Determining Adsense earnings for each section of a site

[csdude55]

I have 55 sites, and each site has 13 main sections; eg, classifieds, message boards, event calendar, etc.

I would like to determine how much each section earns in revenue.

I set up URL Channels awhile back, but since I have to do it all manually I just did 3 of my main sites. But it looks like these just show data for the exact page, not all of the sub-folders and pages.

Meaning, I set up a channel for:

https://www.example.com/classifieds/

The report shows data for that page, but not:

https://www.example.com/classifieds/list/
https://www.example.com/classifieds/view/?id=1
https://www.example.com/classifieds/view/?id=2

and so on.

I obviously can't create an URL channel for every page of the site (there would literally be millions). So how can I determine the value of the section instead of just the opening page?

[keyplyr]

Have you tried Channels?

[csdude55]

You mean Custom Channels? I do have them set up, but I can't pretend to understand the point. When I look at the report for each ad size, am I seeing revenue from advertisers that specifically targeted that Channel? Is there an "optimization" method I should know about? The whole thing is vague and confusing.

How do I modify or create a Custom Channel to target a specific section of the site? Looking at the creation method, it doesn't say anything about that. And I don't see a modification in the code to show a specific channel on a specific page or anything.

[keyplyr]

You do it on your end. On the section of your site you wish to track, just use a specific channel. Use a different channels for different sections.

Custom channels allow you to track the performance of specific groups of ad units. You design your own custom channels and use them to view performance of ad units in ways that are meaningful to you. You can create up to 2000 custom channels for each of your AdSense products

[support.google.com...]

[csdude55]

I've been researching like crazy, and I keep finding suggestions that you CAN do it... but no explanation of HOW.

For example, from the link you gave me (@keyplyr):

Here are a few examples of ways you can group and track ad units with custom channels:

*Ad sizes and colors
*Location of ads on a page — left side vs. right side, embedded in content or above it
*Page topics — articles about sports vs. entertainment

OK, so I can group them by "Page topics"... but how? When I create the Channel, the fields I have are:

Name
Ad Units (with a field to select ad units to group together)
Targeting (yes or no checkbox)
External name
Ads appear on (text field, says "e.g. Sports articles; Electronics homepage)
Ad location (eg, "Top right")
Description
Site language

How do I specify that I want to group the selected Ad Units, but just from (for example) example.com/classifieds and child pages beneath that?

Is there an Adsense for Dummies tutorial or something? LOL

[keyplyr]

Its been years since I used custom channels.

I suggest setting up a couple test pages.

[NickMNS]

I find that custom channels tend to be redundant. The reason is that there needs to be at least one ad unit created for each channel used. In most instances, simply tracking based on ad units is sufficient. Say one wants to track articles by author, the article template has two ad units. To setup channels for each other one needs create two ad-units for each author and assign the two to the appropriate custom channel for the author. Now since each author ends up with two ad-units, one can simply see the performance of the ad-units and skip the custom channel step. Obviously if you have many ad-units per author then there will be a benefit to setting up the channels.

Setting up channels is straight forward. You create the ad units as described above, then within the setup of the ad-unit you go to the custom channel tab, create the channels you need and then simply assign the specific ad-unit to the channel. There can be many ad-units per channel and many channels per ad unit. I don't see use case for the many channels per ad-unit but it is doable.

The one benefit of the channel is that can be targetable in the auction. So in your case, some authors may attract advertiser interest and the channels would allow the advertiser to target the author's channel specifically.

[csdude55]

Oh, I see... I have to create different ad units for each section, then add them to a Custom Channel to make them targetable? If that's the case then that does seem kinda redundant... if ad units were just made targetable then there wouldn't be any need for the channel.