How to Read Your AdSense Account for Dummies
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David
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December 27th, 2012
So, you have a Google AdSense Account. Congratulations! You are on the first step to earn advertising revenue from the internet. Woohoo!
But, you might have noticed that the AdSense profile is not exactly the most user-friendly place to be. It's kind of confusing, and doesn't make a ton of sense.
Fortunately, you don't need to know too much to understand your AdSense Account. I found that the basic homepage was one of the more confusing places for me in my early days online, so I figured it might be useful to share my knowledge with you so as to alleviate the pain and frustration of figuring it out on your own!
Below, you will see an enumerated sample of my very own AdSense Account. Please follow the list below to find descriptions and definitions of each account setting.
Estimated Earnings
This section is a little more straightforward. Basically, this is the list of how much, in dollar form (or whatever your currency may be), of how much you've earned:
1. Today so far
2. Yesterday
3. This month so far
4. Last month
As these are not finalized earnings, the numbers and values could change by the time they wind up in the box for 5.
Finalized Earnings
5. Unpaid earnings
AdSense distributes earnings after they hit the $100 value mark (in the US). This box is money you've received and that AdSense has approved for dispensation. You will receive this money as long as the sites show no sign of foul play, all of your necessary account settings have been recorded (tax information, bank accounts, phone number, etc), and you've hit the required value.
Last 7 days
Although you can edit this setting to show longer time frames, we'll stick with the week-long dimensions.
Basically, this is all of your account activity over the past 7 days as broken up into the following categories.
Adsense for Content
This is just one of the types of ads that AdSense will display on your site. Others include RSS feeds. If you have ads set up on your feeds or elsewhere, another line will appear with more information (thus adjusting the values in the final bar at the bottom).
6. Page views
This is the total number of times your page has been viewed in the last week. Pretty simple!
7. Clicks
Also rather straightforward, this number tells how many specific clicks have been made on your pages and websites in the past week.
8. Page CTR
Now we're going to enter the slightly more confusing stuff, so hold on and take a breath! CTR stands for click-through rate. This is the percentage rate of clicks your page earns compared to content. So, if you have 10 clicks for 100 views, your CTR is 10% (do not expect your CTR to be that high, though!). This just tells you approximately how many of all page views result in a click (often fewer than 1%).
9. CPC
CPC stands for cost-per-click. That's the price earned for each of those clicks on average. This value ranges depending on the advertisers, but is usually anywhere from just under a dollar to around $2.
10. Page RPM
This is the most confusing of all the categories, but really just refers to revenue earned per thousand page views.So, for everyone 1,000 times your page is seen, this is the amount of money you've earned on average. If you earn $10 for every 1,000 views (Page RPM = $10.00), you make about 10 cents for every 100 views.
11. Estimated Earnings
Based on the number of clicks in the last week, this is how much you earned on content ads.
Totals
Remember: if you have ads anywhere besides content (like RSS feeds), you'll have another bar above this one with more information. Those numbers would be added to content ads to create larger totals. In this situation, the totals are the same as the values for AdSense for Content.
12. Page Views
The total number of page views in the last week
13. Clicks
The total number of ad clicks in the last week
14. Page CTR
The average percentage of page views that result in ad clicks
15. CPC
The average amount each click earned on your website in the past week
16. Page RPM
The total amount you tend to earn per every 1,000 page views.
17. Estimated Earnings
The total estimated earnings from all ads in the past week.