Analytics + Adsense = Better Data

In order to link Google Analytics and Adsense together you need two things, an Analytics account and an Adsense account – Surprise! If you don't have both, you can't link the two services. To get them, please follow the following instructions, don't worry, you only have to do this once:

Instead of re-inventing the wheel, here a two great tutorials on Wizzley itself to do this:

• Google Analytics Set-Up
• Google Adsense Set-Up

Please follow the instructions provided and then come back here ;-) Back? Great! Now we finally can connect the two accounts!

Go to your Google Adsense account, you should see now a link saying 'invitation to integrate your Adsense with your Analytics account' or similar. This link is on the overview page of your Adsense dashboard.

Click the link and choose the Analytics account you want to link to. You have to have admin rights on both, your Analytics and your Adsense account, in order for this to work. Follow the instructions on the screen to link the two accounts and click 'Finish'.

Now here comes the 'Secret Wizzley Tip': In order for this to work, you have either to add some extra code to your website or, drumroll please, to choose one web property as your primary domain. As we can't add extra code to Wizzley, the sole solution is to make Wizzley.com the primary domain.

Click 'continue' if you want to add the urls of other domains / websites you own also. For these websites you will receive a code snippet to include into your website. Unfortunately you can only link one Analytics account to one Adsense account. If you write also on other Adsense revenue websites such as Hubpages, Infobarrel or Squidoo, you will have to make a decision which one of these you want to set as your primary domain ;-( I choose Wizzley, because I think it has the best potential from all Web 2.0 sites I know, and I know a few ;-)

And, last but not least, be patient and wait at least 24h to see the data coming in. Things can take a while, but if after 24h-48h still nothing is happening, check if you have followed all steps correctly and look up the links in the resources box below for trouble shooting tips.

So, lets assume all went well and the data is coming in just fine, what do you do now with this information? First of all, the data in question is a bit hidden in your Analytics dashboard, here is how you access it.

Go to your Analytics account and choose your 'Wizzley' profile there. Click on 'Content' in the left sidebar and then on 'Adsense' in the sub-menu that opened. Eh voila! All data that you might want to see is there, just at your fingertips ;-) Before getting now all excited, bear in mind that this data is not retrospective, it only starts to 'roll in' from the moment onwards you connected the two accounts. Meaning you should do this rather sooner than later, as the more data you have, the better are you equipped to make decisions based on said data. Before going into a bit of detail about what you can find out and do with this information, here a few real life examples from my own experience:

People do click ads on product review or sales articles.

That one was a real surprise to me. Some of my product articles, that were meant to review products and be monetized with Amazon modules or similar, were doing really well with Adsense also. Consequently I played around with my article layout to give both monetizing methods an 'equal chance'. You can do so here on Wizzley, to a certain extend, by playing with the 'Ad Settings' at the right side in 'edit page' view for Adsense and by choosing and placing your Amazon module and type carefully.

Articles that I thought were doing well, didn't, and others, that I thought wouldn't do well, did.

Different niches are different in their 'clicking behavior'. Without giving away too much info, I discovered that niches that are geared towards a more 'web savvy' audience had a lower CTR (Click Through Rate / Average Clicks per Visits) and niches that appeal more to a general public had higher ones. Now, that doesn't hinder or discourage me to write about a lot of different topics, but if an article has a lowish CTR, I might be better off putting a, relevant!, Amazon module in the prime spot instead of a Google ad that nobody will ever click.

And, last but not least, I learned to identify articles that were doing well without getting a lot of traffic. Which was a great incentive to improve said articles with even more, relevant content. This and writing more, related, articles that link back to the main article in question, really does help your Google rankings. And the higher you rank in the search engines, the more organic traffic you get and the more you can earn, potentially, from your articles.

So, what is in for you? What kind of data can you see and what can you do with this information? Here some possible scenarios. I always look at the data as whole first, meaning I set my date range in the Analytics dashboard starting with when I connected Adsense and Analytics until today. This way I see better how things have developed over time.

The following refers to the old version of Analytics, I still need to get used to the new one ...

Looking at the Dashboard>Content>Adsense display as a whole, you can see how your Adsense earnings on Wizzley have developed over time and if you are generally on the right track. Hint: If you are not seeing any income, you are doing something wrong ;-)

Under this graph you have ten hyperlinks that, when clicked, show you how the different aspects of your Adsense account have developed over time, for example, if your CTR is going up or down etc.

Whilst this is interesting for your account as a whole, it is even more interesting if you drill this down per article.

For this, you have to go to 'Top Adsense Content' and click 'View Full Report'. Now you see which article made you the most money with Adsense. By clicking on the hyperlink of each article, you see an even more detailed report specific to this article. So what can you do with this kind of information? Additionally to what I have already mentioned above, one thing comes first to my mind:

Split Testing Your Articles

Split testing is a posh name for changing one thing at a time, observing the results of the change for a set amount of time and then either keeping the change or discarding it and trying something new. Proper split testing requires a minimum amount of traffic, without enough traffic your data will be biased and less reliable. I wait normally for at least 500 Adsense impressions before I change something else on the same article. And remember that Wizzley takes their share in the impressions also, so don't go by views, go by ad impressions. And remember to change only one thing at a time, how else would you know what worked and what not?

Improving well performing articles

If you find an article, that is doing well with small amounts of traffic, chances are good that it will do even better when you get more traffic. Two simple things you can do to improve web traffic to such an article, is to add more, related, content to it and to build other articles around it. By adding more content to it, you have the chance to rank for more of these important 'long tail keywords' internet marketers always speak about. This means simply, that the more content you give Google to index, the more search terms Google has to send you traffic for. Lets say you write an article about a specific travel location, by adding more, relevant content to said article you will start to see traffic not only for 'travel location', but also for 'how to get to travel location', 'what to do in travel location' and 'where to find accommodation in travel location'. I think you get the idea ;-)

The next thing you can do, is to write more, related, articles in the same niche / topic and group and link them together. This is known as internal linking amongst SEO experts and it shows the search engines which page of a website is the main one when it comes to >keyword<. Now, don't go wild with this and spam Wizzley with zillions of rewrites of the same article. What works best for me is to write around 5-10 related articles that link to each other and to the main article. For example, such a set-up could look like this:

• Best Laptops 2012 (main, authority article)
• Laptops under $400
• Laptop versus Notebook
• Best Laptop Accessories
• Top Ten Laptop Bags
• ...

This way you have created a cluster of articles that are all in the same niche, that you can naturally link to each other, but where each article has also a 'standalone' value for the reader.

Be careful with link building! We all know that back links are the backbones of Google rankings, but since Panda many Web 2.0 sites were / are punished by Google for being link and content farms. The best known 'victim' was perhaps Hubpages which was forced to crack down on accounts and hubs that created back links in an aggressive manner. Without accepting any warranty for what I say, the following methods, if used sparingly, seem still to be ok and in compliance with the Wizzley policies.

Internal backlinking, as described above.

RSS Feed

Wizzley provides you with a RSS feed that you can either add to your other articles, showing off your other work on Wizzley to readers of your articles or which you can add to your other sites and web properties. As this is provided by Wizzley, it should still be save to use (when not overdone).

Social Bookmarking

Wizzley also provides you with easy ways to like and share articles on social sites like Twitter, Facebook or G+. Now, don't go wild here neither, no reason to like each single of your writings and to tweet the heck out of it. And, btw, it is also good practice to use these features also on other people's articles that you find great and useful (*hint*hint*).

Article marketing

This means basically that, when you publish content also on other platforms, such as InfoBarrel, you can, where relevant and appropriate, add a contextual link to your article here. This can be especially useful, if you want to establish yourself as an expert in a certain field. But, again, don't overdo it.

Guest blogging

Similar to the above, when writing a guest blog post, adding a link to one or two of your articles and / or to your Wizzley profile is a great way to spread the word about what a great expert / author you are in your specific niche.

Blog commenting

This receives less and less attention from the search engines, but is still a great way to get a new article indexed quickly. If you comment normally on a blog, simply put a link to your article or Wizzley profile into the appropriate field when allowed to do so. Again, use sparingly and avoid spamming other people's blogs. We all hate spam on our own articles, so why would we want to pollute other people's hard work with spam?

Linking to your Wizzley Profile

That one is a possibility that is often overlooked by many online writers. Instead of linking to single articles, do link to your main profile at Wizzley. Getting to a decent PR for your profile is perfectly possible, just look at the most successful writers here ;-) Bearing in mind that your profile then contains also links to your latest articles etc, and that you can add links in your descriptive text on your profile, you can send a lot of link juice and link love around your articles whilst staying in full compliance with the TOS.

• Identifying which Wizzley articles make you the most money can be done easily by connecting your Google Analytics with your Google Adsense account.
• First use this information to improve promising articles.
• Second build more related articles and interlink them with each other and with your main article.
• When promoting your articles inside and outside of Wizzley, use common sense and don't spam.

Just in case you overlooked the last sentence, don't spam your link and never, ever use automated software to build crappy links or to automate your social bookmarking and the like. Also building a new fanpage on Facebook for every single one of your articles is a bit OTT, imho ;-)

And, last but not least, give your articles time to age and to gather authority. My best earning articles have reached their peak after roughly 2-3 months and are still going strong. Online content is like good wine, they get better and more valuable over time ;-)

Like always, any comments, questions and suggestions are welcome and appreciated. I will answer them as good as I can and ASAP. And, btw, if you like this article and found it useful, why not give it a thumb up, like it on Facebook or tweet it? Just saying ;-)

If you read this article shortly after it was published, you might notice that I have only a few pages published here on Wizzley. However, I am in this content publishing business since 2005 and yes, I do make money online ;-) I write not only for Wizzley, but have also written for other Web 2.0 properties like Hubpages and Infobarrel plus I do own a variety of websites myself. The data and information for this article is the result of all this. Oh, yes, nearly forgot it, it is 'she' ;-) and if you like to know more about me, I invite you to check out >my blog<, latest posts below via the handy RSS feed ;-)