Why You Need to Link Your Google Analytics and Adsense Accounts

Though discussion of AdSense advertising has slowed some in the blogosphere, especially since the latest Panda updates, Google’s ad placement program still remains one of the key ways bloggers monetize their sites and bring in revenue from their blogs.

Another of Google’s products, Google Analytics, has also revolutionized many bloggers’ marketing strategies, by continuously monitoring traffic and reporting various data about that traffic, allowing bloggers to adapt, to figure out what’s working and what’s not, and to keep improving their sites.

While it may not be breaking news that you can link the two accounts for you blog, a very large number of bloggers who use both programs have not linked Adsense and Analytics, and are missing out on some potentially very important new data that could take their blog to the next level.

If you are using both Google Adsense and Google Analytics, but haven’t linked them, stop reading right now and go link them.

All linked up? Perfect.

In your Google Analytics account, you will see a separate section for Adsense. Given a little bit of time, you will start to gather a good deal of data in more categories than you will know what to do with.

One of the first things you’ll probably want to do once the two programs are linked is find out exactly where your money is coming from. With these programs linked you can even determine which content brings in the most money.

To do this, simply click the “Adsense Pages” tab, which will bring up a report that lists all the pages on your site that brought in income during the last month, and then organizes them highest to lowest.

The most important advantages of linking the two programs are finding out:

• Which kind of post brings in the higher paying ads
• The content that succeeds best, in terms of bringing money in
• How the length of your posts affects conversion rates, and income
• What pages you should focus your linking efforts to (ones that are performing well are already optimized, so you should capitalize on that fact)
• Where you can fit extra ads to bring in even more money and maybe improve page performance

Again, the fact that you can link the two programs may not be news to some bloggers, but the potential that you gain by linking them might be. Blogging is certainly a business built around data points and modifying strategies around these data points. If you’re using both programs already, there is no reason you shouldn’t have them linked — unless of course you don’t want to succeed. If that’s the case, go ahead and leave things exactly the way they are.