Chapter 3 Your Control Center
Once you have created an AdSense account and added your ad blocks to your blog, you will want to learn a bit about the AdSense Console, what it is and what it can do for you. To logon to your AdSense Console simply go online to:
https://www.google.com/adsense/
Enter your e-mail and password for AdSense, which you used previously to create your AdSense account.
AdSense Report Tab
The AdSense Console is very easy to use. The first page you see is the “Overview” page of the “Reports” tab. Here you will find the number of page impressions your blog has had, the number of clicks on your ads, your page click-through rate, and your earnings. You can view today, this week, last week, all time, etc… Using this simple overview you can start to adjust your ad block locations and see if your revenue improves or declines based on the location of your ad blocks. One good thing you can try here is to look at your click through rate for a day. Move your ads and then see if your click through improves or declines. Look at the content on various days and find out if one topic seems to get you better click through than another. If so then you might want to create more content based on those keywords. Your goal is the highest click through rate possible.
As you can see in the graphic above, Google holds AdSense payments until you have reached a total of $100 and have specifically told Google how to pay you. This helps to keep Google’s overhead down and your earning potential higher.
In addition to various simple to use reports, Google offers you a Site Diagnostics page. This site will alert you if there is anything on your site that the Googlebot has issues with. It is a good idea to view this from time to time and make sure everything is okay with your site.
AdSense Setup Tab
The AdSense Setup tab located in the AdSense Console allows you to create the customized text blocks you will need to paste into your Blogger template, get the code for AdSense for Search, and also an AdSense referral button which you can put on your blog to generate income through referring other sites to use AdSense on their own sites.
From the “AdSense Setup” tab you can easily generate the code for your ad blocks, change the colors and look of your ad blocks, update your channels and use the “Competitive Ad Filter” to filter out any ads from you competitor websites which may be showing up in your AdSense ad blocks.
My Account Tab
Under the “My Account” tab you will simply find your personal and financial information. This is where you would update your payment choices or address, e-mail account, etc…
Need More Help With AdSense?
One of the best things about Google is that they assume everyone needs some clear helpful explanations and easy to navigate help pages. They have done an excellent job of creating their “Help” pages with regard to AdSense. Reading the help screens in AdSense can help you to get the most out of the program with your blog. It is well worth taking some time to familiarize yourself with these pages and the information contained within them.