I have begun using channels with AdSense to better understand the relationships between ad position and clicks. There has been another instructive piece of information that I have learned from the exercise.

I had noticed before that Google bypassed a splash page when sending visitors to a two page site. The splash page is the site index page and the single interior page has the information about the subject of the site. I had not considered the implication, nor was the data really available from those sites.

The ad testing format that I have used effectively differentiates between visitors to the home page and to interior pages of the sites or post pages in the blogs. I have just begun incorporating the channel specific ads on a few sites. The early data shows that search visitors are sent directly to an interior page with the requested information. This should be no surprise, but I had not really thought about it.

On one site, with only a couple of days worth of data, most visitors are directed to the home page. This particular site does have an information rich home page, and the referrers other than search all point to the home page. This site is probably my strongest as far as referrer traffic vs search, and the people that find it probably don’t yet know of the terms that would most likely direct them to interior pages.

The sites with the most significant search traffic show most traffic landing on an interior page. These are the result of long tail searches and offer specific information relative to the search terms.

These are early results, and the volume of data is not really large enough to call them trends, but I will be surprised if more data changes the picture. Traffic to the interior pages will be counted as traffic to the site for page rank purposes, so the value to having good quality interior pages is clear. The fact that I use the most effective ad position on the interior pages is a bonus. I will not use that ad position on a home page under normal circumstances because of design considerations, but people are being sent to the interior pages so the ads are being seen.