Tools Beyond AdSense for Tracking
It’s nice to have independent verificationof Google’s numbers and also better analysis tools
of visitor behavior than the AdSense
reports provide. You now have the option of linking
your account to Google Analytics.
Monitoring
your performance so you can make changes to make
more money is a very important part of successfully
working with AdSense.
Impressions
An ad impressionis recorded each time an AdSense ad
unit is displayed. A page impressionis recorded each time a
web page containing an AdSense ad unit is displayed. A single
display of a web page containing three ad units would produce
one page impression and three ad impressions.
Clicks
A visitor’s click on an ad on a publisher’s page. Public service ad clicks are not
included in this statistic.
eCPM
Effective CPM eCPM; cost per thousand impressions is calculated by dividing
the total earnings by the number of impressions in thousands. For example, if a
publisher earned $100 from 20,000 impressions, the eCPM would equal $100/20,
or $5. The point of this metric is to provide a way to compare AdSense’s CPC
revenue with the money you might make from other forms of advertising.
On Alexa, click the Traffic Rankings tab. Enter your site domain in the box and
click Get Traffic Details. The Related Info page for your site will open. Next, in the
Explore this Site box, click the Traffic Details link.
You can use the Alexa metrics as a reality check in terms of whether
it agrees with Google that your page views are going up or down over time,
but you cannot use Alexa as an absolute measure of anything because of how
the Alexa statistics are compiled. Alexa’s page-view metrics are based on
information uploaded from a small toolbar, mostly installed by business users.
This information is notoriously flawed for consumer sites, particularly
ones without high traffic.
Depending on your web host, you should have access to a number of tools used to
generate usable information from your web logs files. Web log analysis is the first and
best place to look for data in addition to that supplied by Google.
Web Log Analysis Programs
There are many good web log analysis programs available with much
the same functionality as Webalizer, the one shown in this section. Popular offerings include Access
Watch, Piwik, ModLogAn, NetTracker, and WebTrends.