How can I specify a channel for an AdSense widget in Blogger?

Blogger now has a simple blog custom layout editor that lets you add widgets and move them around. One of those widgets is an AdSense widget. Blogger lets you log into your AdSense account to specify the publisher id to be credited for clicks in the ad. That's fine, but there doesn't seem to be any way to set the AdSense channel for the AdSense ads in Blogger so that you can track which blogs and which ad units are getting clicks. I looked and looked and looked, but I could find no option in Blogger to specify the AdSense channel id.

Sigh.

Deep sigh.

That was a few days ago. Finally, this evening, I started doing some Web searching to see if anybody else had run into this problem and found a solution, and the answer is a resounding Yes!

I found a blog post dated September 20, 2007 on the My Digital Life blog entitled "Workaround to Add Custom Channels into Blogger AdSense Page Element Widget" which has the step by instructions for how to workaround the design limitation of Blogger.

In short, delete the AdSense widgets in the Blogger layout editor and replace them with HTML/JavaScript widgets usiing the ad script code you get from logging into AdSense and creating a new ad unit and specifying the channel id directly in AdSense.

Seems to work as far as displaying one of the ads properly, but I'll have to check tomorrow to see if the other ads are displaying properly and that I am getting page views and clicks for my new Semantic Abyss blog that uses the Blogger layout editor.

This should solve my problem, but does show that the new AdSense feature in Blogger is not as easy to use as I had hoped.

-- Jack Krupansky