AdSense Introduces Multiple Custom Channels

Today, AdSense made it possible to assign multiple custom channels to a single ad unit which will enable you to track your ad performance with greater flexibility. Up to 5 custom channels can be added to a specific instance of ad code.

What’s the benefit of tracking with more than one custom channel?

Well, multiple channels can be very useful when you want to track one ad unit across several different metrics simultaneously. For example, let’s say you run a sports website and you’ve placed a leaderboard at the top and bottom of every page. To track the performance of the ad placement, you’ve created two custom channels — ‘TopLeaderboard’ and ‘BottomLeaderboard’ — and regenerated your ad code appropriately.

But what if you also want to compare your football pages and your baseball pages at the same time? With multiple custom channels, this isn’t a problem. Just create two new custom channels called ‘FootballPages’ and ‘BaseballPages’, and add them to the appropriate ad units. Now your leaderboards will each be tagged with two custom channels that let you know which position they’re in (top or bottom), and the type of page on which they appear (football or baseball).

Right now, I don’t think this will be of much use to me, but other AdSense Publishers might find it useful.