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
