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Written on August 17th 2007 at 11:29 pm by alexMost advertising companies allow their publishers to insert a custom tracking channel into their advertisements so they can see which of their ads earn a lot of money, and which ones could probably be scrapped, and placed in a different location. For those of you who think using channels to track ad performance isn't worth the time or the effort, you may want to continue reading this article.
Case Study
On that photography website I run, I launched it with a regular leather board advertisement above and below the current photograph. After a month I checked my ad reports and found out the bottom leather board earned me almost double what the top leather board earned. Valuable information considering the pages were optimized for the top advertisement. So I scrapped the top leather board and replaced it with a 300x250 ad-box and set static link colors in the ads. The next month my earnings increased 400%, and my CTR doubled. Without ad tracking probably would have re-optimized the website by now, but I wouldn't have realized the top leather board would be the one that had to go. And what a difference it made.
Multiple Websites
More and more webmasters now-a-days are running more than one website. Usually it's at least a blog, a website about their favorite hobby, and a social networking site (for good measure). If you don't find a way to keep track of each websites' individual earnings, you're going to have an extremely hard time trying to optimize any of your websites to earn you more money. It could be your blog is earning you $500 a month while your photo website is earning you $150 a month. You see a total of $650 and reasonably assume each website earned you about $325. But with ad channels you would see that is way off, and maybe after some AdSense optimization, your blog and your photo website might pull closer to $500 each.
The Bottom Line
As I said before, most companies allow (and encourage) using channels to track performance, and as you've just read, there's no reason not to use it. Even if it's just on one website with a couple of ads, you want to be able to maximize your profits, and keeping everything organized is the best way to start. - View comments...
Case Study
On that photography website I run, I launched it with a regular leather board advertisement above and below the current photograph. After a month I checked my ad reports and found out the bottom leather board earned me almost double what the top leather board earned. Valuable information considering the pages were optimized for the top advertisement. So I scrapped the top leather board and replaced it with a 300x250 ad-box and set static link colors in the ads. The next month my earnings increased 400%, and my CTR doubled. Without ad tracking probably would have re-optimized the website by now, but I wouldn't have realized the top leather board would be the one that had to go. And what a difference it made.
Multiple Websites
More and more webmasters now-a-days are running more than one website. Usually it's at least a blog, a website about their favorite hobby, and a social networking site (for good measure). If you don't find a way to keep track of each websites' individual earnings, you're going to have an extremely hard time trying to optimize any of your websites to earn you more money. It could be your blog is earning you $500 a month while your photo website is earning you $150 a month. You see a total of $650 and reasonably assume each website earned you about $325. But with ad channels you would see that is way off, and maybe after some AdSense optimization, your blog and your photo website might pull closer to $500 each.
The Bottom Line
As I said before, most companies allow (and encourage) using channels to track performance, and as you've just read, there's no reason not to use it. Even if it's just on one website with a couple of ads, you want to be able to maximize your profits, and keeping everything organized is the best way to start. - View comments...
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