Typically a WordPress blog has the following post type, HOME, POST,CATEGORY, ARCHIVES, ATTACHMENT. On custom websites there are a lot of other post types.
Url channels are useful when you want a detailed reporting of a section of your traffic defined by specific url string parameters.
Also, on WordPress multi-author blogs (where the regular number of contributors are 10-20), you can set url channels for each author to determine how much revenue each of the author generates based on the posts.
Alternatively if you’re using custom site, you can tweak the url accordingly to record the performance of url types. This gives you a good insight of what type of pagegroups/url types are performing better and how is the performance pattern.
URL channels are very useful to measure which sections/pages of your site are performing well in terms of CTR and RPM. This is particularly insightful if you have segmented you content in terms of category or author who wrote the post.
Using URL Channels to Track Performance
In this post, we will discuss about how to setup url channels to your site.
Login to your WordPress site and then click on Settings. Under settings click on permalinks and then choose the Custom permalink unit and update your permalink to re-write the author name. (i.e. %author%/%postname%
Now, you need to login to your Google AdSense account, under the My ads section click on Url Channels and then click on a New Url Channel.
Type the urls one by one as shown in the image below. Once done, you can click on “Add url channels”
If you have multiple authors, you can export their WordPress usernames from database to an excel sheet and do the append action to include the site name and copy them in bulk and add them on the URL channels list. You can have 500 URL channels at max which I hope is a sufficient number.
Once done, check back after sometime, and view the url channel reports within updated earnings.
You might have one concern about the SEO friendliness of the url rewrite to author/post-title or category/post-name or any other re-writes. However, from an SEO perspective, since the title has the keywords, there wont be any problem in rankings by addition of strings.
Do let me know if this article has been helpful.