How important are Adsense channels?

[jensrsa]

I know that to be able to track your Adsense income they are important.

But ...

Do they affect your results if you use the same channel across similar sites?

Do the affect your income if you use them for different size ads, change the code?

Why I ask

I run a number of travel directories that generate a reasonable traffic but looking at my stats for July it shows only 85 impressions and 5 clicks!!

One of the sites alone has over 4000 visitors per month and have Adsense in a number of postions on virtually every page.

Can anyone explain this?

Jens

[askloz]

You'd need to contact Google about that.

4000 visitors per month and only 85 impressions. something is wrong.

it's my best guess that google already knows what your page(s) are about, and if not clicked on enough, will show irrelevant results, thus. will not show impressions on your site since they are not related to content. They do this to prevent Adwords advertisers paying more, or less than they should do on unrelated sites.

[John Hocking]

Adsense Channels are mainly for tracking and tweaking your ad placement
to get the best click throughs.

If you are using the same channels accross sites and accross ad sizes, you are losing the value for testing.

I am not sure why you would get only 85 impressions on a 4000 visitor site unless the visits were not actually loading the page.

[keithngu]

using the channel will NOT affect any result. the earnings will be the same whether you use the channel or not. It's just a tool for you to track which site is earning more and you can concentrate more on that particular site or page.

For your case of only 85 impressions on a 4000 visitor site, go check whether your adsense code is inserted correctly into your page or not. This is probably the reasons why you get so low impression even you have 4000 visitors.

[Solidsnake]

My advise is to create different channels on for every page you wanted to promote... There are 2 negative effects of using the same channel over and over again. 1. Impressions might be counted more than once, 2. impressions might not be counted at all... The number 2 is what seems to be happened to you.

[yaji]

I did not see this could affect the results. But this is just my obseravtions.

[Easy Cash]

You should really use the channels to your advantage.

Create a new one for each site.

Having that many visitors and only that many clicks is not good at all.

Are you sure you are getting that many visitors?

If you are - look at your ad positions as this will make a big difference.

[RorRobRob]

As the other posters have mentioned, adsense channels are there to help you track which pages or sites are doing better. Using them or not using them should not affect your traffic levels. It sounds like there may be some technical problem with your ads , though, if they're not showing all the impressions they should show. Have you visited all the pages the ads are on to make sure the ads are showing properly? It could be as simple as a problem with the adsense code on your pages.

[jensrsa]

Thanks, for your responses.

I am using separate channels for each web site but not for each ad position and the ads show when I visit the site and browse it.

Well, the site used to get a lot of traffic from auto submission services (which isn't real traffic) until I changed the directory so some of the traffic may still be these. But looking at the traffic from Google itself the figures still don't make sense.

I'll play around with the ad positions, etc. to see if I can figure it out.

Thanks

Jens

[jensrsa]

Yesterday I did a test and clicked through on ads in the different ad positions - these clicks didn't show up on my stats. How do I know? No clicks or impressions showed. Maybe Google is just clever but it was telling me to make some changes.

I use Joomla for my sites and am using a adsense module to insert the code.

I've now change the site discussed to insert the straight Adsense code rather than using the module. I also set up ad units for the different ad positions.

Within minutes after making these changes the impressions started to show.

Maybe these ad units don't work in the Joomla adsense modules?

Jens

[dburk]

Hi, jensrsa

Clicking your own ads was a very bad idea. This will get you banned from AdSense for life.

Your impressions and clicks from yesterday may show up eventually. the were doing a major update on AdWords/AdSense yesterday and stats from that period will be delayed for sometime.

Based on what you have written, I would say the problem all along was with Joomla. In my experience, Joomla has a lot of issues. You should look at your page code after you set everything up and make sure that the AdSense code has not been altered.

[jensrsa]

Originally Posted by dburk

Hi, jensrsa

Clicking your own ads was a very bad idea. This will get you banned from AdSense for life.

Your impressions and clicks from yesterday may show up eventually. the were doing a major update on AdWords/AdSense yesterday and stats from that period will be delayed for sometime.

Based on what you have written, I would say the problem all along was with Joomla. In my experience, Joomla has a lot of issues. You should look at your page code after you set everything up and make sure that the AdSense code has not been altered.

I agree and it's no something I would normally do. I thought about it but in the end decided it was the only way I could check, so I clicked.

As a result I made some changes to two site and within 12 hours the site has had 25% of the impressions of the month of July and another site had 80+ impressions compared to zero last month.

Well, I have at least 50 sites to change asap and hopefully double my Adsense income vitually "overnight".

How much I lost since this started I don't even wnat to think about!

Jens