How to improve your AdSense performance with Google Analytics

Want to freshen up the AdSense performance on your site? Google Analytics can help. Here are some simple and effective places to start.

1. Find out where to focus

Content Groups let you bundle your offerings to analyze them more clearly. Instead of analyzing all shoes at once, for instance, a shoe company might divide content into shoes for adults and kids, for men and women, or by tennis shoes and high heels. You can view and compare aggregated metrics by group, or drill down to any individual URL or page title.

Suppose you want to know: What topics have the best AdSense CTRs?

Group content by topic (such as food, politics and sport)
Use the AdSense Pages report to view metrics

Once you learn which topics have the best clickthrough rates, you could then focus on creating more content for those topics.

Suppose you want to know: Which product groups have slow-loading pages?

Group products by type (such as shirts and shoes)
Use Page Speed reports to look at page load performance

Are some pages very slow? You might focus on fixing uncompressed images to improve the user experience (and your AdSense revenue).

Content Groups are easy to set up. Learn how to create them and then follow these best practices from Google Analytics evangelist Justin Cutroni.

2. Understand where your users arrive and leave

A Landing Pages report can show you how engaged visitors are with your content. You can analyze individual pages or the Content Groups we just talked about.

Suppose you want to know: What pages cause visitors to leave?

Look for pages with high bounce rates, this usually indicates content that isn't appealing to visitors or is irrelevant to their needs
Try changing the headline of your article or finding better images
You may also want to analyze the page speed for pages with high bounce rates; visitors may be giving up on a very slow-loading page

Both Content Groups and Landing Page reports can help you find underperforming pages on your site and take action to fix them.

3. Get to know your users

Demographics and Interests data helps you understand the age and gender of your users, as well as their interests based on their online browsing and buying.

Suppose you want to know: How old are my visitors?

Try Demographics Report > Age
Check the bounce rate: if it’s high, consider changing the headline or the visuals to make your pages more relevant and engaging for your target audience

Suppose you want to know: What are my users interested in?

Try an Interests report
Then shape your content based on the user interests you see; if viewers of you tech blog are interested in photography, try publishing more articles on that theme

To get started with the Demographics and Interests reports, enable them in your Analytics account.

The key to making your site better is to jump into the data, have fun, and experiment. Find out what works and do more of it. Have any ideas to share about using these reports? Add them in the comments below!