Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Every time I have tried more ad units on a page, my results have gone down. I have tested this multiple times, on multiple areas of our sites, and have sometimes ran it for months. It always seems to produce a lower overall click through percentage, and then lower overall earnings, even if total clicks increase.
I recently refreshed all my units/channels to be "text ads only" (the default was text and image) - click rates and earnings are up significantly a few weeks later.
I suggest changing your channels every so often. Just delete them, make new ones, make new ads codes, and put them in your includes or adserver or whatever (if you have a huge site and are hand coding this may be a problem). I think this encourages the media bot to come through and can help your ad targeting.
Do remove ads from poor performing pages/sections as they do seem to drag you down.
We had a tough few weeks with Jagger but all the wheels seem to be back on the bus - at the moment our AdSense revenue is up about 30% from the same time as last year.
As a general rule we've found the same, but it isn't universally true. If you offer more ads, the additional ones will be lower EPC - so even if the page CTR stays the same earnings can go down because people are sometimes exiting via cheaper ads. But in some keyword areas there will be lots of advertisers, and having more ads can get a higher CTR. So whether you have more than one ad unit (or whether you choose an ad unit with 1, 2 or more ads) depends on the competition for keywords on that page.
>I recently refreshed all my units/channels to be "text ads only" (the default was text and image)
>click rates and earnings are up significantly a few weeks later.
This might just be a coincidence. Ad rates are like oil prices - the market rates fluctuate. Our best channels were set up a year ago and haven't been changed.
>Do remove ads from poor performing pages/sections as they do seem to drag you down.
I know some people keep saying this, but others point out that low performing pages might have a high conversion rate. I've yet to see proper 'evidence' for this, or see confirmation from Google that removing poor performing pages will increase the bottom line. We haven't removed poor performing pages and we have had substantial and consistent growth (apart from obvious holiday periods). Our revenue is up 500% from when we started nearly a year ago - we have retained poor performing pages and now do not filter any competitors or MFA sites.