Using the CTR and cCPM of a page, versus individual ad units

Different approach to looking at your stats?

[maximillianos]

Some of you may already do this, but it is a new way of thinking for me... So I was curious who else looks at their stats this way.

I have been tweaking my ads for months trying to squeeze out some dollars to make up for the downturn in ad bidding, etc. The other day I realized I had been analyzing the wrong data (I think). I was so worried about each individual ad unit's performance that I never really took a look at the big picture, how the page as a whole was performing.

I stack two ad units on top of each other, and then have a link unit near the bottom of my content. When I analyze the page as a whole, I realized I should be adding the CTR from each unit (not averaging), and adding the eCPM (not averaging) to get the performance at the page level...

When a user visits my page and clicks an ad, it should not count against the performance of the page due to the fact that the other 2 ad units did not get a click. A click on any one of the 3 is a click for the page for that one pageview.

I realized the more useful stat (for me) is to look at the page as a whole, and how all 3 add units work together.

Interestingly I could not find such a stat in the Adsense reports. When I do an advanced report and select the 3 channels used, combine them by page, it actually averages the 3 channels out, which does not make sense to me... since all 3 are shown on 1 pageview, and I wanted to know my performance at the page level.

Anyway, does anyone know how to create such a report in Adsense, or even if it is possible?

Or, am I off-base on my thinking about this? It seems to make sense as a useful stat to me, but what do you think?

[CWebguy]

Create one channel and assign all ads to this channel, now you have all ads reporting for this one channel ;)

[maximillianos]

True, that would work. But I do like to see the various units numbers for informational sake. For instance if one is not getting any clicks, I would not know to remove it if I combined all my channels.

I just wish they would have an option to report the numbers by pageview, and not average the 3 ad units.

What is weird, when you do the "show data by page" option, it actually adds the pageviews from the 3 channels, but then it averages the CTR and eCPM? That seems like a bug to me?

The pageviews should be unique pageviews, not added, and the clicks/eCPM should then be calculated against the page stats, not the Ad unit.

[incrediBILL]

If you want to see your ads per page simply enter the individual page names you wish to track.

I have channels for both the ad units themselves so I can track which ones are performing, and channels for all the major pages.

Then I can get a report per ad units or per page, plus you have the AdSense in Google Analytics that shows you additional information.

[maximillianos]

Interesting. Thanks I did not know you could do that. I will try it.

[incrediBILL]

Before I forget, if you have multiple domains names under a single adsense account you can simply enter each domain name like EXAMPLE.COM as a channel to get tracking per domain.

[CWebguy]

yeah, I always do that for each domain. You won't get specific pages, but you will get overall reporting for each domain which is nice (and which will give you an average of all pages running there).

[maximillianos]

Thanks guys! I tried the URL tracking and it works great.

[AdSenseAdvisor]

While you're setting up channels for reporting purposes, I thought I'd share a couple of "Fun With Channels" articles from our Help Center:

- targetable channels [google.com]
- A/B testing with channels [google.com] (There's also a blog post on setting up experiments for A/B testing)

Let me know if you have any questions or feedback about channels, reporting options, etc.

ASA