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Hello and welcome to today's Q&A session. I'm Rachel, Marketing Specialist, on the AdSense
team and I'm Cemal, Google Analytics Specialist on the AdSense team.
Over the past five weeks, we've been posting Analytics Insights. We've looked at how you
can use Google Analytics to grow your business, optimize your mobile presence, increase user
loyalty, and improve your overall user experience. We've also collated all of your questions
to create this video which is going to address most of the frequently asked questions of
our readers.
So the first question that a lot of our users were asking about is "why integrate your Adsense
account with your Analytics account?"
There are good reasons to integrate your accounts. For example, you can get a wealth of new information
when you link your AdSense account and your Analytics account. You can get information
about how to improve your ad performance and how to improve your user experience on your
site. And, for example, you can optimize your content based on traffic sources, geographies
and pages. And you can also improve your user experience by seeing which pages your users
are spending most of their time on and which pages drive them away. You can also understand
where your user attention is focused on to improve your site layout or ad implementations.
You can understand how earnings are affected by aspects of user behavior, like long visit
frequency or page depth.
So once linked, AdSense performance appears in a separate AdSense section in your Google
Analytics accounts on the left navigation under 'content'.
And, with the reportings available in this section you can break down your AdSense performance
in some new ways, showing earnings and impressions or CPM values or CTR values based on user
visits. You can also see the top sites for example referring users to your webpage that
you monetize. Of course, you can also see earnings per page without creating some url
channels in AdSense account. And lastly, you can also create lots of custom reports in
Google Analytics that include AdSense metrics since your accounts are linked, you can include
them in custom reports. I think that you can get lots of new valuable new information once
you link the accounts.
Okay, certainly as a publisher, you're going to have additional access to a information
if you link it. I suppose the next question then is, if you could show us how you would
do that? DEMO
Sure, let me show it. So, first of all, when you are in your AdSense account you should
click the gear icon on the upper right corner of any tab and form the drop down list you
should select 'settings'. Then, in the sidebar, select 'access and authorization' and then
click 'Google Analytics integration' in the very bottom. On the Google Analytics integration
page, just click 'link' next to the analytics account that you want to link to your analytics
account. When you do that a new window opens and you are taken to your analytics account.
In analytics, click 'link accounts' and in the dialog that appears, specify your primary
analytics property and analytics views and then click 'continue'. That's so simple.
Okay, great. And what if a user was to accidentally link to the wrong account during that process?
It's also simple, you just need to go to your analytics account admin page and just unlink
your analytics account and follow the linking process again. It's so simple.
And some readers were asking, they had multiple AdSense accounts, other readers had multiple
Analytics accounts, is it possible to integrate them?
It's only possible to integrate accounts on a one to one basis. In other words, you can
only link one AdSense account to one Analytics account. Multiple linkings are not supported.
Okay, and so then if users want to access their analytics accounts, they've linked to
their AdSense account, will other people with access to that Analytics account have access
to their AdSense account? No no no, privacy is protected there. And
the users who have access to some of the analytics profiles where they can see AdSense data cannot
log into AdSense accounts of the users. So, AdSense accounts and Analytics accounts are
separated. they are not related in terms of users logins although they can see some data
in GA.
Okay, you mentioned at the beginning so much of the additional data that a publisher could
view by linking their accounts. Maybe we could now look at little bit more at the reporting.
So, how can I enable new view or properties for AdSense reporting.
So first of all, just sign into your analytics account which is linked to your AdSense account.
When you click the admin tab at the top right of the analytics, you will see the accounts
and just find the name of the account that you want to work on and just click the AdSense
linking tab on the left. So, then you can find the properties or views that you can
enable for AdSense reporting. This means that when you enable new rules or properties for
AdSense reporting, AdSense data will appear in these additional properties and views and
you can gain separate access to different users based on different views and properties.
That's so easy.
Okay, and how do I set up the code to track my AdSense sites in Analytics?
So, the order of code snippets are important. Especially, if you are tracking multiple domains,
if you're monetizing multiple domains in AdSense and if you want to track them in GA as well.
So, if you have multiple domains that you want to monetize and one of these domains
is your primary domain. In this case no code change is needed. But, say that you have 3
different domains and you want to get reporting of these 3 domains in Google analytics, in
this case you should add AdSense analytics code snippets that you will get from the GA
settings page and you should use this code on your webpage for the domains that are not
primary.
7:47 Okay, that has taken us through why and how
we should link our AdSense and Analytics accounts. Now, what we want to do is check out what
additional data sources we have within our accounts.
We can get lots of additional insights once we link your accounts with analytics. We can
for example, get your earnings based on user visits rather than just impressions and you
can break down your AdSense performance by some user related dimensions such as user
locations, browser type or referring source etc.. So, when you link your AdSense account
to analytics you can reach your AdSense reports under the content section on the left navigation
bar in Analytics and when you check that reporting area you will reach 3 reports: AdSense pages,
AdSense referrers and AdSense exits. Let me quickly talk about those 3 reports.
For example, AdSense pages report is one of the most important reports that you need to
check because it shows you which pages contributed most to your AdSense revenue and you can see
the breakdown of metrics like CMP, CTR etc. If you see that posts about sports generate
more revenue than posts about celebrities you can think about focusing on sports related
articles and add content to add value to your business.
Another report is AdSense referrers report and it's also quite important because with
this report you can see the performance of domains that refer traffic to your site and
who generated AdSense revenue. But, I suggest that you check another report called 'all
traffic' to have a more in-depth information about your traffic sources. And the last report
which is my favorite report is AdSense 'exit reports'. AdSense exists is the number of
sessions that ended due to a user clicking an AdSense ad. Because when they click an
AdSense they will close their session and leave your site. So, with AdSense exit report
you can see the pages which have a higher conversion rate. The term 'conversion rate'
is important because a high AdSense exit rate means a high conversion rate for the publishers
because AdSense exits means monetization for you. And, you can analyze your pages or traffic
sources based on this metric, so a higher AdSense exit means a higher conversion for
your business and maybe you want to focus on this content or on this refers that generates
a higher conversation rate for your business and define your strategies accordingly.
So certainly there is a lot of additional data that is available to publishers after
linking their accounts. And I suppose the next question really is, how do you best optimize
that information. So, how do I use Analytics to improve my AdSense performance?
That's a great question. This is the most asked question from publishers, but I want
to focus on something else. We shouldn't be only focused on AdSense performance, we should
focus on our business performance as a whole because in the end we will be better off if
we will improve our business. In other words, since my biggest asset is my audience, I should
invest in my audience to grow it. First to understand it, then to grow it. And GA is
a great tool to understand your users and your audience, and to make them loyal and
engaged. So, let me talk about some other reports that you can benefit from, especially
to grow your audience, and make them more loyal and engaged.
So, first of all, again, referring source is very important because when you know which
sites direct traffic to your site you can know if that site, or if that resource, is
a valuable one to grow your business. So, when you discover that a specific site or
a specific traffic source is very valuable for your business, because you see that the
loyalty related, or engagement related metrics are very good for this traffic source, you
can tailor your content for the audience coming from these resources to make your site more
attractive for them so that they will come more and more. And you can also improve traffic
sources by such things as search engine optimization efforts or social campaigns or search engine
marketing to drive more valuable traffic to your site. Another idea is checking browser
usage or device usage reports in Google Analytics.
Browser usage report will show you which browsers and what technologies are used by your audience.
And do they have some issues in seeing your content and if some technologies or browsers
are more valuable for you to generate more revenue maybe from AdSense. You can also - maybe
the most important thing is - you can also see the performance of your business in different
devices like mobile. And when you see that mobile audience or mobile visitors are different
than desktop visitors, you may want to customize your content for them and create different
strategies to grow your business. And lastly, let me talk about one of my favorite reports
in Google Analytics which is In-page Analytics report that you can reach under Behavior section
in the reporting. In-page Analytics report shows you the interaction map or click-through
map of your users that visited your site. It provides a click-through data. And it makes
a visual assessment of your users like how they interact with your content. So, the question
here is: are my users seeing the content that I want them to see? I can get a response for
this question checking this report. And you can of course optimize your ad locations with
the help of this report by discovering more hot areas on your site and to move your ads
to more attractive areas to get attention.
Great, one of the questions that some other readers were asking after they had gone through
the process of linking your account is why are statistics differing between your AdSense
and Analytics accounts? Yes, good question. There are 3 main things
that you need to check first. First of all, do I use AdSense for Content ad units on my
site? Because you can only link your AdSense for Content ad units to Analytics. So, other
properties in AdSense like AdSense for Games, Video, or link units cannot be linked to Analytics
or in other words, you won't see any data from these ad units. Second thing to check
is: please be sure that you have Analytics codes on every page that are monetizing with
AdSense. Maybe you forgot to put Analytics code on some parts of your content which is
monetized with AdSense. And last thing to check is: if you are tracking AdSense in Analytics
on multiple domains - like in the previous example that I shared (like domain A, domain
B, and domain C) - you must include a third code snippet which is AdSense Analytics Code.
If you don't put this code snippet when you monetize different domains you won't get any
data from these non-primary domains, and which will of course make your statistics wrong.
And in addition to these 3 main topics, there are also some other things that you need to
know. For example, there are separate Javascript codes: Analytics Javascript code is technically
different than AdSense code, and AdSense counts a pageview when AdSense code is executed,
and Analytics counts a pageview when Analytics code is executed, and in some occasions, since
they are on different parts of your site, one of the codes could be executed whereas
the other one won't be executed. Consider that a user visited site, and he left your
site immediately after visiting your site. In this case, maybe, your AdSense code snippet
will trigger an AdSense impression whereas Analytics javascript code won't be executed.
And this will make your numbers wrong. And in addition to that, there are also things
like iFrames - AdSense use an iFrame to serve ads. Browsers that don't support iFrames won't
report an AdSense impression. And there could be some security softwares blocking ads on
your site, and there could be time zone related discrepancies. Please check them all. All
information is in the Help Center. Okay. Great. So, I guess there is a lot more
content then around these areas available in the Help Center if viewers want to learn
more. And, on this topic, some readers were saying that they were missing some AdSense
data in Analytics. So, what would you propose is the reasoning behind that?
The first question is: Did you link your AdSense account to Analytics? You first need to check
this. Because you maybe think that you already linked accounts , but maybe you made a mistake
and forgot to follow a step, and you didn't link the accounts. Please check first if your
accounts are linked. Or you could have maybe linked your personal
accounts? Maybe, because, you maybe enabled different
properties or views for reporting and you are checking a different property. Second
thing is: Have you place the Analytics code on all of your pages which are monetizing
with AdSense. Of course, like, if your forgot to put the Analytics code, then no data will
appear in Analytics. Then, you should wait up to 48 hours after you linked accounts so
that you will see a proper data in Analytics. Please check the time period when you linked
your accounts. If it happened, like, in the last 48 hours, please wait more. And another
thing is: Are you comparing your Analytics data with your AdSense for Content ad units.
Consider that in AdSense you monetize your content with AdSense for Content (AFC), and
maybe you also do AdSense for Search, or you also monetize your gaming content with AdSense
for Games. Don't look to your numbers in your AdSense account. Just look to the number,
monetization number, coming from AdSense for Content ad units, and compare this number
with Analytics because you can only link your AdSense for Content ad units with Analytics.
That's important. And maybe, another reason could be: Ad servers. When you serve your
ads through an ad server like DoubleClick for Publishers, then this can invalidate your
AdSense reporting in Analytics. Be careful about that. These are the main reasons why
you miss AdSense data in Analytics. But for more reasons, you can again check the Help
Center to understand the area to focus on. An area that we didn't cover in the blog series
but that was a big interest to a lot of our readers is around sampling. So, maybe, we
can start if you can explain, Cemal, what is sampling in Google Analytics and how does
it work? Sampling is widely used in statistical analysis.
And it means that, it is a practice of selecting a subset of your data from your traffic and
report on the trends detected in that sample set. So, in other words, you analyze a subset
of you data to come up with an analysis of a complete data set. It's important because
when you make sampling you decrease your computational burden and you reduce your processing time
in analytical tools. That's why sampling is widely used in statistics. And, when sampling
occurs in your Analytics you will see a warning saying that this report is based on X number
of visits, on the top right of your report. When you see this yellow warning, you will
understand that this report is based on the sampled data. Sampling happens automatically
when more than 500.000 visits are collected in a report. So, but you have the option in
Google Analytics to adjust your sample size. You can make it bigger or smaller. When you
increase your sample size, the processing time increases, and when you make it smaller
it increases. Sampling is widely used is statistics industry.
So, that gives us a good understanding about what sampling is and how it works. Again,
for readers and viewers watching, there is a lot of more additional information around
sampling in the Help Center, so by all means, go and check it out. The next area that we
are gonna look is Universal Analytics. And to begin, we are just gonna see what are the
benefits of Universal Analytics?
Okay, so first of all, Universal Analytics introduces a set of new features that change
the way of data is collected in Google Analytics, and organized in the account. So, for example,
Universal Analytics introduces three new versions of tracking code: Analytics.js Javascript
Library is for websites, and we also introduce Google Analytics SDKs for mobile app tracking,
and measurement protocol to track other digital devices like game consoles, or information
kiosks etc. It's more developer friendly, and you can easily customize the tracking
code with Universal Analytics. And some other advantages are: cross-domain tracking is much
much simpler, and you can also do more configuration by reaching your admin page in Analytics like
you can change your organic search resources, and you can play with referral exclusions
etc. So, if you want to upgrade your classical account to Universal Analytics account, the
process is very simple: you just need to turn all of your classic Google Analytics properties
into Universal Analytics properties, and implement the Universal Analytics code. In order to
follow the process, we launched Universal Analytics Upgrade Center, and just visit Universal
Analytics Upgrade Center, and follow the steps that help you to migrate your account to Universal
Analytics. It is very easy.
Okay. Great. So, users can go to the Universal Analytics upgrade centre and follow the steps
there. What are the Demographics and Interest reports in Analytics. We had quite a few readers
from across the globe asking about this area. These reports are quite new in GA and I think
they are one of the most important reports where publishers can get additional insights
about their audience. I strongly suggest that you spend some time discovering this reports
and using the insights from this reports. So, demographic & interest reports show you
data on your users demographics, for example, their age and gender and their interest areas.
It is under the audience section in the left navigation in analytics and will give you
bigger insights into the makeup of your audience. So, what types of users are visiting your
sites, and which group of users bring the highest business outcomes that you want to
achieve. You can ask for such things with demographics and interest reports.
Great, and so again, I guess, it comes back to the publisher having access to all this
information but how do they best use it. How can they benefit from these reports?
Okay, let me give you a specific example. For example, you want to identify the business
group or audience group that converts best for your business. In AdSense example, let's
focus on AdSense exit rate. You'll remember AdSense exit rate means the conversion rate
for your business. So, you want to for example deep dive the age report to see what the majority
of your audience consists of and if they have a higher or a lower conversion rate. And after
breaking down your report by ages, you can also break it down further with gender information.
And you can even break it down with categories to find best AdSense convertors. So, for example,
if you discover that a specific age group of females who that are interested in music
convert best, in other words, bring higher business outcome or AdSense revenue, then
you can customize and tailor your content for their interest. You can bring them back
and make them more loyal and engaged with their content because they are the most valuable
audience for you. These are some examples where you can work with these reporting.
There are 3 things to enable this reporting in GA, because by default it is not enabled.
First thing is you need to modify your tracking code to support display advertising, second
thing is you should update your privacy policy to adhere to policy requirements for display
advertisement, and you should enable demographic report in your analytics interface as well.
You just need to follow the steps that are shown in the analytics interface when you
visit one of these reports.
Before we wrap up the session, Cemal, obviously you've taken use through a lot of the reporting
capabilities that are available to us within analytics. We've seen a lot of the different
reports that are there. This means a load more really really useful information that
is available for our publishers. Is there anything in addition that you could suggest
that would allow our publishers to really optimize this information?
Yes, there are options that allow you to fully control the data that you share with Google
products and services. When you, for example, share your GA data anonymously with Google
and your Account Specialist, of course, Google teams can analyze your data and come up customized
suggestions and opportunities to grow your business. I strongly suggest that you check
these data sharing settings to see your options. Google marketing and sales specialists can
find ways to improve your implementations and business results. To change your data
sharing options in your account, you can first open your analytics accounts and click 'admin'
at the top of any analytics page. When you click 'admin' you'll see the accounts list
and you select the relevant account that you are interested in sharing your data and click
'account settings'. When you click 'account settings' you'll see the data sharing settings
which are 'With other Google products only', 'Anonymously with Google and others', and
'Account Specialist'. You just tick the relevant options for you and click 'apply' button at
the bottom to save the setting. And when you do that, then Google is able to provide you
with additional insights and custom suggestions to grow your business.
So, Cemal that ended all of our questions. Thank you for joining us today. We hope that
you've found the series to be useful. Many thanks for all of your comments and questions
over the past 5 weeks. We'd recommend that you continue to reference the Help Center
for tips on optimizing using your of Analytics with your AdSense Accounts. We'd also recommend
that you sign up to receive notifications from the AdSense blog so that you're always
up to date on product updates and upcoming events so that you can join in the next series
of Hangouts. Thank you very much and we look forward to seeing you again soon. Bye bye.