Channels

Track ad unit performance with custom channels

Next: Track page performance with URL channels

Custom channels allow you to track the performance of ad units. You design your own custom channels and use them to view the performance of your ad units in ways that are meaningful to you. You can create up to 500 custom channels for each of your AdSense products.

How you can use custom channels

Track a group of ad units

Here are a few examples of ways that you can group and track ad units with custom channels:

Ad sizes
Location of ads on a page – left side vs. right side, embedded in content or above it
Page topics – articles about sports vs. entertainment

Track ad units by custom channel ID

You can also track ad units by adding custom channel IDs to your ad unit code. For example, let's say that you want to track how much you earn from your signed-in users versus your non-signed-in users. You'd create two custom channels, then add the ID of the first custom channel to the ad units that you show to your signed-in users and the ID of the second custom channel to the ad units that you show to your non-signed-in users. You can now compare the performance of these two custom channels in a custom channels report.

Example

Here's an example showing some ad unit code with the custom channel ID 1234 added to it:

<script async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ignored1234567890123456" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>

  <!-- signed_in_ad_unit -->

  <ins class="adsbygoogle"

       style="display:block"

       data-ad-client="ignored1234567890123456"

       data-ad-slot="0123456789"

       data-ad-format="auto"

       data-ad-channel="1234"

       data-full-width-responsive="true"></ins>

  <script>

       (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

  </script>

Create a custom channel

Sign in to your AdSense account.
Click Reports.
Click Settings .
Click Manage custom channels.
Click Add channel.
Select your AdSense product. For example, 'Content', 'Search', etc.
Give your custom channel a descriptive name that will help you identify it later. For example, car_pages or large_squares.
Select the ad units that you want to track with this channel. Note that only the AdSense for content and AdSense for search products support this option.
Click Add.
Your custom channel is now active.

Learn how to remove, deactivate and activate custom channels.

View the report for a custom channel

Sign in to your AdSense account.
Click Reports.
Click Settings .
Click Manage custom channels.
In the table, click View report next to your custom channel.
(Optional) You can also add dimensions to segment your channel data.
Tip: You can also combine the custom channels report with the countries dimension.

Notes:

When viewing custom channel reports, you might be viewing some impressions and clicks that have been tracked in multiple channels. If you add an ad unit to more than one custom channel or assign more than one custom channel to an ad unit, then clicks and impressions from that ad unit will be recorded for each of the custom channels.
AdSense for Search (AFS) publishers only: Click-derived metrics that receive less than 10 clicks per day will appear as 0 in your custom channel reports.

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