How to Implement Adsense Revenue Sharing Using a Single Adsense Account in WordPress and Blogger

If you run a multi-authored blog, then someday you may want to implement Google Adsense revenue sharing. Doing this will let you track the earnings and page impressions for a particular author and you can distribute the earnings among all the authors accordingly. Implementing the revenue sharing model will let blog administrators credit the authors with proper revenue at the end of the month.The revenue sharing model can be applied in the following two ways:

Case A: You ask all the authors of your blog to apply for separate Google Adsense accounts. Then the authors can paste their ad codes in the articles they write and each of them gets paid accordingly.

Case B: You use your own Google Adsense account in all the posts of your blog and distribute the revenue based on Google Adsense channel reports. This method requires only one Google Adsense account to do the job. Our own blog acts as an example in this case.

Case A is easy and you do not have to worry about what ads the author wishes to show in his article. But case B is better for the following reasons:

• You can maintain a uniformity while showing the advertisements on your blog.
• You can decide the ad colors, layouts yourselves and maintain proper designs across all the posts.
• You can see which author is earning the most by analyzing the detailed channel reports.

Implement Google Adsense Revenue Sharing using Single Adsense Account in WordPress

Let’s say you want to implement Google Adsense revenue sharing for three authors – X, Y and Z. Here is a detailed step by step procedure to implement the revenue sharing model using a single Adsense account.

1. Open your Google Adsense account and create a new ad unit. Let us suppose you create the 336 X 280 wide rectangle ad unit.

2. Now create a new channel for author 1 and name it “X”. Assign the channel to the ad unit you just created and copy the ad code in notepad. This is the ad code for author1.

The Adsense code generated will look like the following

3. Again create another ad unit which is exactly similar to the 1st one but in this case assign a separate channel to this ad unit (lets say “Y”). This is the ad unit for author 2. While creating the ad unit for the 2nd author, make sure you keep the name of the ad unit exactly similar to the 1st one.

4. Same process continues for the third ad unit. Create another ad unit which exactly resembles the 1st and 2nd ad units. Create and assign a new channel (lets say “Z”) to the third ad unit meant for the third author. The name of the third unit must match exactly with the name of the 1st and 2nd ad units.

In short, all the ad units must have the same name, size and all the other parameters except the assigned channels.

5. Now that you have created all the ad units, it’s time to compare them. You will find that all the three ad units are exactly identical except the Google ad slot which is different for each ad unit.

6. Copy the Google ad slot numbers for each ad unit in notepad. Let us suppose you want to show the first ad unit on posts written by Mr X, the 2nd ad unit on posts written by Mr Y and the 3rd one on posts written by Mr Z. For demonstrating, lets assign the ad slots of the three authors as 111, 222 and 333 respectively.

7. Copy the display names of all the three authors in the same notepad file. Let us suppose the display names to be author1, author2 and author3 respectively.

So the following table illustrates the ad slot information and the display name of the three authors:

8. Open your functions.php file in any HTML editor and add the following code:

9. Now open your single.php file and place the following code where you would want the Google Adsense unit to appear.

That concludes the tutorial. According to the author name, the three different yet similar looking ad units will appear in the respective author posts and you can get detailed statistics of the ad impressions, clicks and earnings in your Google Adsense account.

Note: The index page, category or tag pages won’t show the above ad units as no author information is available in those pages. You will have to use separate ad units on all of these pages.

Implement Google Adsense Revenue Sharing in Blogger

The revenue sharing model can also be applied in Blogger blogs. Here is the detailed step by step procedure:

1. Login to your Blogger dashboard and browse to the “Layout” tab. Click on “Edit Html” and select “Expand Widget templates”.

2. Copy the entire code in a notepad file and create a backup. We will modify the code to add the revenue sharing model and you may need the backup of your template if things go wrong from here.

To implement the revenue sharing system in Blogger, we will place separate ad units for separate authors in the article body. However the home page, category page or archive pages won’t show any of the below created ad units. You will have to use separate ad units for home page, category pages etc.

3. Login to your Google Adsense account and create an Ad unit for the first author. Assign a unique channel to this ad unit. Copy the ad code in a notepad file.

4. Create another ad unit for the second author but in this case assign another unique channel to it. Copy the ad code in notepad.

5. Open the code of the blogger template in any html editor.

6. Let us assume that you want to show the Google Adsense ads just after the title of the article. Press Ctrl+F and search for the following code:

7. Now paste the following code just after the above code:

8. Remember to replace author1 and author 2 with proper and exact author names as they appear in your blog. You can edit the display name from Dashboard > Edit profile.

Testing the Ad Units

Now that you have implemented revenue sharing on your blog, it’s time to test whether every article is showing the proper ad units or not. Open the posts of different authors and check the page source to find the ad unit thus generated. Copy the ad codes from author post page source and compare them with the ad codes in your Google Adsense account. Both the codes must be exactly identical. This step should be done properly as modifying the ad code is against Google Adsense TOS. (tip: Increase revenue by Split testing Adsense Ads)

Distributing Payments Among Authors

At the end of the month, you can use the Google Adsense channel data to find out the exact earnings of a particular author. Here is a short procedure to do this:

1. Login to your Google Adsense account and go to “Advanced reports”. Select the date range for which you want to generate the report.

2. Next, select the author channel for whom you wish to track the earnings.

3. That’s it. Hit “Display report” and you will get to know the Google Adsense earnings made on the author’s posts for the chosen time period.

Tell us what do you think about the Google Adsense revenue sharing system discussed above and whether you faced any problems implementing the same in your blog.