How to improve adsense earnings

Just yesterday I was discussing with some of my blogger friends about Google adsense and the reason for poor earnings, we identified some reasons and also shared some important tips on how to improve adsense earnings.

A lot of bloggers do not meet the monthly payout threshold by Google adsense due to poor earnings. There may be reasons why your blog is not earning well on adsense. In this article I want to look at some of those reasons for poor adsense earnings and recommend ways to improve adsense earnings.

I don’t typically write about adsense or how to make money online, but I have discovered that so many bloggers are not even aware of the reasons for their poor adsense earnings or how to improve it, so I have decided to write this article for people like that.

Poor adsense earnings may be attributed to poor traffic, poor CPC and even traffic sources. About web traffic a site could have good traffic and still earn poorly and another may have less traffic and still earn much. The issue is not really about the number of visitors to your site but the quality of traffic and your page conversion rates.

If a million people visit your site and less than a thousand of them click on your adsense your earnings may still be poor. This is as a result of other reason such as where the visitors are coming from and the amount your advertisers are paying per click on the ads.

You can change influence these factors and thus improve your adsense earnings. Let’s see how you can improve adsense earnings by improving your CPC and traffic quality.

1. Improve adsense CPC with custom channels

In an article I published on this blog titled “How Custom Channels can improve adsense earnings”, I explained how to create custom channels on adsense, how to add custom channels to existing ads, and how custom channels can increase competition on the ad units placed on your site thus improving your adsense CPC and earnings in general. Check it out.

2. Consider your traffic sources

Another reason your adsense earning is poor could be as a result of your traffic sources. Google trusts organic traffic more than referral and direct traffic. Google believes that if a visitor comes to your site via the search engines, there is likeliness that such visitor is genuinely interested in your site’s contents and when such visitor clicks on ads on your site, he is perceived to really be interested in it.

I have personally noticed that Google pays a higher CPC when your site traffic is mainly from search engines than from one referral site. As far as they know you might be giving people who are not genuinely interested in your site’s content some incentives to visit your site from one referral site or the other, so they don’t really value ads clicks from such visitors and often pay little or nothing CPC for such clicks.

Advertisers set goals for advertising on your site, when Google feels the ad clicks from your site does not meet the advertisers goals for placing ads on your site, they will implement “Smart Pricing” on the ads on your site and you will earn poorly.

So if you want to improve adsense earnings from your site, you must take your SEO very seriously. Get on the front page of Google search results, drive good traffic from search engines and your CPC and Google adsense earnings will improve.

3. What ad type are you serving?

This is another place some bloggers get it wrongly. Google offers TEXTUAL ads, GRAPHICAL ads or simply IMAGE ads and a combination of both. When you choose to show only text ads on your site, you just may be surcharging yourself.

Google only serves ads with the highest bid at every point in time on your site, when you show only TEXT ads or just IMAGE ads you may not have created enough competition for that ad unit. Different advertisers pay different amounts for different types of ads, using a TEXT/IMAGE ad will increase the competition between TEXTUAL and GRAPHICAL ads for that ad unit and Google will at all times serve only the highest bidding ads for that unit.

So if you want to improve your adsense earnings, ensure to serve TEXT/IMAGE type of ad than either of TEXT or IMAGE ads at a time.

4. Ad sizes can also improve earnings

When you place a 300×600 ad unit on your sidebar, you will notice that sometimes a 160×600 ad shows instead. What actually happened is that the 160×600 ad size has outbid the 300×600 ad size to show on your site.

Same thing happens with 336×280 and 250×250 or even 300×250 ad sizes. But when you place a 250×250 ad size on your site, even if the 336×280 outbids it, it won’t be served on your blog and this may affect your adsense earnings.

So my advise will be to always serve the bigger ad sizes and let the smaller ones outbid them and show on the site than limiting your adsense potential by placing only smaller ad sizes. So instead of serving the 250×250 ad size, use 336×280 ad size instead (provided you have the space on your site) and let them bid against each other on who to show at every point in time. This can greatly improve adsense earnings.

5. How fast is your site?

Do you know that your site speed can affect your adsense earnings? A fast site loads all the resources for the page quickly including ads. When your blog or website is slow to loading on the browser, your visitors and potential ad clicks may be lost.

But when your site loads fast on the browser, the ads are loaded alongside and the visitor will see the ads even before scrolling down the page or leaving the site in frustration entirely. Your adsense earnings depend on CPC and CTR and when your visitors cannot see your ads before they leave your site, how can they click on it?

So if you want to improve your adsense earnings, start from optimizing your site for speed. Remove all unnecessary plugins, compress your images, use a CDN on your site for faster page speed, optimize your database etc.

Conclusion:

Properly following this guide can greatly improve adsense earnings. I know a lot have been written about improving adsense earnings but these are the things that worked for me. For a long time I was earning peanuts from adsense just because I didn’t know these things, but you are lucky I have learned and have shared my experience with you.

Let me hear what you think of this article on the comments. How else do you think one can improve adsense earnings? Do you have any questions or contributions please use the comment section below to share.