Understanding (URL & Custom) Adsense Channels

ustom channels allow you to track the performance of specific groups of ad units. You design your own custom channels and use them to view performance of ad units in ways that are meaningful to you.

There are two types of channels:

1. URL Channels

URL channels allow you track the Adsense performance under a specific URL. The URL could of an entire domain or subdomain or directory or even a specific page. The beauty of this is not you don't need to do any thing on the website side. Google automatically reports the Adsense performance with the URL. This is usful when you want to assess the overall performance of all pages under specific sections of your site.

For understanding this consider the following example provided by Google:

·         example.com track all pages across all subdomains

·         sports.example.com track only pages across the 'sports' subdomain

·         sports.example.com/widgets track all pages below a specific directory

·         sports.example.com/index.html track a specific page

2. Custom Channels

Custom Channels allows you to track the performance of a particular ad or group of Ads that you have generated, by placing a channel id all those Ads that you want to group and track.

With these channels the id for the particular channel you create is included in the actual Adsense ad code that you generate. Every ad that you include this code in, will report its performance under that particular channel even if they are different format sizes or appear on different pages or different websites.

Viewing reports for custom channels

Since you've created a custom channel to track the performance of specific ad units, it's important to know how to view a custom channel report.

1. Sign in to your account.
2. Visit the Performance reports tab.
3. From the sidebar, select Custom channel.
4. Click a custom channel in the table to view more detailed statistics.
5. You can also select from the View dropdown above the table to segment your channel.