What are Channels?

Channels enable you to view detailed reporting about the performance of specific pages and ad units. By assigning a channel to a combination of pages or ad units, you could track the performance of a leaderboard versus a banner, or compare your motorcycle pages to your automobile pages. You can even create a channel to track each of your separate domains, so you can see where your clicks are coming from. While channels can be used to track performance and revenue, they won't have any effect on your earnings or ad targeting.

It's easy to set up a Google AdSense account, generate the code needed to display ads on your site, and paste the code into the source for your blog template or web site pages. By doing so, you can start earning advertising revenue immediately-or as soon as someone starts clicking the ad links on your pages, anyway. But if you're interested in learning more about which ads are most successful for you, you need to take another step: Set up and use Google's channels feature.

Channel Basics
The channels feature enables you to assign a unique identifier to a domain name or specific URL, or to a type of ad unit. The channel name is included in the code that utilizes it. Google tracks AdSense activity by channel for your account. You can easily display activity by channel, thus making it possible to analyze AdSense revenue by channel.

There are two types of channels from which to choose:
- URL channels, and
- Custom channels.

URL Channels
Use URL Channels to track your performance without modifying your ad code. By entering a full or partial URL, you can begin tracking the performance of particular pages in your site. You can enter a top-level domain name to track all of the pages on that domain, or you can enter a partial URL to track all of the pages below a certain directory. Entering a full URL will track the performance of that particular page.

To create a URL channel:
- Log in to your account at https://www.google.com/adsense
- Click the Channels link below the AdSense Setup tab.
- Choose the AdSense for content sub-tab and click the URL Channels link
- Click Add new URL channel, and in the resulting text box, enter the URL that you would like to track.
- Click Add channels.
- The new URL channel will begin tracking data almost immediately.

Keep in mind that because URL channels don't require changes to your code, there's no need to designate a URL channel when generating your AdSense code. Once you've created a URL channel, it will track automatically.

Custom Channels
Custom channels allow you to track the performance of specific ad units based on your specified criteria. By pasting channel-specific ad code into your pages, you can track a variety of metrics across a range of URLs. Use custom channels to track the performance of different ad formats, for example, or to compare different page topics to one another. To learn how to create and assign custom channels, please read How do I create custom channels?

You can also turn any custom channel into an ad placement on which advertisers can choose to place their ads.

With up to 200 AdSense channels, plus 200 AdSense for search channels available for each publisher, you can use channels to gain the insight you need to optimize your site's performance. It's easy to add, deactivate, or rename your channels, and customized reports are simple to generate.

Custom channels can be used to help you track which ad colors, formats, and placements are most effective on your site, or to provide answers to questions like:

Creating Custom Channels:
Understanding how you can use custom channels to answer the questions above will be essential in optimizing your AdSense ad unit performance. Let's take a closer look in the following example.

Scenario: John owns a site about cars. His homepage currently has three ad units and one link unit, and John wants to find out which of the units is performing most effectively. To do so, he'll create a separate custom channel for each of the four units to monitor their performance.

Creating and implementing custom channels requires a more involved process than that for URL channels. No worries - we'll show you how to create custom channels in 4 easy steps:

Continue to choose the ad type, ad format, and color palette as you would normally, then in the Channels section,

Listed below are more articles related to the above article from the "Internet Advertising" article category.

People interested in the above article "What are Channels?" are also interested in the related articles listed below:

Craigslist: Free Display Advertising for Newbies

Craigslist offers access to millions of potential customers free or real cheap but it takes some marketing know how to tap into this mother load of traffic. Most advertisers get a zero response rate or get booted quickly simply because they really don't know how to use Craigslist effectively. Here are some important tips.

Best Advertising Methods on the Internet

There are various advertising methods one can use to promote their business website on the internet, but it can also be tough to get your site in front of all the other sites offering similar products or services. Using the internet can get your product out to millions of people but without proper marketing there is no sense. Your site will just site there in cyberspace with no visitors.

Online Audio Advertising – How To Boost Your Internet Business With Online Audio Advertising

Online audio advertising is becoming more popular by the day. Internet marketers have realized that using audio can drastically increase conversion rates. You may have noticed that a large majority of sales pages (particularly relating to information products) utilize audio and/or video. This is no coincidence. Good marketers split test their sales pages and have come to the conclusion that using audio simply makes the prospective buyer feel more at ease and forges a relationship that is not possible with text alone.

Primary Elements of Graphic Designs

Graphic designs have become a part of every website in recent years. They are being combined with text as a part of website designing. The amalgamation of graphics and text is considered a tactic of effective graphic design This article discusses key features that are of importance in creating effective graphic designs. It also explains some benefits of having a graphic design portfolio.

How To Get Cheap Internet Advertising

This article will include how the product and service are presented to your customers and the way it's presented to help you capture the target market you require. Ad media plays a big role in influencing the achievement of service and product knowledge. What could help is the other proven form like the best-selling TV ads?

Advertising on Social Networks: Does it pay?

An eMarketer report predicts increasing advertising revenue from social networking websites such as MySpace and Facebook. MySpace recorded an annual profit of $440 million for the year ending on June 30th 2007. Factors that will contribute to the continual increase in online advertising revenue for MySpace include advances in advertising capabilities, partnerships with major search engines (eg Myspace and Google, Facebook and Microsoft) and growing use of social networking sites globally.

Copywriting Should Cosely Interact with Graphic Design

Marketing Gurus are somewhat divided in debating this "chicken and egg" theory as to what comes first - copywriting or graphic design? There are as usual two schools of thought – one in favour of copywriting and the other on the side of graphic design. I am Neville, a freelance copy writer who believes that both need to be integrated in liaison with each other and firmly advocate a balanced approach to web design and writing – at least on the Internet.