Forum Moderators: martinibuster
thanks
Once you're done reading the last 2 year's AdSense Forum posts write a summary of your findings and post those findings here.
Hey, I started my new website about 2 weeks ago. I've generated about 14 or 15 dollars on adsense and I'm not too pleased with that. My traffic is pretty bad, (about 700 hits)... I'm new at this web thing and I guess I'm looking for tips on getting more revenue and getting more traffic.
I wouldn't be too discouraged by the earnings. If you have earned $15 from 700 hits, that equates to about $21.42 eCPM. I'd say that is quite healthy - especially for a new site. The reason the income seems low is because of the low volume of traffic.
You may already know that eCPM (effective clicks per 1000 impressions) is a standard way of measuring ad performance. Divide the earnings by number of clicks and multiply by 1000. That way you can compare revenue from different pages and ad programs.
This forum doesn't really deal with site promotion as there are other dedicated forums on WW that do, but we can certainly help out with Adsense queries.
But as regards Adsense, it's very much a matter of tinkering with banner types, positions, colour schemes etc to see what works best on your site.
First, use a channel on each banner - that way you can see easily what banners work, and what ones dont. It also makes working out what ad positions work, and how each banner is affected by any changes you make to layout. Don't be in a rush to judge the effect of changes - they sometimes take a week or more to show any real difference - especially in smart pricing. That takes a week or so to absorb changes.
Secondly, don't fall into the trap of placing three banners on a page thinking you'll treble income - it doesn't work like that. Many of us find that less is more - minimum number of banners on a page often means greater ctr, and that affects smart pricing. I personally will yank any banner that doesn't perform. I don't have ads on all pages - saving them for pages that I know they work on. This helps reduce ad blindness. Visitors come to your site for the content - not a wall of ads!
Lastly, and I appreciate that maybe this shouldn't be a major priority at this stage, consider the ads that show on the page. It's a common misconception that the ads that show are the highest bidders. They aren't. Google calculates what it thinks is likely to be the best overall paying ads based on a lot of criteria. All sounds great, but the algorithm gets ad targeting spectacularly wrong, and frequently boots off advertisers that pay well and replaces them with made for adsense (MFA) sites. Have a read of the other threads to learn more about MFA's. But in a nutshell, if the ads are selling products, services or are genuine information sites then they are good. If they link to lots of other ads, have minimal content and aren't actually selling goods or service direct, then it is probably an MFA and blocking them tends to increase earnings.
Oh, and I should mention that you never click on the ads on your site - use the adsense preview tool to check ads, or copy yhe link to a new browser window, strip off all the crap before the addurl= and after the url to view the landing page if it's not showing in the preview tool. Don't block ads based on seeing them in the preview tool - you need to see an ad on your site before you block it.
"First, use a channel on each banner - that way you can see easily what banners work, and what ones dont. It also makes working out what ad positions work, and how each banner is affected by any changes you make to layout. Don't be in a rush to judge the effect of changes - they sometimes take a week or more to show any real difference - especially in smart pricing. That takes a week or so to absorb changes."
A simple idea indeed for those with lots of experience in this world, but one that someone knew to the process like myself wouldn't know without the tip. Thanks.
How this worked in practice for me once was when I decided to try two adblocks on my biggest earning page. Two banners, each had a channel. Called one channel index_header and the other index_footer. Looking at the stats, I could see that virtually nobody clicked on the bottom banner. As each banner impression is counted and used in CTR, then it had effectively halved, and after a week or so it started to lower the earnings per click overall. Removing the banner made the ctr normal again, and the ctr eventually caught up. Simple but effective tool that is under-used by newbies experimenting.
