This is truly a shame as I find that lens labels are perhaps one of the most useful aspects of the dashboard. They easily allow you to slice and dice your lenses into smaller groups and let you track cool things like the traffic that a particular subset of lenses is receiving.

So, for those of you that don’t really use lens labelling, here’s 5 reasons to start:

1. Sort by affiliate program - Create a separate label for Commission Junction, Pepperjam, etc. and place lenses that use each program under that label.
2. Lens Cloud labels (see ‘What is a Lens Cloud?’)- Every ‘cloud’ I make has it’s own label. Sometimes, i even have labels for sub-clouds etc. This cuts wayyy down on fishing around for the right lens.
3. To-Do – When I’m sitting down for a session of lens editing I always begin by assigning all the lenses I want to work on to a ‘pending’ type label. As I complete what I hoped to do for each lens, I remove it from that label.
4. Lenses can have multiple labels!
5. Tracking Lensrank – During some months, I’ll label every lens I have in the top tier with one label and every lens in tier 2 with a second label. Then, I’ll check it every week to see which lenses are rising or falling. This is great for helping me pick out trends that are occuring within my lenses.

1) They save you a lot of time if set up correctly. I thought that having 7-10 labels broken out into groups of 50-100 lenses would help a ton and it did. However, breaking the labels out even further into sub-genres of 10-20 lenses is going to work awesome. That’s going to be my next step.

2) Aggregate Performance #s rock - I care about how groups of lenses perform, not one lens in particular. So, when you can see if a group of lenses is rising or falling in traffic it is incredibly useful. Over time this will allow me to create better and better ‘groups’ of lenses based on the performance results of other groups.

3) A/B Testing - I’ll get into this a bit more tomorrow, but using labels to take a group of lenses and keep one as the control and the other as the experiment can be quite useful…

4) Tier Labeling – This is Huge! Label your lenses in each of the top two payout tiers so you can track them more closely and spend a little extra time on the ones that are slacking off and losing Lensrank. Play the ‘edges’ instead of the ‘middle’.

I don’t think I loaded my lens list that had all of my lenses yesterday except for maybe a handful of times to add labels to lenses.