Using Custom and Advanced Reports

Custom and advanced reports start out just like any other report that you
run from AdSense Quick Reports except no data is preset for display.
When you select the Advanced Reports link on the Reports tab — remember,
that’s where you land when you log in to your AdSense account — a page
loads displaying your options when it comes to creating reports, . These options allow you to define custom reports that feature
the information that you actually need at the moment, rather than information
that someone else decides you might need.
By picking and choosing among the various options, you can tailor a report
to your precise needs. Your options are as follows:
1. Product: With the Choose Product drop-down menu, you can specify
which AdSense product you want to use as the basis for your report.
Products here include AdSense for Search, AdSense for Content, Video
Units, Referral Programs, and any other type of AdSense ads that you’ve
allowed.
Only those products you’ve enabled in your AdSense account show up
as options in the drop-down menu. Your Choose Product drop-down
menu, therefore, may be different from mine.
2. Date range: If you use this section’s first radio button, you get to choose
from preset date ranges that mirror those available in the quick reports
(Today, Yesterday, Last 7 Days, This Month, Last Month, and All Time).
But hey, why go with the standard date range? I don’t run my weeks
according to Google’s schedule, so I take advantage of the customized
date ranges associated with the second radio button. The drop-down
menus there allow you to specify the exact date range you want to use.
If you need a report for a three-day period or a three-week period, or if
you just want a report from Monday through Sunday, you can create it.
View options: Another feature of the advanced reporting capabilities that
you might find useful is the ability to change the way your data is shown.
By default, the Show Data By drop-down menu is set to Page, which means
that your data is sorted according to page impressions — the number of
times your page is viewed, whether users click links on the page or not.
Only there’s a catch — isn’t there always? It doesn’t matter how many different
ads or types of ads are shown on your page; each page counts as
only one impression. If you’re thinking about your impression figures in
terms of having multiple ads on your page, they may seem low.
Another choice here is to show data by Ad Unit. This data display shows
your page impressions according to the number of ads that are on your
page. So, if one visitor comes to your site and clicks all the 15 ads that
you have on your page, you’ll see 15 page views for that single visitor.
Now you have the opposite problem from the Page option. Instead of
having page impressions that appear low because each visit counts only
for one impression — no matter how many ads you have — now only
one visit can create multiple impressions.
Using both of these Show Data By measurements can be useful in that
you can see how many visitors have seen your ads as well as how many
ads your visitors have seen. If, for some reason, AdSense is displaying
a single ad in the place of a large rectangle, for example, you can see
immediately what’s happening. And it does happen from time to time
when AdSense doesn’t have enough matching ads to fill the rectangle,
which can usually hold several ads.
A final option in the Show Data By drop-down menu — the Individual
Ad option — changes your view of the data even more. When you use
this display, you see how many impressions your site gets according
to the number of actual ads that are displayed. Some ad displays show
only a single ad — banners are one; you get one ad in a banner, nothing
else — but others, like rectangles or link units, show more than one ad.
When you view your report data with the Individual Ad option, you see
multiples of impressions, based on the number of actual ads that are on
your site.
At the Individual Ad level, you can see your ads by what type of ad targeting
is used: contextual or placement targeting. Contextual ad placement
is when ads are placed within your content because the ad jibes
in some way with the subject of the content. Placement targeted ads are
those ads that are placed on your site because the advertiser chooses to
have its ads shown on your page. This is an additional detail you don’t
see in any other view.
You also have the option to show aggregate data or channel data.
Aggregate data is just a collection of the tracking information for all
your ads. Channel data is a collection of the tracking information for ads
broken down into the channels that you have selected to use to track
individual ads or groups of ads
When you’ve finished selecting the options that you would like to display for
your ads, then all you have to do to see the report is click the Display Report
button. The page reloads, and your desired information is displayed.
Each different data display shows the impressions on your site slightly differently.
Because the data is considered differently in each view, you see
changes in your eCPM measurements as well. The fewer impressions shown,
the higher your eCPM is.
Page impressions, clicks, and other report data, along with these different
data views, allow you to compare ads and see which ones perform better
than others. It takes some time to gather enough stats to be able to make any
real determinations — if you have plenty of people visiting your site, a week
might be enough; low traffic requires a little longer. With this data readily
available to you, you can test different ad placements and types to discover
what works best on your Web site