Simple tips to boost income

obvious often overlooked

[simonuk]

I've been using adsense since last October and like a few others I play around with my pages and the ads that show to see what works best for me.

For those who are new to this here are some simple things you can do to help boost earnings.

- CHECK THE ADS
When you go on your page you will see a "Ads by google" link where your adsense adds are. If you click on this you can copy/paste the URLs into your browser and check them. This is often overlooked but you'd be surprised how many I've blocked because they bring up a page not found or it doesn't do what the ad says it will do.

- DON'T BE AFRAID TO BLOCK/UNBLOCK
When I first saw the warning message saying blocking ads could hamper earnings I didn't block any. Now I've used it for a while I have the courage to play about and my earnings have snowballed since I started removing the trash ads.

Never be afraid to start blocking a whole heap of ads because you can always add them again and a couple of hours later they will return.

CUSTOM STYLES
These can be very important and should not be overlooked. styles vary and most web sites will differ but my best results have been matching exactly the background color. This is not true for everyone but again it really is worth exprimenting. You may end up down on a couple of days takings but in the overall picture of things your earnings could go through the roof.

POSISTION OF ADS
This is very important and if your takings are very low try placing the ads somewhere else. when I first started I had my ads at the bottom of the page and when I moved them to the top the clicks rose. I then revamped my page and placed them somewhere else on the page (matching color of div background) and the click rate went up even further.

There are more but I ran out of time :-)

Anyone else with suggestions?

Simon.

[simonuk]

One more thing I just thought of...

My site for example has free desktop backgrounds of where I live. Because of this adsense could either show local business ads or desktop wallpaper ads.

Now the ads have been showing business in my town and the PPC rate is low. Yesterday I started blocking a few local ones I knew had a very low PPC and they have been replaced by other ads like wallpapers which pay more.

If your site could display varying adds but is targeting just one type of ad you could think of blocking a few and seeing what else you could have in their place.

Simon.

[Sense_able]

Thanks for some great tips...

I have not done any blocking and I think I might have a play as these trashy ads are getting on my nerves

[4eyes]

The problem with the blocking issue is that you can only see the ads that are served to your part of the world.

If you are in the UK but are building sites that target the USA you cannot easily filter out the competition without asking a US based mate to check them every now and then.

[trillianjedi]

Thanks Simon,

I haven't tried any blocking yet either, but looking at some of the ads bearing in mind what you#ve said, I think I'll give it a go next week and see what happens with the CTR. We're definitely serving up some rubbish in there.

TJ

[moltar]

You can try using a free UK proxy server to check out the ads.

[wgonz]

How can we know which ads pay more?
I only have the information provided by overture tool.
Do you know another way?
Thanks

[trillianjedi]

I don't think it's about which ads pay more, it's about the ads which users actually click on in the first place.

TJ

[europeforvisitors]

IMHO, an even better tip for boosting income is to focus on building new, high-quality pages that will rank well in the search engines. If you can add five or ten pages of content that's valuable to users each week, you'll enlarge your site by more than 250 or 500 pages per year--and you'll be building for the future instead of swatting flies today.

[richmondsteve]

wgonz, since most pages have multiple matching keyword possibilities it's impossible to know exact click prices, but you can get an idea by going to the Adwords site.

[simonuk]

The only way I knew which ads produced little money was because I had the same ads all the time but appearing at different times. It only took a few days to work out which ones were the low clicks.

As for pages I totally agree. I build 1 or 2 pages a day (1 blog and 1 normal) and they all help boost adsense.

Simon.

[richmondsteve]

I agree with EFV. Here's another tip. If your site is sticky and/or there are a small number of ads across most of your site, consider rotating in affiliate ads in the same space you'd normally show AdSense ads. If you can, track user page views by session ID or IP and rotate in affiliate ads every X page views or every X page views after the first Y pages are viewed.

The rationale is that if a user sees the same ads 5 pages in a row they likely either aren't interested in the ads or clicked an ad and hit their back button and promoting something else that might generate you revenue at that point might be better than showing them the same ads over and over for their next 5 page views.

[alika]

also use different ad formats, colors, position on every pages.

if the ads are in the same position with same look all the time, it is easy for users to have "ad blindness" - they'll simply ignore the ads that are under your logo or wherever you regularly put them.

if you have a long article, the new wide skys with 5 ads may be very good. For a short page, go with leaderboard.

just experiment and see how it goes

[wgonz]

How can we know which ads pay more?
I only have the information provided by overture tool.
Do you know another way?
Thanks

[mlemos]

- DON'T BE AFRAID TO BLOCK/UNBLOCK
When I first saw the warning message saying blocking ads could hamper earnings I didn't block any. Now I've used it for a while I have the courage to play about and my earnings have snowballed since I started removing the trash ads.

Never be afraid to start blocking a whole heap of ads because you can always add them again and a couple of hours later they will return.

Is there a delay between when you add URLs to filters and they start really being filtered?

I have a site for PHP developers. Googles keeps placing ads for developers of Coldfusion, Java, ASP, Python, etc.. I wanted to filter those ads but they do not seem to be working as the ads that I wanted to filter still appear.

If there is a delay, how long is it in average?

[Rodney]

If there is a delay, how long is it in average?

it says right on the filtering page that the effects may take a few hours.

[Auction_Mum]

Is there a delay on google in general?

(I have a few issues with them at the moment but to stay on topic here...) I am still getting ads I blocked over a week ago!

I would love to be able to block by domain or language as I seem to get a lot of German ads and most of my members are in Australia.

Thanks for the other tips. I already have tried rotating with affiliates and I'll see how that goes over the month.

I'm also rotating the ads through my pages to see which get the best click rate.

It's an interesting learning curve :)

[annej]

I was having trouble with blocking and wrote to support.

It seems if you want to block out the whole domain you need to enter you put in 'widget.com' without the www. If you include the www then you are only blocking that page.

So now I always block 'widget.com' not 'www.widget.com' and it seems to be working. I figure if there is one bad ad they have lost me as an advertiser.

I don't understand why Google is accepting the kinds of ads that are just searches for more ads. That is exactly the kind of web page I thought they were trying to get rid of with new algos as for a while they were rising to the top crowding out content pages in searches.

[Broadway]

I enjoyed reading this post. Things I should have been aware of, yet wasn't.

I made changes to the colors of my AdSense ads. Say one of my site's topics is several pages long. Now I have it set up so each different page's AdSense ads are different colors (clearly so).

While it is always hard to compare apples and apples with AdSense, over the past 4 days the CTR seems to be about 25% above the same day for the previous week, just related to ad color change (and the fact that the change in color brings the ads to your attention more so).

[trillianjedi]

Well, we followed Simon's suggestion about blocking the cr@p adverts, and I have to say, very noticeable increase in revenue (and CTR).

Thanks for the tip, I owe you a beer or two ;-)

TJ

[onlineleben]

Took the blocking advice and now there are not many ads left.
Have to expand my niche.

[too much information]

I did some blocking last week and my CTR went *way* up. The only problem is that I think I was too well targeted as those great ads have since disappeared. Now that I can't block down to relevant ads I have just started serving other affiliate products.

[yump]

I'm new to Adsense (week or so!) and just wondering how long you should leave each change to get a reasonable statistical idea of what effect its having. It seems a bit like watching share price movements - ie. too easy to react quickly and not really know whether what you've done is right or whether its just knee jerk. Thinking of 3-4 days at the moment, even though the actual changes are picked up quite quickly by Google?

[yump]

Just noticed that the effects of blocking price comparison advert sites, seems to be that the actual sellers of the products adverts appear and looking at the max. bids on Overture they seem to be significantly higher bidders....here's hoping.

[richmondsteve]

yump, for me to draw any conclusions about changes I implement I like to run tests for a week. I also take into account subjective information like perceived changes in advertisers or current events that might be influencing test results. I give AdSense high 4 or low 5-figure daily impressions on average. If I gave AdSense in the low 4 figures or less I'd probably run tests for 2 weeks.

Unfortunately, there's so much normal variance do to any number of factors which I can't control that all results need to be taken with a grain of salt. It's easy to draw erroneous conclusions when there are so many variables that not only are difficult to impossible to control, but are difficult to impossible to measure.

[Auction_Mum]

My question is releated to increasing income. I wonder how you get ads that are better targeted to your audience on a discussion forum? The ads on my static pages are great they seem to have got "smarter" over time and match my content more closely. But how can I get them to be more relevent in dynamic pages?

Most of my members are stay at home mums who use eBay but the ads seem to be related to web hosting. I'd much rather have ads related to children and home products.

In a sort of related issue. I have read some other threads about conversion rates etc and speculation about using that to detect fraud. (I have become paranoid about this fraud thing what with talk of clickbots etc and having accidentally clicked a couple of ads when I forgot I was on my own page!).

Surely conversion rates are related to how well matched the ads are to your audience. If you can't somehow "tweak" the ads served to suit you (thus increasing your adsense income) the CTR as well as the conversion will be low. Is there some sort of formula that in X category the average CTR is y% of z impressions and the average conversion rate is then a percentage of that? Some sort of benchmark to see how well your adsense banners are performing?

Cheers
Caz

[richmondsteve]

Auction_Mum wrote:

Surely conversion rates are related to how well matched the ads are to your audience.

I agree that there's a strong correlation.

If you can't somehow "tweak" the ads served to suit you (thus increasing your adsense income) the CTR as well as the conversion will be low.

If you want to influence the type of ads that are displayed, put some effort into labeling titles, headings and links with appropriate text and adding more relevant text to the pages you are hoping to influence.

Is there some sort of formula that in X category the average CTR is y% of z impressions and the average conversion rate is then a percentage of that? Some sort of benchmark to see how well your adsense banners are performing?

There's no magic formula. Like you said it'll depend in large part how good of a match the ads are to your pages' content. But placement on your site, user behavior, etc. plays a big part too. Ads on discussion forums tend to have relatively low CTRs because 1. visitors don't tend to be in buy mode, 2. visitors tend to look at a relatively high # of pages per visit, 3. visitors may become blind to ads if they've seen them over and over and 4. long pages present problems with placing ads in a location that will be visible when the user would be in click-mode (try just below the discussion post).

[richmondsteve]

Auction_Mum, I hadn't visited your site when I wrote the message above. Now I have. To eliminate/reduce hosting related ads, you may want to remove/edit the phpBB footer on your forum pages. Assuming most visitors click a forum thread, then read the entire page, you may find that moving the AdSense ad block to below the last post will result in a higher CTR. Then again maybe not. My experience is that forum users in read mode tend to tune out ads at the top of the page b/c at that point they want to read the posts and by the time they are done they either forget about the ads at the top or don't want to scroll up. AdSense seems to favor title and heading text so with the word auction in your title, headings and numerous links at the top of each page I'm not surprised ads about auctions that aren't relevant to your content are being displayed.