To help you best understand your site’s traffic, here are some tips on how you can better segment your traffic. Splitting your traffic into segments and channels also helps you understand which campaigns are performing better, where most user interactions are happening, and so on. This will help you optimize the performance of Google ads on your site.
We recommend a two step approach. Step one is to highlight a portion of your traffic to review, then step two is to see the data behind that traffic.
Step one: Using channels to identify specific parts of traffic to investigate
Within your AdSense account, you have two channel options.
- Place different portions of your AdSense traffic within a channel. For example, you can use a URL channel to segment how your ads are doing on your entire domain (example.com), parts of your domain (such as sports.example.com) or a specific page (sports.example.com/marketingid.html). This allows you to see how your ad traffic is doing on these particular sites. To get the most concise data, we suggest you have unique channels for specific pages. For example, use unique URL identifiers for each source of traffic to your site, and then assign a URL channel to that specific page within your site (sports.example.com/marketingid1.html versus sports.example.com/marketingid2.html).
- Use custom channels for specific ad units. This allows you to see how a particular ad unit is doing in relation to another. Tracking various ad units with unique channels will help you isolate quickly if there’s a particular ad unit that you need to pay attention to. Is the CTR on one ad unit much higher than another? You can easily investigate and see if the CTR makes sense in context of your entire account’s CTR history.
Step two: Using Google Analytics to dig into the identified sections of traffic
With Google Analytics you can dig into the specific traffic to your site. For example, let’s say you have a URL channel that identifies sports.example.com/marketingid1.html as a URL you should investigate more deeply. You can use Analytics to look at the traffic you’re receiving on that page.
With Advanced Segmentation, you can look at the types of users coming to your site, such as if the users are new, which countries they are coming from, whether they are clicking on your AdSense ads, and many other interesting data points.
If you find that one of your traffic sources is sending you a lot of traffic that is not quite your target audience, then you can make appropriate changes. For example, if you recently turned on an advertising campaign, and the users from that campaign don’t seem to be interested in your content (which you can infer from things like a high bounce rate), then you know that you need to either change your advertising campaign or possibly use a different advertising solution.
If you have multiple traffic sources, Analytics can also help you segment with a URL builder. This is a handy feature if you manage complex marketing campaigns.
Want to get started? Learn more about the benefits of a channel, and link your AdSense account to your Analytics account today.