AdSense Tip 10: AdSense Tracker and Other AdSense Software

December 2, 2005

Tracking which AdSense format, color, or position works best on a page or a set of pages can be very helpful. Using the information provided, we can drop things that don’t work, adapt new things to test (one thing at a time), keep doing tactics that work, focus on creating more content that earns us the most, and other creative uses.

Google AdSense allows us to assign specific channel name to the AdSense code that we generate. To be able to find it useful, we have to assign a meaningful name that is self explanatory.

While this feature is extremely useful, it does have its own limitation. First of all, Google AdSense allows you to create only 100 AdSense channels, plus 100 AdSense search channels. They have increased the limit from 50 originally and for some of us they are more than enough.

But limitation is just that, some of us who believe in the power of tracking may find that quite annoying. Not to mention that to have AdSense track the ad for specific page, you have to assign it a new channel. There is nothing you can do to let it automatically track every page separately without additional effort.

Google also don’t tell you which ads get clicks the most. Sure you can view your page and have an idea what ads are being serve at a time but we all know those change quite often, and are not specific enough for them to be useful.

Google AdSense tracker software comes to the rescue. Basically what this software does is using a sophisticated programming methodolody to track clicks at a specific frame of the content displayed in the visitor’s browser.

Because some of these software use a powerful database backend, it can save and load a lot of useful data for publishers to examine. For example, here are some of the features you may find useful:

* Individual page views.
* Record all clicks on the AdSense ads.
* Track click-through.
* View report by domain, page, ad formats, etc.
* Track clicks by advertiser.
* Track clicks by IP address.

If you think about this for a while, this data can provide very precious information that you won’t get from default Google AdSense stats. For example:

* Knowing which ads people click the most allows you to build content more specific to that ads, so you got more of that ads.
* Contrarily, you can disable ads that are not targeted and don’t generate clicks at all.
* Let you know which ad formats or color combinations work best so you can adjust other codes accordingly.
* Knowing which part of your sites perform the best allows you to focus on that specific area of your website.
* Detect and know exactly if there are some hosts who click on your ads repetitively (click fraud)

Below are some of the most popular AdSense tracker scripts:

* AdSense Gold
* asRep
* Adsenselogger (free, but was taken down for now due to legal reason as of this writing)

Note that publishers are solely responsible when using such tool because they may or may not be against Google’s TOS, depends on how it actually tracks clicks and other information. Make sure you verify any additional tool or software used in conjunction with AdSense so you don’t have the risk of being banned by Google.

With that said, here are some of AdSense software that I found useful:
Google AdSense Charts and Graphs Chart your AdSense data per channel, including impressions, clicks, and earnings information (free).

* AdSenseDesktop - Analyze your AdSense data, display both tabular and graphical presentation.

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