Google AdSense Vocabulary

Google Adsense is one of the most talked about CPC advertising online. This blog is even monetize using Adsense. In fact, it was Adsense that got me into blogging.

For newbies, abbreviations will sometimes hinder you from fully understanding Adsense. When you first log into your Adsense account and look at the report, you will see this abbreviations and immediately ask yourself what are those (trust me, I was like that on my first Adsense days).

I have met bloggers you have been using Adsense for months and yet ask me what are the meaning of those abbreviations. So I decided to blog about this. Here’s a list of the most common ones, and a plain-english description of what they mean:

Page Impressions
When somebody visits your website and loads a page in their web browser(IE, FireFox, Safari, etc), Google caount that as one "page impression". When that visitor, browse around and visit another ten(10) pages of you website, that's another ten(10) "page impressions". In short, "page impression" is the number of pages a visitor loads while browsing your website.

Page CTR
CTR stands for "click through rate" or "click through ratio". It the percentage of the page impressions that resulted in somebody clicking one of the AdSense ads. So, for example, if you had 1,000 page impressions, and those 1,000 page impressions resulted in 100 clicks on the ads, that is a 10% Page CTR (100/1000 = 10%).

Page eCPM
eCPM stands for "effective cost per millie". "Millie" means thousand. CPM is what the old world of banner advertisements used in pricing their ads. If a site had a $10 CPM, that meant that you as an advertiser would pay $10 for every 1,000 page impressions that your ad was shown on.

With AdSense, eCPM is telling you how much you are earning (or will earn), on average, for every 1,000 page impressions. If you have a $25 eCPM, that means you are earning (or will earn) $25 in clicks for every 1,000 page impressions on your site.

Google shows you this figure so you can get an idea of how much more they are paying you than a banner advertising network will pay you. I have some sites with eCPM values as high as $300, $500, $700 and more. That means for every 1,000 page impressions I’m earning $300-$700 on those sites. How I do that will be discussed later.

EPC
You won’t see the term EPC in your Google AdSense reports, but you’ll hear it a lot if you hang out on AdSense forums. EPC stands for "earnings per click", and just means how much you earn for each click. Your EPC will depend on the price of a keyword because Google only gives you a percentage of how much advertiser pay for that keyword. Naturally, the more expensive a keyword, the more EPC you gain.

Channels
By default, all of your page impressions and clicks are dropped into one giant bucket. By default, you have no way of knowing how much each individual site earned (if you have multiple sites), or how much each individual page earned, etc. "Channels" are Google’s way of letting you break down your earnings into "sections" so you can analyze each website or each page independently to see where the money is coming from. Google only lets you have 200 channels.

AdLinks (or Ad Units)
AdLinks, or Ad Units, are just another type of AdSense ad. The basic AdSense ad is a block of links with short descriptions that when a visitor clicks, you get paid. Ad Links are a little different. They show linked topics
that are related to your page, and when people click on those they are then taken to a different page and presented with a list of ads. If they decide to click on one of those ads, you get paid. You can see what AdLinks look like by visiting Google's Ad Formats page.

So there you have it bloggers. Bookmark this post and whenever you have a question about Adsense advertising terms, go back to this page.