How To Structure And Organize Your AdSense Account
Updated on February 29, 2020
Staying organized is one of my personal daily goals. From handling email to my schedule, I try to stay on top of things pretty tightly. This allows me to free up my thinking for the big ideas and get normal tasks done faster. Plus, I have access to information in an organized manner — great for determining if a new venture is worth it or pulling up an old message.
The same is true with AdSense. In this article I will review ad units, URL channels, custom channels and reports. All play an important role in keeping your account organized. Once you have things setup correctly, it becomes clear how powerful AdSense reporting and tracking really is.
For the scope of this article I will be using the new AdSense interface. It’s the default for most folks, has a better layout, and simply looks a lot better than the old interface. Switching back and forth can be done from the top right hand corner of your account.
Ad Units
When we first started out, Justin and I did not even add ad units to our account. We simply took the theme we were working with and changed the publisher ID. While this works and we received revenue from our sites, its makes it difficult to track performance (unless you use URL channels, see below) and, more importantly, could prevent some advertisers from seeing your ads.
After meeting with an AdSense rep in April, I realized ad units are the basic building block of all reporting and tracking features. It’s critical that you have these in your account and have them targeted to specific sites either by theme, niche or even the when the site was created. Plus you can control specific items like color and fonts to better match your site, which is critical for getting a high CTR.
New ad units can easily be created by clicking on the “My ads” tab in your account then click the “+ New ad unit” button on top, right under the tabs. You will then be presented with a page full of options, which I will walk you through.
The “Name” field is first. Most people overlook this this and just use anything. Naming your ad units logically is the first step in properly thinking through the segmentation of your sites, basically how everything will be organized.
I usually name our AdSense blocks by size and what we will use them for. For instance, for a group of sites I am testing out CTR Theme on, I named one Ad Unit “Medium Rectangle CTR Theme”. You might also want to name your units after what niche you using them in as in “Leaderboard Curtain Sites”. This will allow you to test specific niches against one another. Finally, if you run out of URL channels, grouping ad units into custom channels may be the only way to effectively track individual sites. In that case I group by theme, niche, and time using a name like “August 2011 Pet Sites with CTR Theme”. It’s a mouthful, but will help you identify things later.
A basic criteria for ad units is their size, so you will need to know what sizes work best on your site before getting started. Most WordPress themes, like CTR Theme, will tell you what sizes are compatible with their layout. However, the most popular sizes for advertisers, and therefore the ones you want to use, should be the ones recommended by AdSense: Medium and Large Rectangles, Leaderboard, and Wide Skyscraper.
For most ad units, you will want to display both text & image/rich media ads. This will ensure you get the maximum number of advertisers and the highest bidders as not all advertisers create image ads. However, the Leaderboard and Skyscraper units can sometime be used in “Image/rich media ads only” mode if it fits your site better. Just be sure to test by creating different ad units and comparing the results.
For backup ads you will normally want to set this to “show blank space”. It is unlikely there will be zero advertisers in your niche if you have done your keyword research correctly. If all the advertisers do go away, Google should still show ads based on search history and usage patterns. Selecting the “Show ads from another URL” option can lead to a lot of 5 cent clicks, so it’s best to avoid it.
The ad style section should be used to match your site. The colors codes can be easily ripped from you current sites, but you can also use a color wheel tool if need be. Sometimes matching the font style and size can be difficult. I found using the default values of 14 pt Verdana and simply made my sites match this. You might need to do a little CSS work to get it right, but it’s worth it.
Finally, you can go a bit overboard with ad units. Try not to create too many. We have literally hundreds of sites covering more than 90 niches. So we segment our account by month by creating new ad unit every month and applying them to sites built during that time period. We then use URL channels to drill down on statistics. This works if you create a large amount of sites frequently and don’t want to be creating new codes for every site. Still, if you are new or only have a handful of sites, I recommend drilling down as much as possible, which might mean making category based ad units.
URL channels
Editor’s note: While the new sites report might make URL channels irrelevant in the future, the lack of search capability makes the methods described below more effective for drilling down on particulars.
URLs channels are extremely important to track the performance of individual sites. This means gathering reports on earnings, CTR, CPC, clicks, pageviews, and RPM on a site by site basis. Unless you want to create an individual ad unit for every site (or more likely group of ad units) and use custom channels, you are going to need to use URL channels. They are extremely easy to setup, though the option may elude some AdSense newbies.
After logging in click on the “Performance reports” tab at the top then click “URL channels” down the left hand side. If you have any URL channels in your account, you may be presented with the option to choose URL channels. If so, simply select “All URL channels” and press the “Get report” button. In the middle of the page slightly to the left there will be an “+ Add URLs to track” button. Press it and you will be able to add your URLs in bulk through copy and past. Be sure to use only the domain name, one per line. Do not include www or http://.
It is important to note that historical data is not saved by AdSense. So, if you add a URL channel for a site you had an ad unit on, it won’t show any income even though you did receive that revenue. The same is true if you remove a URL channel — individual statistics are gone forever. So if you intend on flipping one of your sites, be sure the add the URL channel at least a few months before the auction. This way you can present a full report on the site to prospective buyers.
Unfortunately, you can only add 200 URL channels be default. You can contact Google through your AdSense account and request a one time upgrade to 500 channels, but this can take time. After that, you will have to use a combination of ad units and custom channels to track. There is only one feature you will ever need in the old interface that is not available in the interface — deleting URL channels. So if you hit your ceiling of allowed URLs, you made need to switch back to the old interface and delete any sites you no longer need so that you can make room for more.
Custom Channels
Custom channels are used to group ad units for tracking. This can be useful if you want to track different layouts/themes, statistics by niche, or have simply run out of individual URL channels. It’s important to note that custom channels cannot pull up historical data for a collection of ad units, just like the limitation with URL channels. So, again, be sure to create your channels from the beginning for anything specific you might want to track.
Although you can create custom channels during ad unit creation, it’s probably best create them from the “My ads” tab after creating all related ad units. Within the “My ads” tab, you will find a “Custom channels” link on the right hand side. Click that and look for the “+ New Custom channel” button. You will then be presented with a dialog box asking for the name of your channel and which ad units you wish to track. If you named your ad units something meaningful, it should be easy to find the one you want.
Make sure the ad units are in some way related — they all use the same theme, are on the same site, or go on sites in the same niche. Try not to include ad units in multiple channels if possible. This will throw your overall reports off.
Finally the targeting feature of custom channels is a big plus. If you have a site that attracts a good deal of traffic or you segment your ad units by niche, you can make these channels available to advertisers. Premium advertisers tend to use channels to find where they want their ads to go, so using this feature could result in high CPCs. I would not recommend sharing internal channels that you use for tracking, where ad units are grouped by date or by theme. Advertisers would be confused by this and less likely to use your channels.
Reports
Ok, here is where your AdSense account organization is really going to come in handy. If you have not taken the time to layout the above clearly, it will be difficult, if not impossible to get the data you need on your sites. I can’t stress more strongly how frustrating it is to not know why something broken. You have probably experienced this too — a drop in earnings that you can’t seem to isolate. Good reports can help you track down your leak, shore up your sites, and get earnings back on track.
The first reporting features you should use is the preset reports of entire account by day, week and month. Click on the “Performance reports” tab (or “View full reports”) and look for the links on the left. You can set the date range of these reports on the upper right hand corner. We notice revenue drops on the weekends and holidays, mostly due to an overall drop in search volume. However, if you do see other statistics trending downward (like CTR or CPC) you may want to look more closely for the culprit.
Basic ad unit comparison can be also useful. Among them, you will see one called “Ad units”. This gives you a quick run down of how you ad units are performing so you can compare on to the other. This is why naming was so critical — if you can’t remember which ad unit is associated with which site/sites, this report will be meaningless. Early on in your AdSense experience, this will be useful for fidning what ad unit types work best for your websites. Feel free to experiment. I find the other ad oriented reports including Ad sizes, Ad types, targeting types and Bid types, to be less valuable, but if you want to compare this type of data, it is set up for you.
If you have grouped your ad units into custom channels, you will find the “Custom channels” report quite helpful. This will allow you to easily compare different themes, layouts or niches. You might decide to expand on certain sites or apply design changes to those that are under performing. Look for warning signs like significant differences in CTR, but be sure your sample size is big enough. At least a few hundred pageviews is required to establish a base line. This might take some time to acquire if your traffic is particularly low.
Probably the most valuable report is URL channels. Clicking on “URL channels” along the right hand side of the “Performance reports” tab will allow to select each site in your account individually. You can then refine the date range and even add a dimension to further segment your report. This is useful if you want to compare two sites over a specific time period but have it broken out by week or month.
Finally at anytime you can save reports by clicking the “Save report” button in AdSense. I have created a number of reports using a group of URL channels that are easily brought up again without having to pick through a long list of sites. Something you might want to look at if you are creating complex reports. You can’t edit saved reports or rename them, so make sure you get it right the first time!
Well, folks, it was quite a long post, but I think I’ve covered most of the important parts in AdSense account organization. Do you have any tips you would like to share?
Discussion
I hope I am not too late. But I have this confusion. Google allows to link several custom channels per ad unit. But at the end, you only get the code for the ad unit. If I place that ad code, won’t all the custom channels have the same stats?
I wouldn’t suggest adding an ad unit to different custom channels as it will throw off your reports. However, you can add multiple ad unit to one custom channel, which is what you want to do.
Hi
Thanks for the post. Are you worried about having a footprint with so many websites being linked to your one adsense account. You hear so many horror stories about people having their adsense account closed down and thus advice to only have a few websites in one adsense accout.
Not really Joanna, in fact I am more concerned about trying to make secondary AdSense accounts to put sites in as that is against the TOS. Everyone we have spoke to at Google has said what we are doing is ok.
Hi . I have a few questions.
I’m trying to figure how to organize my account. I have several websites, and would like to filter my reports by:
-theme
-ad color (if I’m using Niche Website Theme from Spencer, I’d like to test different color schemes with the ads matching)
-ad size
-ad position
-month of creation
However, I don’t see how can I do these without creating tons of new ad units per month. For example:
Ad unit:
2012-03 300×250 Content Top Left Theme Niche Website Ad Red
Or using channels, like:
content-top-left-300-250
theme-niche-website
ad-red
ad-2012-03
With this approach, if in a given month I want to test in a group of sites another theme or ad color, then I’d have to create like 4 or 5 ad units more.
I want to plan this very well before continuing, do you have any suggestion to achieve this?
Thanks!
To knowledge the only way to do this is multiple ad units and multiple channels like you suggested. If your are creating a lot of sites, this quickly gets out of hand.
So how do you do it then? Do you just filter by month and ad size, and if you want to test things like themes or color do you just pick a small sample of websites to test it?
We go by month, but will be taking a small sample to test soon, no that we have an intern!
So, just to be clear, you’re creating around 5 new ad units per month, is that right?
I realized adsense will not be your primary source of blog income. It’s probably only 30% of your total income. Still better than nothing but I was hoping it would be much more… What percentage of your blogging income comes from adsense?
Hey there…thanks for stopping in!
We don’t have any AdSense on this blog. Almost all of our income comes from either AdSense or selling sites that are monetized via AdSense. We get a few sales from affiliate links, but it’s really just a bit extra at this point.
We’re still relatively new…for someone who gets a majority of his income from AdSense only (and not selling sites) check Spencer with NichePursuits. Really good guy, good content, etc.
CTR theme demo video looks amazing. Is that what you guys use exclusively?
I bought it. I tried manually inserting my code from Adsense but i didn’t want to deal with html. In about 5 minutes I had ads strategically placed on my site without taking all that time it would have taken to strategize placement and all that. Loving it, worth the $67 but most importantly worth the time saved.
Now I noticed that I’m missing my pages link such as about, privacy page, ect.
We have switched many sites to CTR Theme, but honestly it looks like ProSense gets a better CTR. So we may switch back.
To add the pages, just use a widget.
Yes, it’s very easy to apply AdSense, but we’ve noticed a drop across the board that’s a bit concerning when compared to ProSense. Look for a short write-up about it in the next income report…ugh…it cost us a bit!
Overall, we think CTR Theme is still effective overall…but we’ve lost a little with this test, we think.
First of all, thank you very much for this post.
Hello..
I have a question. While tweaking our appearance and placement of the ads and to make sure that they are working properly, we often require to visit the pages from our own browser, sometimes by refreshing again and again till we become satisfied with everything. So obviously, those impressions may get counted and displayed in the a/c stats. Right?
Is there any potential threat in doing so? Or how to make sure that my visits are not getting counted and recoded in my account? I know there is no such option as an IP blocking to save ourselves from clicking by mistake. So any other solution in your view? Or how do you guys tweak and preview your ads?
And one more thing. In the bluesense (prosennse) theme, I can find that your content text is grey instead of black. Where can I make the changes to look my site exactly like yours listed in flippa. And also the font size of adsense ads seem to be a bit different from the default size.
Sorry for asking too much, but it would be great if u can help..
Thanks
Please reply…
Hey Mohamed,
You can filter out your visits in Google Analytics but, unfortunately, you can’t do the same thing in AdSense (as far as we know) so you’re stuck with the Pageviews being higher if you were refreshing the site.
It shouldn’t cause you any problems long-term…although it will throw your CTR off a bit. Our CTR is lower on the weekdays than it is on weekends (that nobody’s working, that is) on average and this is generally why.
Lol, I don’t remember exactly in ProSense how to gray out the content…I think it was just one of the editing options in the theme for each post/page? If not, just some html code to change the color’s probably doing the trick.
I’m not entirely sure the gray content has a useful effect, actually…I never tested it. If you do test it both black and then gray, definitely let us know if you see an improvement one way or the other.
Thank you very much for the quick reply, Justin.
Ok it seems like there’s nothing too much to bother about this adsense page views.
by the way, what do u think abt changing the font-size of adsense ads? I felt like ur ads fonts are a bit bigger than mine. I couldn’t find any such option to increase font-size though.. Just asking to know, that’s all.
I’m not sure, really. I know that Google talks about two ways to go: blending and contrasting. We blend in our ads to the site to some degree, but you’ll notice we definitely contrast when it comes to the color of our text vs. that of our ads. I guess we can’t make up our minds which way we want to go, heh.
If you create individual ad units you will see the option for font size, color, and type. There are limited options however and I would suggest matching your site to your ads, it’s easier.
What great info. I first read the income reports when finding this site and was wondering how you were doing the tracking with more than 200 sites. I am still using the old interface, but will change to the new one now.
The new interface rocks! There are a couple of things you still can’t do, like delete URL channels, but they are always improving it. Let me know if you run into any issues and I can help.
Yes, really like the new interface…I see quite a few people still using the old one. Luckily, we started this all when the new interface was coming out (around there anyway) so we weren’t attached or married to the old one, heh.
I wanted to echo Ethan’s congratulations as well.. that’s an AMAZING sale in such a small amount of time!
Are you guys seeing a wide open market for this in terms of strong competitors on flippa?
For as long as I can remember, Adsense sites have always sold so well on flippa, I figured by now there would have to had been a ton of people that are taking advantage of the trend and what seems like easy websites to sell.
I’m sure you guys can’t be too worried about competition as you have this website explaining the business model in absolute detail, so just wondered how you see the market currently.
Tyler, it’s funny you should mention this as Justin I were just discussing the topic yesterday. I see 3 approaches from competition to our model — independent entrepreneurs new to the space, existing niche marketers with a library to sell, and medium sized BPO companies looking to expand. The first two don’t worry me much because we have such a head start on them, especially with the AdSenseFlippers brand (as you mentioned) that it would be hard to catch up. We see copycats on Flippa all the time, but they are always lacking the end to end solution we have laid out here causing their sites to sell for only 6-10x. If you don’t have direct access to cheap labor, this multiplier would not be enough to make much money, especially considering all the time that needs to go into each sale.
If medium sized BPO companies got into the game and leveraged their low cost labor, relatively large marketing budget, and simply scaled up the process to produce more site, I could see how they they would give us a run for our money. Still though, we have a head start, avid readers, and repeat customers. Plus there is a lot of business out there, as our latest auction showed. I just don’t see this market going away anytime soon.
What are your thoughts?
The fact that the market won’t go away anytime soon is encouraging to me. I don’t have a team like you guys, but I feel like I can build really good Adsense sites and sell them effectively. I’ve been thinking about starting a site like AdsenseFlippers and others that kind of document the process.
Regardless, this is a great blog and has given me a lot encouragement.
Kenny, if there is anything we can do to help you along in the process please let us know. There is more than enough business to go around!
Joe, thanks so much. I’ve been working on organizing everything and raising money to start outsourcing more sites. I’m using your spreadsheet (the one you guys sent me) as a model to get organized. Some of the sheets are confusing to me, which I was going to get some questions together and send to you, eventually. But, besides that, it’s been a huge help in getting organized.
I have one site I finished less than a month ago and it’s sitting on mid page 2 of Google! Which lets me know I’m at least picking keywords with low competition. I feel like I’ve found some winners that I’ve yet to develop. The good news is, we (me and my business partner/girlfriend) good easily live off what you make from one auction. Not that we’d want to stop there, but, it’s encouraging to know.
Awesome, Kenny…it sounds like you’re off to a great start!
I know you’ve been doing it yourself first, but as a warning to others…make SURE you’ve done it yourself first before even considering outsourcing the process. If you outsourced a half-baked plan you have the possibility of having those early mistakes blow up in your face and costing you quite a bit of money!
It’s a similar thing with tools. There’s really no reason to start with ANY tools (other than Market Samurai or another KW tool maybe) in the beginning. Go through the painstaking process first and then you’ll be able to decide which tools are necessary. (To get rid of some of the MIND-NUMBING work that’s required!)
Thanks Justin, that makes sense. I’ve been building sites for years and I’m ready to start letting others do all the tedious stuff now! But, yeah, outsourcing a process that doesn’t even work will be wasting not only time, but money.
I think that the independent entrepreneurs like myself (until I get Adsense high enough) will have the benefit of the rolling advantage once the first phase of site building is completed.
Unless i’m missing something, once months 3-6 come around I should be able to sell off quite a few earning sites in this market which should give the funds needed to outsource heavily.
It makes perfect sense to me now. It takes so much work in the beginning unless you already have funds to outsource that apparently most people don’t have the desire or funds to do this business model.
I just understand its gonna be all my own work for the first few months, which is fine, because I know what waits for me on the other side.
Keep up the good work guys, I look forward to learning more in the future!
Tyler, I think your strategy is sound, at least it has worked for us. We were lucky in that we owned in outsourcing company and therefore do not have to go through a middle man to get things done. That increases your price point quite a bit. Plus we had experience managing and organizing large SEO processes. It was a little bit of the perfect storm, but we now are willing to teach others how to get there as well.
Yes, Yes, Yes, Tyler…that’s exactly right! The point of selling off sites is so that you can expand without continuing to come out of pocket. Once you’re up to a high enough level of production you’re good to go! Just realize that until you start to realize those profits, you’re not actually earning a profit until you sit back and start collecting. Still, with the ROI you’re getting it totally makes sense to continue to reinvest…
That being said, it’s not get-rich-quick. Read this post on 5 publishing truths you don’t want to hear to find out some of the difficulties.
Tyler, just read your conversation here with Justin and Joe. So, now that you’re 9 months out, how have things gone for you? Have you been able to prove that the strategies laid out here at Adsense Flippers work? Would love to hear your thoughts as somewhat of a “case study.” Thanks. Cheers.
I’m interested to hear as well if we can get Tyler back here. 🙂
Congratulations guys on your amazing buyout today 🙂 It sold for roughly 25x monthly earnings. Keep em’ comin!
Thanks Ethan. Our goal is to provide valuable passive income sites to customers without the sales hype or magic bullet approach. Our open door policy is being rewarded in the marketplace too, we’re quite happy with the results!
Hey guys. It’s funny, when I started using Adsense, I really had no method to the madness, so now I have to go back and painstakingly change or replace the ad codes with ones that make sense. This write-up was very helpful for me just at the right time. I’ll let you know if I have any hangups.
I noticed on your sites for sale that you don’t display the ad code on the “about us”, “contact us”, and “privacy policy” pages. I tried wrapping the code with exception statements, but couldn’t get it to work. How do you implement this? Finding code online can be so unreliable, not to mention, my PC got one of those fake antivirus software viruses last night from a not so helpful coding advice websites, so it’s totally out of commission until I get someone to help me clean it up. I was up till 3am trying to fix it. What a nightmare. However, because of your advice, I kept a copy of all my articles, pictures, and tracking spreadsheets in Google Docs, so I can still work from my laptop. Thanks!
I also noticed that you don’t have any videos on your adsense sites. I’ve read mixed advice on videos (both creating your own or embedding a link to someone elses.) Some say it gives a great SEO boost, gives your page interest, and as long as there is good unique content, it doesn’t break the TOS to have it on a page with Adsense. However, let’s say you link to a YouTube video, and for whatever reason, it get’s flagged as inappropriate or copywrited. If Google makes the connection from an inappropriate video to your site, I figure you’d be done. So, maybe it’s too much of a liability. What do you guys think?
Finally, Joe, thanks for the advice on manually installing WP. I was able to do a successful manual install and get the site up and running. I’ll probably follow up with a reply to that comment explaining the hangups I encountered to get your insight so other readers can benefit.
Hey Chris. Take your time with the ads. It’s really best to sit down and plan things out before replacing code willy nilly. You will save yourself a lot of frustration. Trust me!
Excluding pages is easy with a theme like CTR Theme. It’s right in the options. With other themes and static pages, I manually edit the code using the editor in WP. Sometimes, it’s simply not possible and you will have to live with ads on your contact us, about us, and privacy pages. It’s not a big deal, as long as you are not trying to take advantage of by tricking users into clicking on your ads somehow, AdSense won’t mind. If it is a problem, they will contact you through your AdSense account.
I’m unsure of video for small niche sites like we produce. I think the best traffic comes from the search engines themselves. Advertisers and Google seems to be happiest with it that way too. As an add-on to your site, I see it as another distraction to the user, lowering CTR and therefore revenue. For authority sites, it’s a different story.
Let me know how the manual install goes. Once I started doing it that way, I never looked back.
Hi Joe. So I figured out a simple way to block the ads on specific pages or posts. I go into the WP editor and pull up the page.php, then I find where it calls the adsense code and wrap that with the following code:
In this case it calls the adsense code, but if the code is directly in the file, you could wrap that as well. All pages and posts have a post number. To find it, go to the page edit screen in your WP backend and look at the url. It should read “post=27” or some other number. Grab the number for the pages you want to exclude and put it in the array above. Done.
For some reason it won’t let me post code snippets. Let’s try it without the php wrap. Make sure to add back the php wrap to the beginning and end of each line.
if (!is_page(array(26, 29, 185))) {
include(‘adsense_homepage_linkunit.php’)
}
Are you using ProSense? Just post the ad unit code directly on the pages and disable each php file by blanking out the AdSense Code. While your solution is more elegant, I think the theme is fundamentally broken, possibly due to a WP upgrade. The only PHP file that seems to work in that theme is the AdSense sidebar.
By combining the use of ad units and URL channels I was able to a/b test my site so good I got it sold for $15K a few months later. Still doing this ’til this date! 🙂
Hey Nabil…thanks for stopping by!
That’s quite a sale price…can you share the link so we can take a look at the auction/site?
I took a look at your Nabillionaire site and it looks like you’re off to a good start! It’s a really good idea to brand yourself in this niche, we think.
The site is located over at http://www.lundins-skor.se
Keep in mind though that the site is Swedish and that you most probably won’t understand a single word 🙂
Thank God for Google Translate! 🙂
NABILLIONAIRE, your site only has 6 pages and only 1 ad, and you sold it for 15k? Very impressive.
Do you find higher clicks when using only one ad?
Okay, wow, this is been really helpful for me. For the longest time, I’ve only used Custom Channels. I clicked on “Ad Units” under “Performance Reports” and all I see is ad sizes and the dates I created them, so I have a lot of organizing to do. I feel like this is really going to improve my business, so thanks!
I have one random question. This is my first time actually spending time in the new interface. I clicked on “Sites” and saw all my sites, plus some sites I use for revenue sharing (like Xomba and Infobarrel). Then, I saw some random blogspot sites that brought me back to the days of when I first started using Adsense. These sites are pretty horrible and I have no clue what my login is to get in there and delete them. Is there a way I can block these sites? Or, better, what’s the best way to get my ads off of them or get them deleted?
Thanks for the great tutorial!
Hi Kenny, thanks for stopping by, I’m glad you found my article helpful.
The feature you need is called “Allowed Sites” and can be found by clicking on the “Account settings” link on the right hand side, then scroll down to the bottom and look for “Sites authorized to show ads”. Click edit, check the box, and click save.
WARNING: you will need to add all your sites manually if you do this in the “Authorized sites” box found below when you check the box. Sites take about 4 hours to add (not good if you have a good deal of revenue coming in as it will be missed) and will prevent any cache URLs such as image search or translate tools from earning revenue.
In short, unless your ads are being displayed on dubious sites, I highly suggest NOT using this option. It’s just too risky that you will lose revenue because you forgot to add one of you sites or get revenue from a URL you did not realize.
Thanks Joseph for the answer.
I read about that and thought I might have to do that. But, then I remembered how you can disable Adsense from certain revenue sharing sites like hubpages, which I had done before. Well, blogger happens to be in there, so I just disabled access to blogger. I’m never going to use blogger for Adsense anyways, so, seems like a good fix!
Great and timely article. Just this week I was searching for a solution since I had more than 200 sites and had passed my limit for URL channels. Unfortunately Google isn’t upping the limit to 500 now like they have in the past. However last week they launched a section in their new interface called “sites” which is listed directly below URL channels. It automatically groups your revenue by site and I don’t believe there is any limit.
Thanks for stopping in, Logan!
Yes, Joe showed me the new “sites” feature…pretty cool. He mentioned something like 100K as a limit or something? Either way, REALLY helpful and needed.
Logan,
Thanks for stopping by. Your’re right the new sites feature does track individual domains, but without the search functionality of URL or custom channels. At least not yet. So I still suggest doing it the old fashioned way, if possible.
Here is the article in case anyone is interested:
http://adsense.blogspot.com/2011/08/view-domain-level-performance-data.html