In addition to the facelift at AdSense today there is also news that there are new reporting features. The AdSense ‘what’s new page’ explains that there are two new features – firstly the ability to see how much of your traffic is viewing ads that are being targetted to your site specifically by advertisers (impression based ads) and how many visitors are viewing normal contextually targeted cost per click ads.
To view these – go to your Advanced Reports tab, then choose the ‘AdSense for Content’ in the first drop down menu, then check ‘show data by individual ad unit (it doesn’t work with viewing by page unfortunately) and then check the ‘Show data by targeting type – contextual or site’ box. It will then show you some new stats that you won’t have seen before.
The other new reporting feature that is being rolled out is referral reports which now can be checked over any date range (previously they only showed it in your ‘overview’ page which was quite frustrating.
To view your referral stats go to ‘advanced reports’ and then in the ‘choose product’ drop down menu choose ‘referrals’ and generate a report.
The only other thing that I notice that seems to be different is that when I went to log in to AdSense today it did so without asking for my password – something AdWords has done for me previously but not AdSense.
My comments:
The ability to see how much is being earned from site targetted ads is fantastic. I’ve long suspected that some of my sites were being targetted in this way (including ProBlogger) and now I can see that this is the case. In fact here at ProBlogger the majority of some of my ad units are being targetted by advertisers.
Surprising to me is just how many of my blogs are being targetted in this way. On my own personal blogs every single blog has site targetted impressions and over at b5media a bit under half of our blogs are being targetted by advertisers (higher than I thought considering that most of those blogs are very young).
Having said this – on the vast majority of my blogs site targetted ads make up very very little of the overall income. In fact on all blogs (except for ProBlogger it seems) the site targetted ads are around the 1% mark of the overall figures. ProBlogger is the exception to this and it’s site targetted ads are actually paying more than contextual ads over the last month.
One suggestion – I’d love to be able to see JUST site targetted stats on channels – all side by side. At present they are all mixed in with the contextual ads but comparing between channels is a little difficult.
update: The AdSense blog (official) has a little more news on the topic
Interesting… I always wondered what kind of ads were being run on my sites. Most are contextual but I have a fair number of Site ads and to be honest, contextual advertising is beating site advertising hands down…
Yeah, 1% of site-targeted ads looks like close to what I’m getting as well. If they appear, that’s fine, but they really aren’t making me that much money.
On the other hand, the new reporting quickly showed me that I actually made a $100 from an AdSense referral last week, a fact I somehow missed.
[…] En principio supuse que el rediseño de la interfaz de Adsense era simplemente una forma de lavado de cara pero ProBlogger me hizo notar que hay nuevas funcionalidades en el sistema de reportes. […]
Huh, on the plus side I seem to be gettin up to 10% site targetted ads, but on the downside, I almost always earn less from them in terms of eCPM than the contextual ads. Should I turn off the “advertise on this site” feature?
I’m kind of shocked to see that someone’s actually targeted my site – I didn’t think we were big enough to get the attention.
@Stephen – AdSense *say* they only run these things if the eCPM works out better for you, so assuming they’re being honest about this, it could be that they’re showing these on ad units that have a lower eCPM, or maybe running them at times or on specific pages that would otherwise tend to do badly.
The ability to see information about the targeting type is really useful.
I was very surprised to see that site-targeted ads have a much lower eCPM on my sites!
Would someone have an explaination?
On my site the site targeted ads have much lower CTR and eCPM. It’s great they’ve added this feature to reporting, but now we need a way to turn off site targeted ads. Seems like I’m not the only one missing out on earnings from them.
Google have just answered this very question.
The new system makes it much easier for me. The stats seem very accurate.