Leverage Google Analytics to track your traffic

Google Analytics is a web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your site/app traffic. Audience data can help plan content, improve the user experience by optimising the look and feel, navigation and user value of your platform.

In this article:

• Use Analytics insights to conduct traffic analysis
• Use Analytics statistics to optimise your revenue
• Tips to maintain clean traffic

Use Analytics insights to conduct traffic analysis

• Monitor your traffic and get to know your site's normal traffic patterns.
• Drill down into AdSense reports on specific ad units, CTRs and page views.
• Break down your Analytics traffic reports into meaningful segments or channels.
• Use the methods listed above to find suspicious traffic sources or clicks.
• Make sure that your ad implementation is compliant with the AdSense programme policies.
• Still have a question? Consult the AdSense Help Community.
• Finally, report invalid activity to the AdSense team.

Use Analytics statistics to optimise your revenue

You can use Analytics' associated services to integrate with your AdSense revenue. This can help you conduct a comprehensive and three-dimensional analysis of your income at the page level.

1. Link your AdSense account to Analytics.
2. In Analytics, under 'Behaviour' reports, visit the 'Publishers' report tab.
3. In the 'Publishers' report tab, select secondary dimension filters such as: User demographic, Country, Traffic source, Browser language, Screen resolution etc.
4. View the revenue breakdown of the visitors across different user demographics, e.g. gender, age, country, etc.
5. View the breakdown of visitor revenue of a single URL in different time increments, e.g. hours.

By combining the data from above, you can perform a multi-dimensional analysis on specific traffic sources, pages and user groups.

Tips to maintain clean traffic

• Use Analytics to understand your ad traffic and site visitors. You can break down traffic using URL channels, custom channels or Ad unit reports in AdSense.
• Create different ad units for each of your sites, on both desktop and mobile. Segregate different ad placements with unique ad unit IDs.
• Identify bot activity: self-identifying bots, spiders and search engine crawlers.
• Segment your traffic to get a better understanding of your traffic sources and users, and help prevent against invalid traffic.
• Make sure that you work with trusted traffic partners to avoid suspicious traffic.
• If you want to use paid traffic it's important that you do quality checks beforehand. Use the traffic provider checklist to guide your discussions with any traffic provider that you're considering.