When it comes to building great revenues on AdSense, nothing is more important than following your stats. The effect of any change you make to your site, to the positioning of your ads or to their layout or color is going to have a direct impact on the behavior of your users. That’s going to be clear in your stats. You’ll see it in your click-through rate and you’ll see it most importantly in your revenues.
You need to check your stats regularly. A week after you’ve made a change to the way your site looks, you should check back in to see what that change did… and whether it brought you more money or less.
But your stats won’t tell you everything. They might tell you whether or not you’ve made more money this week than last week but they won’t tell you what you need to do to make even more money next week. If you really want to find out what your users are up to – and get more of them doing the things you want – you will need to use some additional tools.
Tracking Programs
The Internet is packed with tracking tools for AdSense. Some of those tools are just plain useless; others you really don’t want to do without. In my book, Google AdSense Secrets, I give an introduction to each of the main programs and point out which ones you absolutely must have if you want to maximize your revenues. For now though, just bear in mind that the tracking program you use should let you see where your visitors are coming from, where your clicks are coming from and which keywords your biggest clickers are searching for when they find your site on a search engine.
Once you’ve got all that information, it’s a breeze to use the various AdSense strategies to optimize your site and get more visitors clicking on the highest paying ads.
Graph Builders
In addition to tracking programs that tell you information that you can’t find out any other way, you should also use graph builders that make your information a snap to compare and analyze. They convert your figures into graphs so that you can see with one look how your CTR is changing and how your revenues are improving. Some of the best tracking programs include this option but even if you’ve bought the wrong one, it’s still worth downloading a graph builder – especially if you don’t really have a head for figures.
Copyright © 2005 Joel Comm. All rights reserved.
Joel Comm is Dr. AdSense, an Internet entrepreneur who has been online for more than 20 years. Joel is co-creator of ClassicGames.com, now known as Yahoo! Games and is the author of the web’s best-selling AdSense ebook, “Google AdSense Secrets (Or What Google Never Told You About Making Money With AdSense)”.