AdSense have added the ability to use multiple custom channels on the one ad unit.
I have to admit that when I first read it when I got up this morning that it made my head hurt a little but I can see it being a useful option for some publishers who are really into tracking their statistics. The example AdSense use to explain it is probably the best:
“What’s the benefit of tracking with more than one custom channel? Well, multiple channels can be very useful when you want to track one ad unit across several different metrics simultaneously. For example, let’s say you run a sports website and you’ve placed a leaderboard at the top and bottom of every page. To track the performance of the ad placement, you’ve created two custom channels — ‘TopLeaderboard’ and ‘BottomLeaderboard’ — and regenerated your ad code appropriately.
But what if you also want to compare your football pages and your baseball pages at the same time? With multiple custom channels, this isn’t a problem. Just create two new custom channels called ‘FootballPages’ and ‘BaseballPages’, and add them to the appropriate ad units. Now your leaderboards will each be tagged with two custom channels that let you know which position they’re in (top or bottom), and the type of page on which they appear (football or baseball).”
I suspect that the majority of AdSense publishers will never use this – but that a small number of publishers are busily adding multiple custom channels to their sites as we speak.
I used to spend a lot of time tracking this kind of information and experimenting with different ad placements. These days I much prefer to spend most of time creating new sites/content.
I can see that being useful in some situations but I’m wondering if I’ll get the time to implement it. My channel setup is woefully inadequate as it is. I agree with Mike.
Tracking via channels has proven to be very useful to me. I was able optimising settings, etc. So yes, tracking is knowing and knowing is improving. My adsense revenue went x 6 since april and about 30% of the latest increase is thanks to tracking carefully and learning from it.
I can see how that can be useful when you want to easily have a summary of all your codes by site. It justs involves changing all codes we use now (which can be done since we have them on an adserver).
Now my question is, do you get more channels? If the old 200 channels limitation is still on, then this might be waisting some precious channels. We aren’t that far from using 200 to track activity of several formats across some 20 sites…
Hopefully I’ll be making enough in the near future to where channels will be something I can utilize, heh. Good to know it’s there.
I’m not too sure what happens if you delete a channel with earnings. I did it once. It seems to delete the earnings as well.
I think I will use this new feature in one or two websites, but it takes a lot of time to change the adsense code in bigger websites. Custom channels could be very usefull, but you have to keep in mind that ad units tagged with multiple custom channels will log impressions or clicks in each channel. As a result, you’ll see a higher number of impressions and clicks when you view your channel reports than when you view your aggregate reports.
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If it takes you a long time to implement channels, you aren’t doing it right.
Ads should be generated by code, not statically inserted. So, on every page you have a call to a script that generates the ad – change the script, and you’ve changed the ad.
In my case, I take it a bit further: scripting generates the entire page, reading the text portion from static files and inserting ads and other dynamic content on the fly. That lets me tag the ad channel based on the content of the page etc. So, for example,
(in pseudocode)
$gadch1=”9929927590″; # default age channel
$gadch1=”8338221560″ if $article_age
Hello,
I tried alot to setup channels, but didn’t succeed. Dunno how,(now my head is going to blast due to this problem) can somebody help me in setting up multiple channels ? thanks
Do you know if you can dynamically generate channels on the fly or can channels only be configured through adsense?
Can we use multiple blogs for single account? with multiple corresponding ad sense code?