Xotopia:Unlimited Informations Sharing

You’re starting to get clicks on your Google AdSense ads and the cents are starting to mount up to dollars – it’s now time to start tracking your statistics (from this point on, called stats).

OK, what do we mean by tracking stats? What starts should you be keeping an eye on and what do they mean? There are a number of different stats that Google AdSense provide you with that are worth keeping an eye on:

• Page impressions
  The number of pages with ads on that have been displayed to visitors
• Clicks
  The part of the equation that earns you the cash!
• Page CTR (Click Through Rate)
  The number of clicks an ad receives divided by the number of times the ad unit is shown
• Earnings
  How much cash you make
  

You probably know that, ideally, you want to see each one of these figures increase over time (although with, say, page CTR, there is a ceiling that you will eventually hit, after which, these figures will plateau). You definitely want to see your clicks and earnings go up over time (although small dips are to be expected, along with dips associated with times when fewer people are online, such as over the Holidays), because this shows that your website or blog is growing over time.

OK, but what do you do if your earnings start to take a nose dive? Not look at your stats? Hide under your bed? Hope that things will change and get better?

No! You take a look at your stats! Why? Because you’re looking for what’s caused the dive in earnings. Your stats can tell your a lot about what’s going wrong:

• Are you earning lower because you are getting fewer visitors? This will translate into fewer impressions and fewer clicks. If so, you need to take a look at your web site logs and try to figure out why. A good place to start is by looking at your referrer log (where your traffic is coming from). What changes can you see there? Are you getting fewer hits for your top topics because someone else is beating you in the search engines? If so, you need to find out why?
• Has your page CTR taken a nose dive? In this case, your page impressions will still be high but your clicks will be lower. If so, maybe something you changed about your site is putting users off? Maybe your ads are no longer relevant and they aren’t of interest to your readership. If this is the case, there are things that you can do to try to fix this (that we’ll cover in a future post).
• Is it just your earnings that have taken a dive (your page impressions and clicks are still high)? This could be because you’re getting lower quality ads which are earning you less. You now need to start attracting better quality ads (another topic for a future post!).

When things are going good, you need to keep an eye on your stats, when things are going bad, you need to put both eyes on the stats!

If your earnings have taken a nose dive, we’ll be giving you loads of advice on things that you can do to bring them on track in later posts. For now, the message we want you to take away is that stats are your friend. Keep an eye on them!

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