Reading Google Analytics for AdSense Optimization

The data that Google supplies directly through AdSense’s Performance
Reports only concern AdSense itself. It won’t tell you all sorts of useful
information that you need to know about your website. It won’t tell you:
• Where your visitors are coming from;
• Where the ad-clickers are coming from;
• What search keywords led them to your Web page;
• How users navigate your site to reach the ads that interest them.
None of that information concerns AdSense directly, so AdSense doesn’t
track it. But knowing what’s happening on your website, how users reach it
and what they do when they arrive is clearly going to be important to its
optimization.
In the past, some of that information could be picked up through server logs.
Your hosting company supplies access to a bunch of tables and stats that you
can wade through and try to make sense of. It’s always been difficult to use,
and depending on the hosting company, hard on the eyes.
Spotting an opportunity, as always, Google has come to the rescue with
Google Analytics, its branded version of a service first created by Urchin
software, a firm it bought in 2005. When Google first released Analytics later
that year, subscription was so high that the company was forced to close the
doors after just a week and use a lottery model to allow entry to new users
as capacity increased.
Since then, it’s been estimated that around 57 percent of the top 10,000
sites and just under half of all of the top million websites, use Google
Analytics to track user behavior.
For any website publisher, the program’s simplicity and comprehensiveness
make it indispensible. For any publisher using a Google service such as
AdWords or AdSense, the integration makes the service even more vital.
It’s also free. You can sign up at www.google.com/analytics, collect a piece of
code and embed that code into your website. You’ll then have access to all
sorts of information about your site in easy-to-read graphs.
The basic information you’ll receive shows the number of visits the site has
received over a time period of your choice; the number of page views those
visits generated; the average number of pages per visit; the bounce rate(the percentage of users who left after looking at just the landing page); the
average time spent on the site; and the percentage of visits that were new.
You can also see the number of views each page received, and which
countries those visitors came from. The main graph shows the rise and fall of
your traffic over time and you can combine different metrics to make
comparisons.
The Traffic Sources Overview shows the origins of your visitors: the numbers
that came as direct traffic, from referring sites (and the sites that referred
them), and from search engines (including the keywords that brought them
to the site.) You can even create goals, such as downloads, newsletter
registration or a set number of pages per visits, and track the percentage of
users who reach those goals.
In short, you’ll have all the information you need about your website,
including:
• the number of people who visited your site;
• where they’re coming from;
• how long they stay;
• in which parts of the world your site is most popular;
• what searchers and looking for;
• which content wins the most attention.
What Google Analytics can’t tell is how much your ads are earning — at least
not until you integrate your AdSense stats with your Analytics data.