How to Find Which of Your Articles Are the Most Profitable

The question of which articles are the most profitable is one that crops up over and over again. It is wrong to assume it is always the most popular articles. There is also a balancing act between low traffic high cost per click (CTC) and high traffic low CTC keywords.

If you have your own website or blog you can easily use Google Analytics to get a wealth of data about which articles are doing best, how users come to your articles, which search terms your blog ranks highly on, and so forth. But writing for a third party website such as Xomba or Hubpages means it is not possible to use Google Analytics. The problem is that to enable Analytics you need to insert a special code into your page header, and this is only possible to do if you have admin access.

There is, however, a slightly time-consuming but nevertheless feasible way to get this precious data of which articles are winners and which are sleeping. The only way I can see how to do this is to create a custom URL channel in your Adsense account for each article.

Once your article is published immediately copy the article URL and create a URL channel in your Adsense account. You should already have a general URL channel for your writing site, such as xomba.com. Now you will have a channel for each article, such as:
xomba.com/my_first_article
xomba.com/my_second_article
and so on. Note that Adsense channels leave out the http:// and you can also leave out the www.

There is, however, one problem here, which is that you have a limited number of channels available in your Adsense account. Last I looked there was a limit of 200 channels available. If you are writing maybe just one article a week this is not a great problem, but if you are writing numerous articles across multiple websites that 200 is going to shrink very rapidly.

As the aim is to find the most profitable articles the only solution to this limited number of channels is to slowly delete those articles that just haven't been earning. You will then be able to see your best articles and be able to decide what to write next. Unfortunately this also means that if a "dead" article springs to life in the future you won't know about it.

It isn't a perfect system but seems to me the only way to get article-specific data on revenue sharing writing websites.

Let me know if it works or if you have any problems setting up Adsense channels.