As I get more and more immersed in AS I see things others do that I'd like to try. One of them being the use of channels to better improve AS earnings. But my question it just how deep do you make your channels? Some people say they remove ads from pages with low impressions or CTR... which to me means that each individual page must have it's own channel, right? How else would one know a page's stats? Right now I just use channels for placement among my pages (all the pages have the same layout), for example, header, right sidebar, left sidebar, etc. I'm not sure how well I'd be able to set up channels for individual pages, especially since my site is dynamically generated (using WordPress). I'm thinking I'd start with the following: one set of channels for the main index page, one set of channels for category pages (i.e. one level below the main index) and one set of channels for the individual pages (i.e. two levels below the main index). Common sense tells me my stats would be 200% more accurate this way but maybe I'm wrong Any thoughts on this? Much appreciated.
If you want to get an idea of how each page is performing, you can use URL Channels. The benefit is that you don't need to add any extra code to the adsense ads. Note that this would also result in double-reporting. For example, if you had a custom channel called "sidebar_right" and also had yoursite.com/crackerjacks.htm as a URL channel, they would both show a hit in your reports if the right sidebar was clicked on the crackerjacks page. You obviously won't get double paid or anything, but it can help you optimize your site to some degree. You'll see which custom channel does the best as well as which particular page (or directory or site) does the best. The downside is you have to enter every single page you want tracked one by one in Adsense, unless you want a URL channel to cover an entire directory or domain. Myself, I used to use custom channels, but lately I've been more interested in page performance (especially since Adsense was picking up the wrong keywords in some pages), so now I use URL channels. What you use comes down to preference... do you want to see which pages do better for you, or do you want to see what ad positioning works best?
I don't know how wordpress works but setting up channels the way you described them makes very little sense. Being able to track performance of individual pages has been really helpful to me personally. But, I guess, using some channels is better than using none.
Liminal, why wouldn't it make sense? (not saying it should, I just want to know), do you mean because pages are dynamically generated? If so, that's not a problem as WP allows things to be customized based on what category or single post is shown. By the way, this is what I want to do with my channels (for now). The top level (circled in red) is what I've currently got going, as all the pages use the same template. As for using URL channels, I hadn't thought about using that for individual pages, but then my question to others is which pages do you track? If I remember correctly you can only have a combined 200 channels so not only would I eventually run out (I've got over 130 "pages" and I add at least one every day) but it'd be tedious to add so many. So the question, do you pick pages at random, or your highest trafficked ones, lowest trafficked, etc.
My bad. I guess I did not fully understand your plan from your previous post. What you are planning to do sounds like a good way to go. Personally I love to have the flexibility of having separate channels for each individual content pages but in your case (with new content added daily) that might not be feasible