URL Channels in Google AdSense
There's a great new bit of functionality in Google's AdSense: URL channels.
Channels are used in Google AdSense to understand on which of your pages Google ads are being clicked. Before these new URL channels (which were added in the last couple of days), here's how the process of using channels worked: You'd create a channel in advance, and each of your channels had slightly different underlying code. In the Google AdSense publisher interface, you could then display reports on a per channel basis (or on the aggregate). Per channel reports showed you where your hits were coming from.
There are some problems with this way of reporting channel data:
- You have to set the channel up in advance.
- What if you didn't realize beforehand that an area of your site was going to grow and needed its own channel? You'd have to change the code in all the pages in the area to add them to the channel.
- What if you are using a mechanism for replicating the Google AdSense code across an entire site or sites, for example, server-side includes (SSI). An automatic replication method like this won't work with channels that require differing internal codes.
URL channels solve these problems, and demonstrate concretely Google's ongoing commitment to improving the usability of its services.
To start with, you don't need to set up a URL channel in advance. You can wait and see how your site grows.
All the Google AdSense code on your site can be the same, so you can use a cross-site replication method like server-side includes.
When you are ready to create a URL channel, you just specify a URL. For example, www.braintique.com/research. All pages and directories "below" the specified URL become part of the URL channel. There's nothing else to do, and you can change URL channels as you need depending on how your site changes or grows. You can generate aggregated reports, and when you need more analysis (to show which AdSense pages are working, and which are not) you can create reports to view the click-through results from one or multiple URL channels.
Nifty!
Posted by Harold Davis at January 19, 2005 09:29 AM
