Understanding Google Adsense

The last time we looked at our google adsense report was 1 month ago, at which time there were requests for more information about what it all meant. Now that October has ended, let me finally respond to that with a look at our 2 month results.

The Google Adsense program connects paying advertisers with webpage creators (like us!) by matching up words that advertisers bid on, with webpages that have those words in them. If you look at the "Ads by Google" boxes on the ourwwworld team blogs, you will notice that many of the ads relate to stuff we've been writing about. Every time you write about another subject, the ads on your page will change. The more content (blog posts) you produce, the more opportunity Google will have to match advertisers with your page content. When the ads become more relevant to the content that's on your pages, people will be more likely to click on them. That's the theory anyway. When the ads get clicked on, we get paid.

The report below specifically and only refers to the "ads by google" on the ourwwworld team blogs that look like the ones circled in red on the screenshots at the beginning of this post.



To help you understand what the report means, here's some definitions:

Channels: understanding that many Adsense account holders have multiple websites with different kinds of content, the Adsense program allows me to set up different channels that keep track of how the google ads I'm running in the various places I tell it to monitor are performing.

Page impressions: this number is equal to the number of times google ads have been viewed on that channel. It counts our own visits as well as the visits of anyone else who views our pages

Clicks: this number tells us the number of ads running on that channel that were clicked on. Always remember you are not allowed to click the ads on your own page. Google will know, and shut the account down - they own both Adsense and Blogger so they have the ability to know a lot about your activity.

Page CTR: this is the number of clicks divided by the number of page impressions to give us an indicative percentage of how many visitors have clicked on an ad. More than one ad is shown on each page, and a visitor might click on more than one ad when s/he visits, so this is only indicative. We are paid for each click that occurs, whether it was clicked by the same visitor or not.

Page eCPM: this is another indicative measure that Google provides us to be able to compare and evaluate the performance of our ads. It refers to what that channel is earning per 1,000 page impressions. Since many of our blogs have not yet reached 1,000 page impressions, for most of us it's only a projection.

earnings: that number is the most significant, because it is real (not just for evaluation purposes). It's the actual amount that the advertisers whose ads were clicked on are paying us (through Google) for the clicks we've received. Some ads pay more, some pay less, and some also occasionally pay just for being shown on our page. The amount paid per click or view depends on the words that actually appear in our pages and how much advertisers are willing to pay for having their ads shown wherever those words appear online.

Interesting to note is that LifeInAfrica.com is currently performing better than all of our blogs combined, even though Ads by Google ONLY appear on the home page right now. Here are those figures from the same 2 month period for comparison:

Channel: lifeinafrica. com
impressions: 1,760
clicks: 65
CTR: 3.69%
eCPM: $11.34
earnings: $19.96

I don't claim to understand exactly why the Adsense earnings at LifeInAfrica.com are so much better than the rest of the channels we're running Adsense on, but I am working on putting the Adsense boxes on more pages there so that we can earn a bit more for the organization on a monthly basis.

Please ask questions if there's anything about this you don't understand!