How to get the data you need to manage AdSense for profit

Which ads make dollars?
Which ads make cents?
Which pages get the clicks?
Which don't?

To grow your AdSense profits you have to know

*

which ads perform, get clicks, make money
*

which pages perform: get most traffic, get most clicks, make most money
*

which color schemes perform: get more than their fair share of clicks
*

which ad formats earn the money: get most clicks and make most money

You can't manage this complex process without raw information.

But Google doesn't tell you much and what you do get is many hours out of date.

One service gives you tons of data and much more. It is the AdSense Tracker. This service will tell you

1.

Where your clickers are coming from - by referrer, by search engine and by search engine keyword.

This information can tell you where you should focus your promotional effort and budget. If you are getting clicks mainly from keywords about one topic, then use this information to increase the content of your site about that topic. If you are getting most clicking visitors from 3rd party referrals, expand that aspect of you internet marketing campaign.

2.

Which ads your visitors are clicking on - click through rates, names of the advertisers.

You can use this information in 2 ways: first you can re-focus your page content to concentrate on the content that most closely relates to the high clicking ads. Secondly you can use your Google AdSense control panel to block the low performing ads. This will give even more prominence to the best performing ads.

3.

The click through rates for each page on your site(s) - what percentage of your visitors produce the clicks

If you know this you can see how to steer visitors through your site. Suppose one page gets a much higher click through rate than any other, make sure that this page features prominently on your home page with a big and obvious link.

4.

Click through rates for each ad format: size and shape, and color schemes.

Simple but powerful information this. If you find that changing the ad format from black and yellow to red and yellow increases your click through rates by 20%, then do it throughout your site and the chances are your overall click through rate will rise = more money. Likewise with the size and shape of your ads.

5.

Detailed down to the click data - the IP address of the clicker, the source of the clicker, the page he /she was on, when he / she clicked.

Use this data to see how many people are clicking on more than one ad on your site, when your ads get clicked (can help you work out which part of the world they are in) and where they came from.

You can do this for an unlimited number of domains too whereas at the moment Google only lets you track up to 20 domains / pages.

I've used this tool for several months now and find the data I get not only useful from the point of view of increasing my AdSense profits, it is also interesting. For example, I can tell that I am getting clicks on ads that appear in the USA but which don't appear in the UK.
How it works

Simple: you just add a short piece of JavaScript into your pages underneath Google's own JavaScript code.

Once you've done this you can see all the detailed information in REAL TIME about your AdSense income via an easy to use control panel. You also get high quality graphs of your data so you can monitor and react to trends.

As an added bonus, you can use the system to track more general visitors to your site and, perhaps most usefully, see which keywords people are searching on to find you.