If you are using Adsense to monetize your site(s)/blog(s), it is important that you know which of the sites/pages are getting more number of clicks i.e. performing better with the program. This would give you a better chance to maximize your profits from your sites. Some sites always perform better than others because of the niche they are based on. At the same time, the location and the color combination of the ad blocks also determine the number of clicks. In order to keep track of all these factors, you have to use custom Adsense channels.
Adsense channels provide information about the performance of Adsense ads on different sites. You will have to create separate channels for each site or page you wish to track. For example, if you have a website and a blog and wish to keep track of the performance of the adsense ads on both of them individually, you can create two channels and name them like “site” and “blog” (I use the site’s URL as the name of the channels.), generate the code and then insert in into your webpages. When you start getting impressions and clicks, you can, monitor the performance of each channel separately and experiment with the color combinations/locations until you get better performance.
By default, you get 200 Adsense channels and another 200 search channels (Search channels are meant to track the performance of Adsense for search). If you are a “small time” Adsense publisher, 200 channels should be more than enough. However, if you own too many websites and blogs, 200 channels may not be sufficient. If this is the case, you have to look for an alternative way to keep track of the ads. Unfortunately, there is no way to increase the number of channels and so the only way out is to use a third party advertisement tracking software.
As far I know, the best advertisement tracking/serving software is OpenX (formerly OpenAds and before that phpadsnew). And best of all it is absolutely FREE! See www.openx.org for more details on this open source project. OpenX can be used to serve and track Adsense ads without any problem and you can create unlimited number of “channels”. It will also provide you with detailed statistics about the impressions/clicks generated and you can compare this with the data in the Adsense control panel. OpenX also has lots and lots of other features like geo-targeting, ad rotation, etc and you can take full advantage of these to maximize your profits. You can also keep track of fake clicks on your ads.
Installing OpenX is not so difficult. The installation process is very intuitive enough and you will have no difficulty in getting used to the OpenX interface in no time. Besides, there is plenty of documentation on the Internet on the same topic. If you have a cpanel based hosting account with Fantastico, you can very easily install the script. I have phpAdsNew in my Fantastico installer. I know it is a bit outdated, but it does the job perfectly.
Now, is it okay to use OpenX to serve Adsense ads? The answer is a YES! The Adsense TOS mentions that you are not allowed to modify the Adsense code in any way. When you use OpenX to serve the ads, you don’t modify the code in anyway. The software just serves the javascript and tracks the number of clicks and impressions. And this is in compliant with the Adsense TOS. To confirm, I once sent an email to the Adsense support team asking them if it was okay with them. And they replied back saying that it was perfectly okay. But if you still have doubts, you can write to them and I am sure they will say it is okay.
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