense integration with Google Analytics adds a new "Adsense" menu item under "content" in Google Analytics's sidebar menu. If you click on that you'll see statistics on how much money was earned for that website profile and you CAN see which page was clicked on!
You can also see information about the people who clicked on an advertisement like the city they live in. Perhaps you'll want to make a post just for that visitor next time. Another great feature to the integreation is the ability to see clicks by referrer (website that linked to you!), so if you got a link from another blog or a forum and someone clicked through and then clicked on a Google Adsense advertisement on your website, there'd be a reference there. This can be useful because you could work more with those sites to get more traffic and hopefully make more money to pay those hosting & domain registration bills!
The Adsense report page is now very detailed with the common statistics to help you understand your CPC earnings. You get statistics per impression, per visit, per Adsense unit, and Click Through Rate. The pages with the most earnings and the top referrers are listed right below.
I think the pages with the most earnings will be great. The usual pages with the most visits will not necessarily be the pages with the most earnings. I'm excited again! Thank you Google for finally making statistics available. I'll be checking it often.
