Tracking AdSense Responses

Anytime you track how well your AdSense strategy is actually doing,
you’re relying a little bit on science and a little bit on magic. True, the
only surefire way to determine what your AdSense revenues will be is to wait
until they’re processed and show up on the AdSense administration pages.
But that doesn’t tell you what works (and what doesn’t work) with the way
that you’ve set up your ads or the placement that you’re using for the ads.
If you want to know what trends seem to be influencing your revenue, here’s
another way to go about it. Tracking your Web site traffic — more specifically,
tracking what brings people to your site, what takes them away, and
what they do while they’re on your site — is the best way to get a feel for the
trends that affect your AdSense revenues. To track all that, you have to put in
some work or find a really good program.
Which of those options you decide to use is determined by you. What are
you more comfortable with? You can track everything and extract all that
information from the logs that are available on your server, or you can let
someone else do all the hard work for you so that all you have to do is take
a look at the data that’s been gathered.
Both ways have advantages and disadvantages. Ultimately what it comes
down to is whether a service (like Google Analytics) can provide all the data
that you need. Such a service might not, and if that’s the case, you have only
one option: Roll up your sleeves and do it on your lonesome.