What are channels?

Aditya Agarwal asks:
What are channels? How do I use it?


Answer:

Channels are a great way to track the performance of your ads. They come in handy when you got to identify where exactly the clicks that paid you came from. They are really easy to set up too. As you know, one of the things that determine your adsense success is how much you tweak your ads. Keep on experimenting to know what works for your site.

How do you do it?

It's through channels. You can make channels for separate ad units in such a way that their names can be used to identify the ad unit it corresponds to, it's colour and position. Typical channel names can be like 'site1_blue_bnr_top', 'site1_ash_link_right'. Now you can keep displaying these ads for a week or so, till you gather enough data. This will give you a better idea of which ad unit performs for you.

Try changing the colour, position and size of your ads units. Create channels for each changed unit and gather data from your adsense reports. Figure out what works for you and stick to it.

Channels can also used to do A-B split testing. I'm coming up with an article on performing A-B split testing with channels easily.
Stay tuned for it!