What are channels?

Channels enable you to view detailed reporting about the performance of specific pages and ad units. By assigning a channel to a combination of pages or ad units, you could track the performance of a leaderboard versus a banner, or compare your motorcycle pages to your automobile pages. You can even create a channel to track each of your separate domains, so you can see where your clicks are coming from. While channels can be used to track performance and revenue, they won't have any effect on your earnings or ad targeting.

It’s easy to set up a Google AdSense account, generate the code needed to display ads on your site, and paste the code into the source for your blog template or web site pages. By doing so, you can start earning advertising revenue immediately—or as soon as someone starts clicking the ad links on your pages, anyway. But if you’re interested in learning more about which ads are most successful for you, you need to take another step: Set up and use Google’s channels feature.

Channel Basics
The channels feature enables you to assign a unique identifier to a domain name or specific URL, or to a type of ad unit. The channel name is included in the code that utilizes it. Google tracks AdSense activity by channel for your account. You can easily display activity by channel, thus making it possible to analyze AdSense revenue by channel.

There are two types of channels from which to choose:
• URL channels, and
• Custom channels.

URL Channels
Use URL Channels to track your performance without modifying your ad code. By entering a full or partial URL, you can begin tracking the performance of particular pages in your site. You can enter a top-level domain name to track all of the pages on that domain, or you can enter a partial URL to track all of the pages below a certain directory. Entering a full URL will track the performance of that particular page.

To create a URL channel:
• Log in to your account at https://www.google.com/adsense
• Click the Channels link below the AdSense Setup tab.
• Choose the AdSense for content sub-tab and click the URL Channels link
• Click Add new URL channel, and in the resulting text box, enter the URL that you would like to track.
• Click Add channels.
• The new URL channel will begin tracking data almost immediately.

Keep in mind that because URL channels don't require changes to your code, there's no need to designate a URL channel when generating your AdSense code. Once you've created a URL channel, it will track automatically.

Custom Channels
Custom channels allow you to track the performance of specific ad units based on your specified criteria. By pasting channel-specific ad code into your pages, you can track a variety of metrics across a range of URLs. Use custom channels to track the performance of different ad formats, for example, or to compare different page topics to one another. To learn how to create and assign custom channels, please read How do I create custom channels?

You can also turn any custom channel into an ad placement on which advertisers can choose to place their ads.

With up to 200 AdSense channels, plus 200 AdSense for search channels available for each publisher, you can use channels to gain the insight you need to optimize your site's performance. It's easy to add, deactivate, or rename your channels, and customized reports are simple to generate.

Custom channels can be used to help you track which ad colors, formats, and placements are most effective on your site, or to provide answers to questions like:

Creating Custom Channels:
Understanding how you can use custom channels to answer the questions above will be essential in optimizing your AdSense ad unit performance. Let's take a closer look in the following example.

Scenario: John owns a site about cars. His homepage currently has three ad units and one link unit, and John wants to find out which of the units is performing most effectively. To do so, he'll create a separate custom channel for each of the four units to monitor their performance.

Creating and implementing custom channels requires a more involved process than that for URL channels. No worries - we'll show you how to create custom channels in 4 easy steps:

Continue to choose the ad type, ad format, and color palette as you would normally, then in the Channels section,