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How to track adsense clicks on your wordpress blog

Stats, stats, stats!!! Every blogger love their stats, specially if the graph is moving up. You might already be using Google Analytics to track visitors on your blog. From where they are coming, what articles they are reading. But won’t it be great if you knew what user clicked on adsense ad? On what page a visitor clicked on adsense ad? How they came to your site? With the tracking information in front of you, you can optimize your web site for your visitors to increase conversions. I won’t be teaching Analytics here in detail, but if you have any issues or don’t understand anything you should ask.

To better integrate Google Analytics with your wordpress blog, I would recommend you use a plugin because adding tracking manually in your template is prone to errors and you might mess up your theme. I personally use Google Analytics for WordPress and you can get it from here.

Once you have installed Google Analytics for WordPress, goto Google Analytics configuration page and enable “Track Adsense clicks“.

Enable adsense click in Analytics plugin

Save your settings and then login to your Google Analytics. We will be creating new Goal on Google Analytics, if you are wondering what is a Goal? it lets you track conversion rate. You can evaluate your traffic in terms of money and much more. When you are logged into your Google Analytics account, goto your Website Profiles and click Edit in front of your website profile.

Edit analytics profile

Now you are on Profile Settings page and you should now be seeing a section Goals. By default there are 4 sets of Goals available for every profile and you can add upto 5 Goals in every set.

Analytics Profile Settings Goal

Click on “Add goal” to add new Goal. Once you are on Goal Setting page to add new Goal. Enter your Goal Name we will use “Adsense Clicks” for this example and select URL Destination as Goal Type.

Goal Add Settings

As soon as you will select URL Destination as your Goal Type, the Goal Details panel will be shown. Enter “/outbound/asclick” as the Goal URL, you can also enter your optional Goal Value.

Analytics Goal Details

Click Save Goal and you will see the new Goal listed under Goals on your Profile settings.

New goal  adsense click listed

From now on Google analytics will track your adsense clicks. You can track your conversion rates under Goals while viewing reports of your site.

This is how I have setup my adsense tracking, do you have suggestions to improve it? Do you know how else can those adsense clicks can be tracked?

Published by

Hameedullah Khan

VR enthusiast, Cloud Architect, Passionate Programmer and Opensource advocate.

9 thoughts on “How to track adsense clicks on your wordpress blog”

  1. We’re having trouble adding any code to our wordpress blog?

    It should be a simple as –

    1/ find the code.
    2/ Add a text widget to the sidebar.
    3/ Add the code to the text widget.
    3/ press “Save”
    4/ Be very happy and add what else one likes in the sidebar in the same manner!

    It’s just not working for us!

    Please help Arpit Shah.

    We would like google friend connect, adsense and analytics.
    And just to know how to make it work would be amazing!!

    Regards,

    Chris.

    [Reply]

    Hameedullah Khan Reply:

    Chris,

    What code are you adding? Are you not able to make Adsense tracking work on your blog? Or are you trying to add Google Friend Connect?

    [Reply]

    Chris Dusseldorp Reply:

    Yes you’re exactly correct!
    I think our problem is making –
    2. Upload the file to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory work.
    How do we do this?
    We’ve looked everywhere online for answers for months now!!
    Regards,
    Chris.
    .-= Chris Dusseldorp´s last blog ..Is Your Business Allowed To Speak? =-.

    [Reply]

  2. After signing up for friend connect. This is the code we are using.

    var skin = {};
    skin[‘BORDER_COLOR’] = ‘#cccccc’;
    skin[‘ENDCAP_BG_COLOR’] = ‘#e0ecff’;
    skin[‘ENDCAP_TEXT_COLOR’] = ‘#333333’;
    skin[‘ENDCAP_LINK_COLOR’] = ‘#0000cc’;
    skin[‘ALTERNATE_BG_COLOR’] = ‘#ffffff’;
    skin[‘CONTENT_BG_COLOR’] = ‘#ffffff’;
    skin[‘CONTENT_LINK_COLOR’] = ‘#0000cc’;
    skin[‘CONTENT_TEXT_COLOR’] = ‘#333333’;
    skin[‘CONTENT_SECONDARY_LINK_COLOR’] = ‘#7777cc’;
    skin[‘CONTENT_SECONDARY_TEXT_COLOR’] = ‘#666666’;
    skin[‘CONTENT_HEADLINE_COLOR’] = ‘#333333’;
    skin[‘NUMBER_ROWS’] = ‘4’;
    google.friendconnect.container.setParentUrl(‘/’ /* location of rpc_relay.html and canvas.html */);
    google.friendconnect.container.renderMembersGadget(
    { id: ‘div-6437588443871818026’,
    site: ‘15413439916234759661’ },
    skin);

    [Reply]

    Hameedullah Khan Reply:

    Chris,

    I have written a step by step tutorial to add Google Friend Connect to sidebar. I would recommend you to check it http://hameedullah.com/how-to-add-google-friend-connect-member-gadget-to-your-site-in-10-steps.html

    [Reply]

  3. thanks for this plugin . iam very suspicious about some ip adresses who are clicking my ads frequently to ban me from adsense but now i will track them google analytics
    Thanks very much

    [Reply]

  4. Can you tell me , why do you add “/outbound/asclick” as the String in the URL. I want to know the concept behind it?

    [Reply]

    Hameedullah Khan Reply:

    Because the wordpress plugin “Google Analytics for WordPress” by default record adsense clicks as /outbound/asclick, you can change that in plugin settings page and then use the changed URL in your analytics goal settings.

    [Reply]

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