Understanding Your Google Adsense Account Reports

The Google Adsense program is one of the most popular ways to make money online, even after various changes which make it somewhat more difficult for publishers to make money from Google Adsense than it used to be pre-2006. These days, publishers need significant help with Google Adsense before they make a decent income from it.

After a series of questions and some outright misinformation being bandied about in the HubPages forums, I got tired of typing out long answers, and I decided to put the information in a Hub, so that anyone who needs it can get the comprehensive answer they deserve, without cluttering up the forums.

What is Google Adsense?

Google Adsense is a pay-per-click advertising medium.

Google Adsense publishers place Adsense ads on their websites, and whenever a visitor to the site clicks on an ad, the publisher receives some money.

There is some misleading information floating about the web, which suggests that publishers are paid for impressions (ie when the ad is shown to a visitor) as well as clicks. This is not the case. Some other types of online advertising are paid per impression, but not Google Adsense.

Google Adsense help is available from Google itself, but Google holds its cards close to its chest and doesn't always give out the information publishers most need.

How Do I Use Google Adsense?

If you are using Adsense on your own personal website, you need to understand where to place ad units, and what designs of ads will convert better (ie, get more people to click on an ad). You will always need to test and refine your layouts to improve your click-through rate (CTR). More about CTR later - for now, just know that bigger is better when it comes to CTR.

On a platform like HubPages, the owners of the platform take charge of some of the most difficult aspects of making money from Google Adsense. HubPages programmers (or in this case, Yieldbuild programmers via the Yieldbuild testing algorithms) make the decisions about the placement, size, color, and design of Adsense ads on Hubs. As a writer, you can relax about the technical aspects of using Google Adsense, and concentrate on producing appropriate content, instead.

As a HubPages author (or a contributor at any other, similar site), all you need to do is get yourself a Google Adsense ID, and enter that ID in your Affiliate Settings panel, accessible from your "My Account" page.

If you also intend to use Adsense on other sites, or have started using it and are not getting the results you want, you will need to research the secrets of Adsense - ad unit placement, choice of colors, page design and layout, and so on. This link is just one of many available books - I happen to know the author of this book did his own research on his own sites, and isn't just passing on stuff he has never tried himself (always a risk with this particular industry). However, you can find good information elsewhere, I'm sure.

Google Adsense Reports

Google wil provide you with reports, which can help you to understand what is happening with your Adsense ads. They can also help you to make decisions about how to improve your returns from Adsense, whether you are using Adsense on your own site, or here at HubPages.

Here you can see some sample data from a Google Adsense account report. Each row in the report will represent either a whole site, a subdomain, or a single page, depending on how you set them up in the first place. You can change the set-up at any time, but the data will only collect from the time you make the change, so it is best to set up each new site as a channel as soon as you put Adsense on it.

I won't go into the technicalities of how to set up channels in this article - that could be a whole page on its own! I am much more interested in the thought process involved in looking at your numbers and making sense of them.

You can change the time period for the Adsense report to any of today, yesterday, last 7 days, this month (so far), last month, or all time. Make sure you have in your mind what the time period is, or you can confuse yourself mightily!

Page impressions refers to the number of times someone looked at a page on your site. Each page may have more than one ad unit, and the ad units mayhave more than one ad in them, but "page impressions" is set by default to report page visits, regardless of whether the page had one ad on it, or nine.

You can change the impression reporting to get down to the level of individual ad units, or separate ads, but the beauty of using a platform like HubPages is that you don't need to do that - decisions at that level of detail all taken care of by the software. You can leave the setting at is default level of "per page", and that's just fine.

Clicks - pretty obvious. This is the number of ads that were clicked on.

Page click-through rate is the number of visitors who clicked on an ad as a percentage of the total number of visitors to the - CHANNEL. I know it says "page", but it actually means "channel". Depending on how you have the channel set up, that "page" may be one page, or many pages. If you follow the basic instructions given by HubPages, for example, you will have all your Hubs set up as a single channel, and all the visitors to all your Hubs (and your profile page), along wiht all their clicks, will be amalgamated into a single number.

Page eCPM is the source of so much confusion!

For a start, "page", as with "page impressions" and "page CTR", refers to the entire channel.

Secondly, the "e" stands for ESTIMATED. This column is an estimate of possible future income, not a statement of current earnings.

CPM stands for "cost per thousand" (M being the Latin for thousand) - it is a hangover term from the offline advertising industry, and sure causes a lot of hangover-like pain.

What this number represents (when you have fewer than 1000 page impressions) is a projection of your current results. It is saying "if you got 1000 people to your site, and those 1000 people did on average what your visitors have done on average in this time period, then you would make (eCPM) in click revenue".

Once you have had more than 1000 visitors, and you are looking the report for at a time period with more than 1000 visitors, the eCPM is a statement of what you made on average per 1000 visitors to your site, during that time period.

Earnings, on the other hand, is what you were actually paid for the clicks during that time period. This is the only number on the report which represents real money.

So, now we know how these numbers are calculated, let's move on to the "so what?"

What do these numbers mean?

These numbers allow you to understand what is happening on your sites, and where your greatest profitability lies. This can help you to direct your activities to improve your overall earnings, by focusing on the best parts of your publishing portfolio.

The top row of the report is a summary - the totals of everything. So, overall, during this time period, this account had a click-through rate of 2.51%. This is not great, but if you look down the Page CTR column, you can see that most of the sites have a CTR much higher than 2.61%. Only two sites have a rate lower than the average of 2.61% - but those two have the bulk of the traffic.

Lesson number 1 - get more traffic to the sites that are converting better!

Do we take Adsense off the ones that convert poorly, then?

Well, of the total earnings in the period of $23.49, a whopping $9.63 came from one of the low CTR sites - that's nearly half the income. About 41%. Would you want to lose 41% of your income? No. A low CTR plus high traffic can still bring in some money.

Lesson number 2 - look at ALL the numbers, not just one. And THE important number for the here-and-now is actual earnings.

OK, so we're not going to ditch the low-converting site (just as well, because in the example it's representing HubPages!) - but we want to make more money, so we want to get more traffic to the higher-converting sites.

Which one do we start with?

Thinking music ... look at the numbers ... where is our marketing time best spent? ... thinking music ...

Hands up who voted for the site with a CTR of 17.95%?

Mmm hmmmm.

Hands up who voted for the site with CTR of 7.62%?

Yes, here's your kewpie doll.

Why that one?

If you're confused about why that site is the best choice, look at the eCPM column.

Assuming it takes about the same amount of work to get 1000 visitors to any site, you want to invest that effort in the site that will pay you the most for your effort.

The site with a CTR of 17.95% will pay you an estimated $22.76 per 1000 visitors on average. The site with a CTR of 7.62% will pay you an estimated $52.54 per 1000 visitors - more than twice as much money for exactly the same work.

The difference happens because clicks are paid at different prices. Basically, advertisers are willing to pay more for some clicks than for others, which means that you will earn more for pages on some topics than on others.

The 17.95% CTR site is getting a good rate of click-through, but they are lower-priced clicks when they come - 12.7c on average. The 7.62% CTR site is getting fewer people clicking, but when they DO click, it's ka-ching! About 69c per click.

You can work out how much you are averaging per click by grabbing a calculator and divding the earnings by the number of clicks. Lord knows why it isn't a column - something to do with the veil of mystery Google likes to draw over its pricing calculations, I would guess. It's silly, because you can easily work it out from the data they DO give you, but I guess they are banking on most people being too under-educated or too over-worked to do the math for themselves.

Now, this is a very basic overview of your Google Adsense account report. The whole area of increasing your Adsense revenues is a vast wilderness of information, misinformation, and outright exploitation, but if you are serious about making a living wage out of Adsense, you need to get the right information, and study it thoroughly.

On the other hand, if you are happy to just get a bit of pocket change while you exercise your writing muscles on a site like HubPages, you need never so much as glance at your Adsense account report. It is a useful tool for making business decisions, and if you don't want or need to make business decisions about your Adsense advertising, you don't need to use the Google Adsense Account reporting tool at all.

Images: paul_irish