How To Create A URL Channel

12.2 How To Create A URL Channel

Google lets you create two kind of channels: URL channels and custom channels.

With URL channels you can track clicks across your site’s pages. You can do this by entering four different kinds of URL in the “create new channel” box. Each type of channel gives you information of different accuracy:

example.com tracks all the pages in your site and gives a general picture of what your site is doing;

subdomain.example.com tracks all the pages in one particular subdomain;

subdomain.example.com/widgets tracks all the pages in a specific directory;

and subdomain.example.com/page.html tracks the clicks on one specific page.

That’s a huge range of choices, from an overview of a site that might have hundreds of pages through groups of pages that concern particular subjects to the clicks you’re getting on just one page.

So if you had three sites, one about custom cars, one about custom bikes and one about speedboats, the first thing you’d do is create a general channel for each site.

You should always create a channel for each one of your sites.

That will let you see not just how much money you’re making overall, but how much money each site is making. You’re not going to get too far without that sort of information!

Now, let’s say that the custom car site had tabs for American cars, European cars, Japanese cars and classic cars. Each tab is a subdomain and you could create a channel for each subdomain too. Now you could see which topic is making the most money.

And if you discussed one car on each page, you could also create channels for the individual pages and see which cars are the most popular and deliver the highest earning clicks.

Sounds good, right?

And it’s now very easy to do.

Back in the bad old days, Google required you to manually change AdSense tags for each ad block you wanted to track. Many AdSense partners complained about these pesky old channels until Google launched the URL Channels to make life easier.

Now all you have to do is sign in and click the tab marked “AdSense Setup” followed by the “Channels” link.

Fig. 12.1 Spot the Channels And the next step is to use the link marked “URL Channels” and enter the URLs you want to track.

That’s it! You don’t have to do anything else. Google will start tracking the URLs you’ve added automatically.

So apart from creating URL Channels for each of your sites, which of the other URL Channels should you create?

As far as I’m concerned, you can’t have too much information. Major areas should certainly be covered and if you can go as far as tracking each page without going over the 200 channel limit, so much the better. It’s certainly worth tracking a few individual pages to make sure that the revenues are spread out across different parts of the site.

If you find that one page is making lots of money and another is making none, you’ll want to know the reason why.