Risking Your Income

How far will you go to improve your Adsense income?

[ClosedGL]

Recently I've been looking at my website wondering how I can improve my Adsense figures without bombarding visitors with ads all over the place or using dirty tricks. This has led me to a complete redesign of the site which inturn has moved positioning of my Adsense panels. I am on the cusp of relaunching the site but fear is stopping me. What if my earnings drastically fall? What if my visitors increase because the site is better but my Adsense earnings don't increase, or worse still, decrease?

When you're making changes, how do you measure what effect you've had and how big are the changes you make each time you experiment?

[TheRookie]

If earnings drop, go back to your old design. :-)

[petra]

I did a redesign that saw my figures go haywire (for the worse) and so I redesigned the redesign back to the old design, it eventually clawed back to the original figures (barely), so the morale of the story, if it aint broke don't fix it ;)

[Swebbie]

if it aint broke don't fix it

I'm with that sentiment 100%! I think your time might be far better spent adding new pages to your site with quality content. That way, you don't risk losing what you've already built in AS income - all you do is keep incrementally adding to it.

[treeline]

Try changing just a few pages, not the whole site, to experiment.

[jchampliaud]

I've found that altering ad placement and/or color helps in the short term. Also sometimes removing AdSense from pages and then reading it also can lead to short term gain.

[esllou]

if it ain't broke, don't fix it....

is true enough, but how do you know that your site's 2% CTR is "not broke". Maybe your site's maximum potential is more like 3.5% so you need to do a bit of tweaking on certain sections of the site to see, but I wouldn't suggest a wholesale site-wide switch.

[jetteroheller]

Big changes since February

URL filtering

blend in, after testing for 6 hours on 2 domains, difference so big that roll out on all domains

Position change roll out on all domains as fast as possible

4 different combination of text colors for the ads with the select up to 4 color schemes in the code generator. 4 days tested on one domain, removed and wend back to old color scheme.

[conroy]

> if it aint broke don't fix it

Disagree entirely in regards to this subject. Testing new placement of ads takes 1 day since there is no longer a delay in channel reporting. If the results are close you might have to run for a few days.

This isn't about turning a 2% CTR into a 3%, it is about 2% into 25%. The difference in earnings can be huge.

[OptiRex]

Realistically there are only three nett ways to earn more income through Adsense:

1. Higher CTR

2. More visitors

3. Higher EPC

All three depend on different variables, two of which are under your control:

1. You may get higher CTR through better placement of the ads, blending etc.

2. Higher search engine placement, links to other relevant and authority sites plus have you tried Adwords as an experiment?

3. Mostly out of your control since that is what your subject pays.

I'm with conroy on this:

This isn't about turning a 2% CTR into a 3%, it is about 2% into 25%. The difference in earnings can be huge.

If your 1 & 2 are pretty much spot on then you may have no option but to risk it and see what happens, after all, you still have the original site to re-upload if it all goes pear-shaped!

A few day's experimentation should not damage your SE placment if you do it right.

[icedowl]

Also out of my control is the targeting of the ads. I've come to the conclusion that the targeting is way out of kilter on my main site. The ads I'm seeing just aren't on the pages that they should appear on.

**Right ads - Wrong pages**

It hurts and there isn't anything that I can do about it. All stats other than impressions have decreased by 90%. Bad. Bad. Bad. :(

[conroy]

Changing the location of the JS code for adsense will have zero effect on rankings. If you do a complete redesign things may be different. I would explore all available options with your current layout before doing any drastic layout changes.

[dutch_dude]

Well I remember when I was happy with a 5% CTR If I thought back then if it aint broke.. Its more like 20% now with some tweaks. Just experiment a bit, you can always change it back. I have the best results with clean pages with lots of textual content, placing ads only on these so not on sitemaps, index pages etc. Removing ads from pages not rich in content increased both my income and average CTR. It also made the site look very clean and not commercial, probably helps in getting inbound links.
And blend in your ad: give it the same colors as your content, no border. Give the link and / or url in the ad the same color as links on your page.

[spaceylacie]

Whoa, don't change the whole site at one, that's what channels are for!

[PatrickDeese]

> if it ain't broke

I have more than doubled my daily earnings for a site by redesigning the template. It was my 5th highest earning site, now it's tied for 2nd place.

[Rodney]

This isn't about turning a 2% CTR into a 3%

I'd have to disagree with this one just a bit.

I think Brett said it best in another semi-recent thread (that I can't seem to find at the moment).

The difference in income between a 2% CTR and a 3% or 4% CTR can be thousands of dollars. So a little change can do a lot of good sometimes.

Definitely worth testing now that the channels are in real time.

[Never_again]

Realistically there are only three...ways to earn more income through Adsense:
1. Higher CTR
2. More visitors
3. Higher EPC

How about:

4. More content.

5. Better targeted content.

6. Diversify your subject areas.

And there are plenty of other ways to improve your AdSense income.

[OptiRex]

4. More content.

5. Better targeted content.

6. Diversify your subject areas.

I'm not disagreeing however they still come under the three points I listed, each should add to:

1. Higher CTR
2. More visitors
3. Higher EPC