How to Maximizing your adsense income from your blogs
>> Monday, December 8, 2008
I see lots of people complaining about their low adsense earnings, so I thought I would share a few things I have discovered over the last few years of earning adsense income. I make fairly decent green from Google and it isn't because they're my buddy.
This is strictly all white hat, so you aren't going to get banned. Your results could be different from mine, but these tips have worked for me. Veterans of the adsense wars may not find anything new here, so I hope you'll contribute some of your tips as well.
1. Quit allowing cheap clicks. If you are getting lots of one cent and three cent clicks it is time to dust off Google's competitive ad filter. You can find it in your adsense account by clicking on the adsense setup tab.
Once upon a time I had an ad tracking system that let me know what advertisers ads were being clicked on. The way I was tracking my channels I could figure out early in the day how much I was making on each click by advertiser. It didn't take long for me to figure out who was paying the least to me through Google. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, tracking information by specific advertiser is no longer available with any ad tracker.
Finding most of the serious cheapskates is still fairly easy. Just look at your adsense ads and if you see advertisers such as amazon, ebay, target, walmart, expedia, orbitz, etc. then you've probably identified those super cheap clicks. Pretty much any well-known giant company with a gigantic advertising budget will be paying the minimum per click. I once found two clicks from the same large well-known advertiser that paid one cent for both clicks combined. To hell with that.
The cure is to add such companies as priceline.com, target.com, business.com, amazon.com, ebay.com and others to your competitive ad filter. Check your average pay per click before you do this, and then see if your pay per click has gone up after applying the filter. Odds are you will see a moderate to dramatic increase in your average pay per click. Obviously, if your income goes down, remove the advertisers from the filter.
Every month I get a notification from Google that I may be filtering high converting ads. I really don't give a shit and here is why. Let's say for example that if I weren't filtering these cheap ads on my website I would be getting 100 clicks per month instead of 50 on the first ad served. Well, lets do the math. For the website with filtered ads you may be making 20 cents per click, times 50 clicks equals $10 that you earned. Lets then say we don't filter out our parasite advertisers then we earn 3 cents per click times 100 clicks and earn $3. By getting rid of your parasite you earn an extra $7 that you wouldn't have had otherwise. In actual practice, I haven't seen the decrease in total number of clicks that Google would have me believe I would get by allowing these ads, but I have seen a massive increase in earnings. You can test this out for your self. It is legal and Google won't ban you for it.
2, Removing the adsense link units from your web pages is a good way to increase your adsense earnings. Visitors have to click twice before you earn anything. I earn a lot more without link units than I do with them. My click through rate with link units has always been dismal and that has been the experience of many other people as well.
3. Don't try to hide your adsense ad. Making the ad blend in with the rest of the website doesn't mean trying to hide it as part of the content. Stick a large 336x280 block just under your H1 heading and watch your percentage of clicks go up.
4 Clean up your web page. If you have three adsense blocks, remove all but the one big one at the top. By displaying the maximum number of adsense blocks, link units, and search box on a web page you're pretty much guaranteed to make your visitor perceive your page as spam and they'll click away in a heartbeat. Not only that, but the more ads you display on a page, the less you are likely to earn per click. That is because the highest converting ads are displayed first (be sure to filter out the cheap paying parasite advertisers first) then the cheaper paying ads are displayed.
In other words, the more ads available to click on, the more likely the visitor will click on a cheap paying ad.
5. If you have lots of flashing banners and other such crap, get rid of it. People just click away, don't convert to a commission, and never come back. If you are making good affiliate commissions, get rid of adsense and get your visitors to click more on your affiliate link.
6. Sometimes restricting the number of ads in a single block to two or three ads can increase your pay per click. The 250x250 ad will display three ads and the 200x200 ad displays two ads. Although the 336x280 ad generally will have the highest conversion, you may pop your income up by first filtering the advertisers as discussed above, and then displaying no more than two or three ads in one adsense block. This way only the few, highest paying ads are published for your visitors.
