How to increase EPC?

[newbies]

Now the problem at least for me is how to increase EPC after April adsense change. Although my number of clicks and CTR reached record high but earning has decreased 30%. From my channel data I learned that very lower EPC (as low as 0.03/click) for ad click on dynamic pages such as forum and search results and some other pages dragged down my whole earning. This is unfair to those clicks because adsense cannot determine those clicks are not going to convert to sales. Even if they could, for my site there is still a problem because most clicks from visitors in the filed cannot buy products directly from advertiser's site they have to buy through their institutional PO system.

So we have worked very hard to get a good CTR, the most important thing is, however, to increase EPC, the question is How TO in current situation.

Thank you for any input.

[europeforvisitors]

Well, the easiest way to boost your overall EPC would be to remove AdSense from those dynamic and forum pages. Of course, that would reduce your total revenue. :-)

Or (and this is obviously a better strategy) you could create more of the content that does generate decent earnings per click, which would boost your average EPC and--more important--would add to your bottom-line earnings.

But I don't think there's any way to increase EPC on pages or types of content that Google has identified as being poorly converting.

[newbies]

Thanks for reply.

I have some forum archives pages which get good keyword targetting, EPC for those page is slightly better than dynamic pages but still much lower than other content pages. I wonder what is the algo adsense uses to determine the type of pages. Could the name I used for channel or some special words on the pages tell adsense that those pages are not important such as for channel name I use something like "search_tower", "archives", etc.

[mrfragger]

This is my theory which most likely is way off but I love speculating, don't we all.

The less ads you show per page the more likely the ones that do show are higher paying. In other words, the ones with 4 or 5 ads per page. Now you might have say a couple of ads that pay more than the other 3 ads. So if one of the very few who actually click on ads is going to click and your only showing say 2 ads per page then your EPC will probably be higher since those with a higher budget and those who pay and have better position ranking with adwords most likely fill those slots. Those with 4 or 5 ads per page are showing 60% more ads per day but those 60% are probably not paying as well if you were to limit it to 2 or 3 ads per page.

[europeforvisitors]

That's an interesting hypothesis, and you may be right in assuming that fewer ads would lead to a higher EPC.

On the other hand, fewer ads might also lead to a lower CTR and lower overall revenues. (I'm sure that I'm not alone in finding that a 4-ad skyscraper or leaderboard, for example, generates a higher clickthrough rate and revenues than a 2-ad banner.)

I'd guess that the mixture of ads probably determines whether your idea pays off. If a page is mostly attracting variations on the same ad (e.g., four different "blue fuzzy widgets" or "Shelbyville hotels" vendors), then maybe there's value in having just two high-paying ads (although you might be discouraging the comparison shopper from checking multiple vendors). On the other hand, if the typical mixture of ads has enough variety to attract clicks from different people ("blue fuzzy widgets," "pink furry widgets," "Shelbyville hotels," "Shelbyville holiday rentals"), then maybe it's better to stick with a four- or five-ad layout.

[itisgene]

I have some experience with adsense on the forum and other pages. I explained it here(http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum89/2370.htm).

I agree that forums drag down the EPC (in my case about 45% drop since April 1st).

So, what I did?

I created a new site for product review pages leaving the main forum site.

It instantly restored the EPC for the product review pages. (There are some caviats, though. See above posting.)

I didn't want to create new domain for the forum because it is three years old and have more decent incoming links than the product review pages. ( I just got a DMOZ link for the forum after two years of waiting!).

So, my suggestion would be creating a new site and start from the scratch if you don't have much to lose (such as incoming links or huge drop in searnings etc.)