How Changes in Ad Units can Impact Your AdSense Earnings

As an AdSense publisher, you are always looking for effective ways to maximize your site’s revenue through Google Ads but without hampering the end user experience.

You therefore routinely experiment with ad units of different sizes, you rotate between different colors palettes, you fine-tune your section targeting tags – all this and more just to determine that perfect combination which will yield the highest the click-through rate.

There’s one problem though. When you make any change to your AdSense Ad units, you need to have them live on your website for least a week or two to determine whether that change has had an effect on your earnings, if any. And if you make more than one change in the same window, tracking their effect on performance gets even more difficult.

Things are about to become simple though.

The AdSense team is testing a new feature that will help publishers easily understand how changes to ad units have impacted their earnings over time.

Now when you make a change to any of your ad units, big or small, that event will be highlighted as a labeled flag in your AdSense performance reports. You can click the flag to know the exact change that you have made. This is completely automatic and you will also be able to track the effect of any changes that you may have made in the past few years to your AdSense account.

For instance, if you refer to the screenshot above, the label “E” suggests the impact on earnings /CTR when the font size of an ad unit was changed from media to large while label “B” represents the event when an existing ad was changed to serve both text and image ads instead of just text ads.

Other than individual ad units, you’ll also be able to determine the impact on earnings from blocking any ad categories or when you make more channels available for placement targeting to attract new advertisers.

Overall, all this is extremely useful and actionable data but you'll to wait for a while - the feature is still in beta and may not be available in your AdSense dashboard yet.