If you’ve visited any forums where people discuss AdSense, you’ll see all
kinds of abbreviations and hear all kinds of terms that you might not
understand. Also, when you login to your AdSense account for the first time
and look at the reports, you’ll see a number of abbreviations as well. Here’s
a list of the most common ones, and a plain-english description of what they
mean:
Page Impressions
When somebody goes to your website and loads a page in their web
browser, Google counts that as one “page impression”. That means one pair
of eyes has seen one page of your site. If that same person browses around
and looks at 10 pages of your site, Google counts that as 10 page
impressions. So basically a page impression is just how many of your pages
were looked at by people.
Page CTR
CTR stands for “click through rate”. It’s expressed as a percentage of the
page impressions that resulted in somebody clicking one of the AdSense
ads. So, for example, if you had 1,000 page impressions, and those 1,000
page impressions resulted in 100 clicks on the ads, that is a 10% Page CTR
(100/1000 = 10%).
Page eCPM
eCPM stands for “effective cost per millie”. “Millie” means thousand. CPM is
what the old world of banner advertisements used in pricing their ads. If a
site had a $10 CPM, that meant that you as an advertiser would pay $10 for
every 1,000 page impressions that your ad was shown on.
With AdSense, eCPM is telling you how much you are earning (or will earn),
on average, for every 1,000 page impressions. If you have a $25 eCPM,
that means you are earning (or will earn) $25 in clicks for every 1,000 page
impressions on your site.
Google shows you this figure so you can get an idea of how much more they
are paying you than a banner advertising network will pay you. I have some
sites with eCPM values as high as $300, $500, $700 and more. That means
for every 1,000 page impressions I’m earning $300-$700 on those sites.
How I do that will be discussed later.
EPC
You won’t see the term EPC in your Google AdSense reports, but you’ll hear
it a lot if you hang out on AdSense forums. EPC stands for “earnings per
click”, and just means how much you earn for each click.
Getting the Most out of AdSense Page 15
Channels
By default, all of your page impressions and clicks are dropped into one
giant bucket. By default, you have no way of knowing how much each
individual site earned (if you have multiple sites), or how much each
individual page earned, etc. “Channels” are Google’s way of letting you
break down your earnings into “sections” so you can analyze each website
or each page independently to see where the money is coming from. Google
only lets you have 200 channels, which is pretty lousy if you have a lot of
sites or a very large site. I’ll discuss how to get around that in a later
section.
AdLinks (or Ad Units)
AdLinks, or Ad Units, are just another type of AdSense ad. The basic
AdSense ad is a block of links with short descriptions that when a visitor
clicks, you get paid. Ad Links are a little different. They show linked topics
that are related to your page, and when people click on those they are then
taken to a different page and presented with a list of ads. If they decide to
click on one of those ads, you get paid. You can see what AdLinks look like
by visiting Google’s “Ad Formats” page. It shows all of the available ad
formats, including Ad Links:
https://www.google.com/adsense/adformats
Ad Filter
Sometimes Google might decide to show ads on your page that aren’t really
related to your page content at all. When that happens, you have the option
of going into your AdSense account and adding those sites to your Ad Filter.
Google will not show ads from any site that you put in your Ad Filter. Also,
if your competitor’s ads show up on your pages, that’s another reason to use
your Ad Filter.
Alright, Enough Vocabulary!
Enough with the vocabulary lesson! Let’s get down to business and see how
the AdSense Big Dogs earn the big bucks.
March 2, 2008
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