Putting AdSense code on your web pages is only the beginning of making money with Google AdSense advertising. Once you’ve added AdSense for Content and the other AdSense products explained in Chapter 8 to your pages, you need to know how well your AdSense revenue is doing in relationship to how well it could be doing. Monitoring your performance so you can make changes to make more money is a very important part of successfully working with AdSense.
This chapter explains the reporting and performance tracking tools available in the AdSense program and what you should be looking for in terms of performance.
When you log into AdSense from the AdSense home page at https://www.google.com/adsense/ (after your account is up and running and you have ads on your site), the first thing you’ll see is the Reports Overview window, with the current day’s earnings displayed, as shown in Figure 9-1.
Scrolling down the page shown in Figure 9-1, you’ll see links to optimization tips (Figure 9-2) and links to premade custom reports (Figure 9-3). Note that these custom reports open in the Advanced Report window preloaded with the specified content.
Returning to the initial daily earnings screen (shown in Figure 9-1), click the top channels links shown to see the statistics for your top-performing channels (Figure 9-4).
When you click the Advanced Reports tab (or view AdSense channels links), the Advanced Reports window opens, as shown in Figure 9-5. This is used as an extensive and complete way to monitor your performance in the AdSense for Content program.
Once you really get going with AdSense, you are quite likely to have a number of custom reports you’ll need to organize and keep track of (see Running Reports). That’s where the Report Manager, shown in Figure 9-6, comes in.
