Traffic is mostly a good way to get more revenue on your Adsense, but there are other little known ways to get more Adsense money from your blog or site. In this article i will try to explain you how in 10 easy steps you to can really tenfold your earnings without thinking about more visitors..
The 10 Killer methods to increase your Adsense earnings are:
1) Ad creation
General guidelines in ad creation:
-blending ads can be a great asset but if your page is busy try contrasting ads instead.
-alternate ad colors to prevent ad blindness among your (regular) users. try serving more variations of colors in one ad by selecting "use multiple palettes" in the drop down palette menu.
-use ad backgrounds to accentify your ads while remaining within Adsense TOS(terms of service) Adclustr has some great tutorials on how to make your own and free ad backgrounds you can download and integrate with CSS.
-Google Ads without background color and borders always perform better. Make the border color and background color same as your page background color.
-Try setting the ad link URL color to a lighter shade. If your text is black, you may make the ad link as light gray.
- The large rectangle is on average the best paying adsense format (336×280) - The Google Adsense Publisher team also feels that the best formats are the wider ones - the ad formats that contain the widest individual ads. Try using the 336×280 large rectangle, 300×250 medium rectangle, or 160×600 wide skyscraper.
- make ad links the same color as your site links, splitting ads in smaller units and… inserting a border less link unit in the middle of a column where you have internal site links are good ways to attract a higher CTR(click through rate).
2) Ad placement: Where to place my ads?
One of the first you must asses is to what limit an adsense unit will compliment your blog without irritating your readers.
The best places to place your ads is in the single post page beneath the title of the post and just above your main content. testing for me has shown that placing ads inside your content actually generates less clicks much to my amazement
On the Homepage you can add the Adsense units between posts and leverage link units. Link units look very similar to menus or navigation bars, therefore if you place those units on the right spot you could generate a very high click-through rate.
Here is a simple heatmap from google used for blogs, forums and one for regular sites:
Optimal blog ad placement:
Forum ad placement:
general ad placement:
Keep in mind that these are just guidelines and may or may not work for you.
General guidelines for ad placement.
-Always put ads above the main fold. Make sure that the ad unit with the highest click through rate is the first instance of the ad code that appears in the source code. Since the first ad unit is always filled before the rest, you want to make sure that ad unit is located in the best placement on your page.
-Blend link-units with other navigation links or place horizontal ad links at the top of your web page
-A lot of people will naturally look for the search box in the top right corner. So you know where to put your adsense search box.
-For short articles, CTR is best when ads are placed just above the content
-For long articles, CTR improves if ads are placed somewhere in middle of the content - visitors read the long content and then they are looking for more resources.
-Remember, you are the best judge when it comes to choosing ad formats. Even Google doesn’t offer the best advise always. For instance, in the visual heat map above, Google suggests that webmasters are best served by positioning ads on the upper left-hand side of a Web page. But on the Google homepage, you will find ads on the far right.
There is another way to determine ad placement with laser targeted preciseness by heat mapping.
heat mapping. is visually mapping of user clicks on your page showing hot and cold click zones, so you know which parts of your page are most interesting to monetize ads or where not to place them.
A tool I use for this is ClickHeat It is php program you can easily install(instructions) on your server. You can try out the demo here ( username and pass : demo )
Download from Sourceforge
3) Ad quantity: less usually means more.
Placing ads in higher quantity can result in initial increase in clicks but decrease of traffic and readers in the long term due to ad intrusiveness. Not only that but it will also generate less revenue per click on average, why? well for one adsense is fueled by the Adwords advertising system which allows potential advertisers to bid on keywords that are contextually placed in your content, the highest bidder will get the highest placement and lower bids get lower placement.
Meaning if you have one skyscraper and two large rectangles you are placing your site open to 12 ads ranging from potentially the highest but also the lowest bids ( think 0.01$-0.03$). In contrary were you to place only one small rectangle you have effectively cut of the potentially 8 lowest bids thus increasing your revenue per click while only slightly decreasing your click through
Thus the more ads you show, the more lower-bidding advertisers show up on your page that when those get clicked, your CPC becomes lower than it could be if they weren’t on your page to begin with.
The benefits don’t just stop there, you will also see in increase in traffic and subscribers as your site is much cleaner and user friendly, also resulting in more revenue.
4) Image or text ads?
On one of my sites I have experimented with placing alternatively image and text ads on different pages after hearing that image ads work better with a female audience. I use only image ads on a female-targeted site I run and that seems to be working. If you want to display image ads, consider ad formats that support image ads - Choose either the 300×250 medium rectangle or the 160×600 wide skyscraper - or both, if you display multiple ad units on a page.
5) channel your ads
Now you got your ads placed and quantified, you want to know which ads are performing well and what ad size relates to the most revenue for your site.
Go to your adsense panel then to adsense setup and select channels. You can also add channels on the fly in your adsense setup but we are not going to that. Why because we want our ads to be visible for advertisers to bid directly on our sites. Now select Add new custom channels and tick the box "Show this channel to advertisers as an ad placement" this will allow you to fill in details directly visible to potential adwords advertisers.
Be especially weary of the description and ad location make it as compelling as you can as you want as much advertisers to bid on your ad as possible. Good locations are top-left and top-center but experiment as much as you can but keep in mind that what you define here has to hold truth as most will visit your site to verify those details, so it can work contra productive if not used wisely. But if done right you should see a distinct rise in your average EPC(earnings per click).
6) Track ad size performance
This involves channeling your ads as i have explained above but when naming your ad channels include the size in the name so you know what size is performing best when you view your reports.
So for example: domain(abbreviation)-300 or domain(abbreviation)-300×225 but since there is only one ad size of 300 you can choose to leave it out.
I have always found the 468×60 banner to be a poor performer. People seem to be ad blind to the 468 banner no matter how or where it is placed. but it can be significantly different for your site so experiment.
Now in the next few days and weeks closely monitor the CTR and eCPM of these ad-sizes and change them often un till you have maximum click through.
7) Competitive ad filter: filter Mfa and low bidding advertisers
You can filter out ads that compete with what you offer on your web site. Here is what google says about this:
Competitive Ad Filter
Google AdSense provides the functionality to block specific ads from appearing on your pages. Although Google ads are highly targeted to the content of your page, there may be situations in which you don’t want to display particular advertisements - for example, you may wish to block ads leading to competitors’ sites.
Now this is not only useful if you have products but content sites (where adsense is made for in my opinion) but also if you want to filter out low paying advertisers.
Why does google say it will show the highest paying ads while i can clearly see low clicks/paying ads?
Not every ad displayed is a top priced ad, if they were, the ads would have almost no variety and therefore get little response over time, therefore Google rotates through a good subset of ads. Furthermore, there may be times when a specific page has a few low paying ads that are highly relevant and therefore may take the place of more general yet slightly less relevant ones. So in addition you have out filter out the bad from the worst that is one of the reasons you use the competitive ad filter for.
There are a lot of advertisers out there who want nothing more than pay you as little as possible.
Why? because what they offer on their web site generates a very small revenue per 1000 visitors on average so they have to bid less to still make a decent profit or at least play quite.
How will you deal with this? first you will need to download the Adsense preview tool and install it ( it only works for Internet explorer). Now you can right click on any page and select "Google Adsense Preview Tool".
It will show you a box where you can safely click the links that are advertised on your page.
Finally you want to put these into your adsense panel to block them from displaying on your sites.
Under adsense setup select "competitive ad filter" and fill in all those domains you have gathered with the preview tool.
How to Identify low paying advertisers? There are several ways you can positively distinguish them.
Here are a few guidelines I use:
-Sites who rely almost solely on adsense or other (contextual) advertising(MFA - made for adsense sites)
-If the domain displayed in the adsense preview tool, when selecting "display URL’s" is different from the one your directed to with the preview tool you should also be wary as they are using your site for plugging their affiliate links with a redirect.
Example site A is the site advertising on your site through Adwords
-sites with a sales letter and their own product is in my opinion ok since they will generally bid more, caution be taken if the product is of low value, free or the page used just to collect email addresses for their opt-in lists(squeeze pages), in such cases I will block the site.
-Sites made especially for affiliate pages without their own product for example:
In this example site A is the site that advertises on your page and you are directed to when using the preview tool
That being said If site A refers to site B who has a plethora of banners or promoting products of other sites, there should be an immediate alert on your side as they clearly have to send tons of visitors to make a decent profit as they are the middleman(affiliates) and it is very much in their interest to bid as low as possible.
-Not active and Parked domain pages are also to be filtered for the same reasons.
-Filter ads that have content which is not safe, scummy, fraudulent etc. as this is in the best interest of your users and they are your sites lively hood.
-Finally filter sites that are completely irrelevant as your visitors will not click them and may make place for more relevant ads.
-Use an adsense tracker script that can identify which ad was clicked per channel, I use asrep because it tracks the site the visitor goes to so I know exactly which ads to block. At the end of the day there are some free scripts lying around the net but they are either unsafe for adsense or just useless because they do not provide better tracking than adsense itself.
You are advised to do this manually and not like Darren from Problogger advises you . You could do as they advise and use the web service Adblacklist but the sites you will find there to put in your blocking list will never be fine tuned to your site.
Plus there are only 200 sites you can put in the "competitive ad filter", meaning if you use this list your ad filter will be immediately full giving you no space for your own and placing you directly open to numerous low paying advertisers. So checking your sites every day is most advised. They are your bread and butter so why not protect them as such, if that is not your thing and you blog for leisure don’t fret you can skip this part.
8) Target your content for high-paying keywords
The first few lines of your content are an important factor for determining what Ads are served on your web page. That’s the right place to put keywords in bold (strong or <b> tags) or header tags (h1, h2, etc).
In theory: This is simple maths. With 0.10 click payout, generating a 40 dollar income would require 400 clicks. With 0.50 click payout, generating a 40 dollar income would require only 80 clicks.
How this is done :Iif a product is in low demand, cheap or sold in bulk the keywords associated with it will generally be of low quality(low paying). For example the keyword "plastic surgery Beverly Hills" will reap far greater EPC(earnings per click) than the keyword "ring tones" but on the other demand is really low and competitive for the first keyword. you will have to seek a middle way.
You can do this by determining advertiser competition for a certain keyword(aside from the mandatory check of demand and estimated value above). For example if you wanted to know if the keyword "cat food" is competitive just type it in google search, if you find a lot of advertising you can be sure that competition is high and the bid price will be driven up. If you like a list of high paying keywords just ask and i will send you one.
Determine search trend and CPC of keywords
Another way to determine advertiser competition is google itself. They have a great tool on their site by which you can check for related keywords of the one you search for and find out advertiser competition. In there you can also see how much CPC each keyword is costing an Adwords advertiser.find the link here(google adwords sandbox)
(click on the image to enlarge)
Another great plus is you can also seach for search trends to find out what is hot and make content about it that will automatically recieve a lot of traffic without having to compete with numerous websites. Find the link here. ( google trends lab)
(click on the image to enlarge)
In theory: Niche markets are usually very mature and business oriented with selected interest of topics. And when I say business users, it means users with money and power to make decisions; target audience most serious advertisers dream and target for. Hence the payout’s are good and it also shows in ad design (a relevant and good ad gets more clicks than a bad one)… As an added bonus, working with niche markets is easy and rewarding in SEO sense (so called long-tail keywords).
In addition the AdSense for search Top Queries report shows you what your users are looking for, by listing the 25 most common searches conducted through your AdSense for search boxes. Use this report to identify additional topics to add to your site, or to keep track of your most sought-after information. Focus and improve that content.
9) filtering your content of negative keywords
Negative keywords are words defined by advertisers when bidding through Adwords that they do not want their ad to go into the auction if this keyword exists in your content (or search but that is not applicable).
This can be a potential problem for Adsense publishers: that the inadvertent use of certain (negative) keywords on pages can depress your earnings.
So, having had the problem brought to our attention, the next question is how us publishers can identify the negative keywords that we have inadvertently included in our pages but our advertisers are using to withhold their ads.
One approach is to block generic words that seem likely to be unwanted by advertisers – for example, the word “free”. Advertisers may block this word because it suggests that the surfer doesn’t want to pay. We publishers may inadvertently include it in our pages because there are over 20 other meanings/uses for the word which may seem appropriate to our page – e.g.: “free thinking”.
Blocking generic words may work for many sites, but there aren’t too many words that are such obvious candidates for blocking as “free”. In fact, even “free” may not be an appropriate word to avoid in all circumstances. For example, having done some research on my advertisers, there are some niches where the word “free” is used extensively in both adverts and on advertisers’ landing pages. So, removing the word “free” across all my pages might damage income in some areas.
Another approach that I’d like to put on the table is to do word comparisons between relatively high and low EPC(earnings per click) pages in the same niche. Words that appear on low EPC pages and not the high ones are then candidates for being negative keywords.
For example, I’ve done this with a couple of popular pages on my site and found the name of a proprietary licence in the low EPC page. advertisers may be blocking this because, if they are not licensed, they can’t provide products, services or support so the clicks from such pages may convert poorly. From my perspective, the use of the proprietary licence name on this page is incidental – I have other pages that talk about it specifically – so I could easily remove the name without affecting the page content. However, the fact that I have many other pages that talk extensively about aspects of this proprietary product means it is not something that I would normally think of excluding from individual pages’ content (that is, until I used this technique).
I’ve had a look round for a software download that compares two pages and produces a word-list comparison between the two. There probably is one, but I haven’t found it yet (please let me know if there is). So, I’ve designed an approach to do this word comparison using Excel and Word that I’ll outline here. It takes about 5 to 10 minutes once you know what you are doing.
Step 1 - identify relatively high and low EPC pages
This requires you to have URL channels, or custom channels on individual pages like explained above. Choose two pages in the same niche that have differing EPC’s over a long period (e.g.: a month). (To do this comparison, download a CSV report of pages of one niche into Excel, calculate EPC for each page as earnings/clicks, sort by EPC, and then pick the highest and lowEPCt page in the sort order).
Step 2 – Create a word list for each page
You can do this with Word, by:
-Make a backup copy of your html file
-Open it in Microsoft Word
-Select all text and copy to the clipboard
-Open a new Word file
-”Paste Special” into the new Word file, selecting the option for “unformatted text”
-Do a Replace on the whole document, changing “ “ (a space) to “^p” (the new paragraph symbol)
-Save the file as a text file
-Repeat the above process for every file you want to compare.
Step 3 – Create an Excel file and column with the page name
Create a new Excel file with two columns labeled “Word” and “Page”. Save it as, say, “comparison.xls”.
Open each text file in Excel (each word should appear in a new row), create a second column, fill that column with the name of the page from which the words came, then copy the two columns to comparison.xls
Once you have done this for two files, you should have an Excel spreadsheet that looks something like this:
WORD…..PAGEThe…….page1quick…..page1brown…page1::dog……page1How…..page2slowly..page2does….page2::big……page2
Step 4 – Run a pivotable analysis
Pivotable is on the Data menu in Excel. After confirming the data to be used, select layout and drag “word” onto the row, “page” onto the column and “word” onto the data (making sure it is set to ‘count’).
When you run the pivotable, this will give you a report showing how many times each word is used in each page.
Step 5 – Sort the table
Sort the pivotable on the high-EPC page column, which will cause all the words in the low-EPC page and not in the high EPC page to group together.
Despite the length of this part of my article, this technique does not take long and it enables you to identify a manageable-sized list of words from which you may be able to identify negative keywords that may be depressing a particular page’s performance.
Considering negative keywords on a page-by-page basis can be beneficial because, as can be seen in my example above, in one page a proprietary name may be a big plus (increasing relevance) whereas in another it may be a problem (putting off advertisers).
Another solution to displaying negative keywords in your content you have filtered out is by the use of CSS to reverse words so Adsense does not read them as "negative" but the browser displays the words "normally" here is how i did it…
For example, the word "nasdaq" can be written as "qadsan" in your html source, surrounded by tags: qadsan
Then a CSS rule (provided for languages which don’t read left-to-right) can reverse the contents of the :
10) Split testing your adsense ads
Split testing your adsense is the process of taking two different ads and presenting them both randomly.
The reason why we are split testing is to determine which ad receives the highest number of clicks.
This eliminates a lot of guesswork.
Step 1 - Replace your current adsense code in your blog or site with the following snippet, change "adsense 1" and "adsense 2" with the ads you want to test.
Step 2 - Go to you adsense account and create the first version of your ad with a unique channel, for instance make your links blue for version one and paste adsense over the above code where it says "//adsense version 1 goes here".
Step 3 - Go to you adsense account and create the second version of your ad with a unique channel, for instance make your links red for version two and paste adsense over the above code where it says "//adsense version 2 goes here".
That’s as easy as it is to split test your ads. Both versions of your adsense ads will now be served randomly to your blog visitors. be sure to channel to them to compare the results.
After a few days you can view your adsense stats and see exactly which version of your ad received the most amount of clicks or made you the most money!
You’ve now eliminated most of the guesswork out of your adsense game plan and hopefully keep increasing your earnings with this technique.
Conclusion:If you did these steps you should drastically see an improvement in your Adsense earnings. Keep in mind to track your adsense monetized sites in as much detail as possible is the key to reaching the site’s full potential. You’d be surprised at how many of the most tiniest things make all the difference.Most importantly in this article you improved your Adsense earnings without even getting a single visitor more!
ENJOY MORE EARNING TO YOUR ADSENSE! :)
If you have any questions/opinions to say why not leave a comment!
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