The Advanced Reports interface is designed to generate reports. To generate a report, pick your date range, select page or unit impressions, choose aggregate versus channel data (and select your channels), and click Display Report.
Note
The initial AdSense settings are to display an aggregate page unit report for the current day. When you log into AdSense subsequently, it displays the settings for the most recent report you ran. The best idea probably is to generate daily reports to get a sense of how your AdSense account is doing in real time. You may also want to generate weekly and monthly reports to get a more long-term perspective.
It’s useful to be able to save a report you’ve generated as a template. That way, you don’t have to figure out all over again how to generate the report. You can also arrange to have a report that’s been saved as a template sent to you by email on a regular basis.
To save a report as a template, once you’ve generated a report, give it a name in the Save as Report Template box as shown in Figure 9-8 and click Save.
Once you’ve saved a report as a template, you can open an updated version of the report whenever you like on the Reports Overview page under Quick Reports as shown in Figure 9-9.
You can also arrange to have the data in the report emailed to you at selected periods of time. To do this, open the Report Manager window, check the report, and enter an email address as shown in Figure 9-10.
When you build a report, you can choose any data range you’d like, by date, from the inception of your AdSense account to the current point in time, all using the interface shown in Figure 9-11; or you can choose one of the preset time spans that Google always has available.
The preset time spans are:
Today
Yesterday
2 days ago
Last 7 days
This month
Last month
This week (Monday–Sunday)
Last week (Monday–Sunday)
Last business week (Monday–Friday)
All time
Google lets you put more than one ad unit on a single page, and each ad unit has multiple ads. Therefore, it makes sense to be able to display impressions (the number of times something is displayed) by page, unit, or ad using the drop-down list shown in Figure 9-12.
Note
If you put a single ad unit on each of your pages, then displaying data by page or unit will show the same thing.
It’s easy to be tempted to throw four AdSense units (three ad units and one link unit) up on each of your pages, but try to resist this temptation. Experienced webmasters generally find that CTR goes down as pages become too loaded with ads—even AdSense ads.
You can choose to display AdSense data for your entire account by selecting the Aggregate data radio button shown in Figure 9-13.
Alternatively, you can select Channel data to show as many or as few channels as you’d like. If you choose Channel data, the drop-down box shown in Figure 9-14 will appear, and you can select the channels you’d like by checking the box next to the name of the channel. The drop-down list displays both custom and URL channels.
Note
As explained in Chapter 8, URL channels display information from the specified web address. In contrast, custom channels can be applied to whichever ad units you’d like to group together—for example, they can span multiple domains and not include all units in those domains—but must be specified before the ad units are created and included in the ad unit code.
When you are showing data by Channel, you can use the Group data by radio buttons to display statistics organized by date, channel, or grouped using both.
Note
Clicking the manage channels link opens the Channels page on the AdSense Setup tab, explained in Chapter 8.