One of the things that I love about Google's assortment of webmaster tools, like Analytics and Adsense, is that they give you better insight into your site's performance than just about any other app that you can find. And there are some easy ways you can use those statistics, like Tim's article on the Analytics WordPress plugin, or the desktop app called TrakkBoard where you can monitor multiple Analytics accounts at once.

Today, I'd like to cover a change that took place over the past year or so where Google integrated Adsense information into Google Analytics. You use Adsense in your websites and your feeds, so wouldn't it be nice to get a glimpse of what sort of performance your Google Ads are doing each time you monitor your Google Analytics account? If you didn't know that you could do this, I'm going to show you how to integrate Adsense with Analytics, and what some of those reports look like.

How To Integrate Adsense Into Analytics

Before you can take a look at your Google Ad performance alongside your traffic data, you need to enable the feed between Adsense and Analytics. You can do so with a single click. When you're logged into Adsense and viewing your report overview, just click the link to integrate Adsense with your Analytics account.

The next step is to tell Adsense which data you'd like to "marry" into Analytics. If you've only used one Adsense account for all of your websites, this is easy because there won't be any choice. However, if you've organized your Adsense into "channels" for each domain, as I've done, this is where you can tell Adsense to only integrate the Adsense numbers for one channel into the Analytics account that you have set up for that domain.

In this example, I'm telling Adsense to use the ad information for RyanDube.com and feed it into my Analytics account set up for ryandube.com. Once you go through this simple 3 step "wizard," you're good to go. It may take a little while for the data feed to start flowing, but you'll see the Adsense option in your Google Analytics account immediately.

Adsense Data You Can View In Google Analytics

Once you've enabled this feature, the information you can use to compare to your overall site traffic is pretty cool. You can see Adsense data within Analytics when you click on the Content section. The menu option shows up simply as "AdSense."

Once you dropdown the Adsense item, you can see how much information your account feeds into Analytics.

Now that you know where to view Adsense information within Analytics, let's take a look at what that information means to you. The first overview will show you your overall Adsense income for the domain. You can see your daily revenue over time - which offers some pretty cool insight into how certain events affected your income on that day.

Did you do certain work on a certain day? Did you cover a particular topic or publish a very popular article on that day? You can monitor your daily revenue to keep track of how your ad income was affected by those events. If a certain topic consistently seems to draw better clickthrough rates for your ads and generates higher income, doesn't it make sense to focus more of your efforts on that topic? It will sure affect your bottom line if you do.

While the graphical display shows you the trend, if you click on "Top Adsense Content" you can actual see the details - exactly which of your pages are producing the most income for you?

You can see not only revenue, but how many ads were clicked, click-through rates and more. If you really want to beef up the monetization of your website through Google Ads, this is the place where you can get the best optimization data.

This information doesn't stop with articles, you can also click on Top AdSense Referrers to see which incoming links you receive that seems to generate a better ad clickthrough rate.

Obviously, it would make sense to establish stronger ties with those partner websites that are sending you traffic which results in your strongest ad revenue. Often this simply represents the "type" of visitor that site is sending you. Folks coming in from Google may not be the type of visitors that are as likely to click on your particular ads as people coming from StumbleUpon. If you want to improve your bottom line, focus on those things that are revealed by the AdSense data as working for you.

Finally, another very cool piece of information is when you click on AdSense Trending. This display shows you how much specific Adsense variables have changed on a particular day.

For example, it will show you that on Saturday, your AdSense revenue increased by 3.74 percent. Or, you can change the variable to AdSense CTR and learn that on Monday your clickthrough rate shot through the roof. This is a great way to test certain changes to your site and then review how that change affected your user behaviors. I saw this just recently on one of my websites, where changing my entire site them increased clickthrough rates by almost 50%.

Since Google added this feature, have you been using it? Share what you like or dislike about the AdSense integration with Analytics in the comments section below.