What Are Adsense Channels?

Here's a page on the Google
Adsense help site that tells
us what an Adsense Channel
is:

What are channels?

OK. So far I gather that channels
are layered on top of everything else.
That's my first impression.

On top of what? On top of ad units
and the web pages you choose to run
these ad units on.

Here are some assumptions I'm currently
making about Google Adsense:

1. Ad units and web pages are,
   by default, decoupled
2. Because ad units and web pages
   are not associated together, you have
   to associate them together if you want
   to know how a specific ad is doing on
   a specific web page
3. The assocation of a specific ad
   with a specific web page is known as
   a channel

My presentation of what an adsense
channel is is somewhat of an over-
simplification.

It's over-simplified because channels
are a very very flexible tool. Like
any flexible tool, it is hard to explain
because there are so many different ways
you can use it.

However, I think the most basic way to
view a channel is as follows:

1. One web page
2. One ad unit

Later, as I become more familiar with
adsense channels I will probably
view them more like this:

1. One aggregation of
   web pages
2. One ad unit

In other words, even though adsense
channels can be viewed as possibly
being an aggregation of web pages associated
with one ad, you might be better off starting
out by thinking in terms of one ad unit,
one webpage, one channel.

Later, you can scale up in your thinking
and start to see that a whole website could
in fact be a chennel.

I'm learning as I go so what I write here may
be far from 100 percent accurate. However,
I think I've got the basic idea.

I'll write more as I experiment more with
adsense channels

Ed Abbott