AdSense Statistics

One of the many great things about Google AdSense is that there are an abundance of statistics available to you that show you how the adverts on your site are performing.

However, when you first log on you might be slightly confused and unsure how to intepret the figures, what they mean, and how best to use the copious data that is provided to you.

The key data that is available is as follows:

• Page impressions. This tells you how many pages no your website have been served in the specified time frame containing adverts. Note that if you have two adverts on a page, this is not showing every advert impression, but rather page impression (e.g. the total ads served would be double the page impressions)

• Clicks. This figure is the easiest to understand - this simply records the number of times that one of your adverts has been clicked by the visitor

• Page CTR. This stands for page Click Through Rate, and is a measure of the total clicks divided by the total number of page impressions, expressed as a percentage. This figure is useful for understanding how attractive your adverts are to your visitors. For instance, if there is a 2% CTR then you know 2% of your visitors have found the adverts interesting enough to them to click on.

• Page eCPM. This figure probably confuses the most. It is a measure of Cost Per Thousand (M in Roman numerals!) Impressions. This is useful particularly for those who have more than one site or more than one advertising program, as it allows one to measure revenue across the piece. It's the result of this calculation: total earnings divided by thousands of impressions. That is, it shows you how much revenue your site is earning for every 1,000 impressions.

• Earnings. This is a measure of your total earnings during the specified time period, expressed in dollars.

So now you know what the figures mean, you can use them to track performance over time. Use the Page impressions figure to benchmark overall traffic to your site (up or down). Use the page CTR measure to benchmark how relevant your visitors are finding the adverts to them, and see if different placement and sizes of adverts on the page affects this figure.

The page eCPM is useful for understanding overall the revenue for every 1,000 page impressions. Finally - the earnings - well these determine the size of the cheque you'll receive at your preferred payment interval, or upon reaching your payment threshold!