An AdSense Vocabulary Lesson

                   If you've visited any forums where people discuss AdSense, you'll see all kinds of abbreviations and hear all kinds of terms that you might not understand. Also, when you login to your AdSense account for the first time and look at the reports, you'll see a number of abbreviations as well. Here's a list of the most common ones, and a plain-english description of what they mean:

Page Impressions

When somebody goes to your website and loads a page in their web browser, Google counts that as one "page impression". That means one pair of eyes has seen one page of your site. If that same person browses around and looks at 10 pages of your site, Google counts that as 10 page impressions. So basically a page impression is just how many of your pages were looked at by people.

Page CTR

CTR stands for "click through rate". It's expressed as a 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.

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.

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, which is pretty lousy if you have a lot of sites or a very large site. I'll discuss how to get around that in a later section.

Ad Links (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. It shows all of the available ad formats, including Ad Links:

https://www.goog le.com/adsense/adformats

Ad Filter

Sometimes Google might decide to show ads on your page that aren't really related to your page content at all. When that happens, you have the option of going into your AdSense account and adding those sites to your Ad Filter. Google will not show ads from any site that you put in your Ad Filter. Also, if your competitor's ads show up on your pages, that's another reason to use your Ad Filter.