URL Channels or Custom Channels?

The first blog about optimizing tips posted today at the Inside AdSense Blog. This time AdSense tries to make things new, though many of us have heard of channels, most of us don't notice the difference between URL channels and Custom Channels.

URL Channels

URL channels provide an effective way to track your ad performance on different sections of your site or on different domains. Since you don’t need to change your code at all, they're easy to use. If for example you have a blog about cars and another one about boats, you can create a URL channel for each one. Then, when you optimize, you can use your channel reports to determine how your changes affected the success of the ads on each blog.

Custom Channels

Custom channels are great for pages with multiple ad units, since you can use them to track different ad units on the same page. To implement them, you’ll need to generate new channel-specific ad code. Let’s say you have a page with two ad units – one on the left side and one on the right. You can create a custom channel for each one, giving them distinct names such as ‘Left_Ad’ and ‘Right_Ad’. After you’ve regenerated the ad code for each ad unit and pasted it back into your HTML source, you can view reports for each ad unit separately. You’ll be able to see which ad unit performs better, and whether a change like removing the borders affects your earnings.

In short, when you would like to compare earnings within sites (with different domains) you should use URL channels and if you would like to see which ad performs better within a page (with a identical URL) you should use Custom channels. As mentioned by the AdSense Team over and over, you could notice which format, style, placement and your ads converts the highest earnings for you with channels. Let's see what's the next optimizing tip.

Kicking Off the AdSense Optimization Month

The Inside Adsense Blog today started off its one-month optimization month to share insights and tips together with what they said secrets to optimize all aspects of your site:

Week 1: Testing and tracking optimization effectively. When you decide to experiment with a new ad format or color palette, you want to know just how much impact the changes have had. Get back to the basics and learn about the importance of channels and A/B testing when you optimize your site. We'll finish off the week with a favorite of mine, the top 3 tips for testing and tracking.
Original post

I have heard many times from AdSense that they are helping publishers to optimize their ad placement. But so far the "tips" are so repetitive that I could almost mesmerize them all. They would tell you to try out AdSense for Search and try the link units and place ads according to their "heat map" and to blend the ads in your site by matching the ad background with the site background then track your ad performance with channels. Well, I really hope to see something different and more inspiring this time. I see a good start with the A/B testing .

Google AdSense on Google Page Creator

The AdSense Team blog about integrating AdSense ads on Google Page Creator.

We’re excited about Google’s new Labs creation, Google Page Creator. You can use it not only to easily design and publish web pages, but also monetize those pages using AdSense.

Blog Announce is one of the first to do so and you can see how the ads are placed here. Though we are still in the developing stage and needs more improvements for our ad placement, we are thrilled to hear that AdSense now encourages people to do the same as us. Learn more about AdSense here.

Read the full blog in the Inside AdSense Blog here.