Bryan's Tips for Testing and Tracking Optimization

As mentioned on Tuesday by Mike Gutner, we'll be finishing off this week with the top 3 tips for testing and tracking. This'll be a recurring theme for Optimization Month -- the end of each week will feature top 3 tips from the Optimization team. With that, I'm honored to be able to share 3 tips that I commonly suggest to publishers. It's always rewarding to hear reactions from publishers about how helpful these suggestions are -- it's almost as if I can see a lightbulb go on in their heads..."Ah-HA!"

Over the last few months, we've doubled the number of channels and added several new reporting features. Here are my tips on how to use these channels and features to the fullest:

1. Search, don't scroll: I always encourage publishers to do a lot of testing and to use a lot of channels. At times, though, it can be tedious to scroll through a list of channels (up to 200!) to select the few you want to look at. I recommend using a standardized naming convention that puts as much information as possible into your custom channel names so you can group them by searching. For example, by using longer names like HomeRightWideSkyOpenAir, you can easily search and group the channels by page (in this case, Home), location on the page (Right), ad format (Wide Skyscraper), or color scheme (Open Air).

2. Save time with custom reports: With the advent of custom reports, publishers should rarely need to use the Advanced Reports tab. Instead of taking time to specify the channel(s), date range, and data type every time you want to get a stats update, you can use custom reports to preconfigure those views. This enables you to quickly click through reports directly from the Overview page. The faster you can see your data, the easier it is to test and find patterns that increase performance.

3. Stay in sync with emailable reports: Many publishers have more than one person working on various aspects of their AdSense implementation. But it's common for only one person to have the login information for the AdSense account (and therefore the ability to see stats and performance). With emailable reports you can add everyone to a mailing list and keep the whole team up to date with a daily, weekly, or monthly email about your AdSense earnings.

Stay tuned for Week 2 of Optimization Month-- Designing Your Ads!

Posted by Bryan Vu - AdSense Optimization Team