Adsense on home page - is it worth it

Using Google Adsense on home page does it put people off

[scotland]

I was wondering what the opinion is on having adsense on the index page of a website - does this put people off visiting the rest of the site? or should you focus on getting people to visit other pages that has a higher adsense click value?

[andrewshim]

My site's in one of those competitive niches where people want fast, easy answers, so the bounce rate for my homepage is high.

Having adsense on my homepage means that at least I get some money by providing adsense ads for those who are intent on bouncing in and out looking for their quick easy answers. In fact, the ad unit on my homepage accounts for 33.33% of my revenue from that site alone, but it wasn't always like that. The homepage ads were getting pittance (1 & 2 cent clicks) at one stage until :

-I removed low CTR units on other pages.
-Kept strictly to one unit per page (only on performing pages).
-Found the sweet spot for my ad unit on the homepage.

I believe that if your site contains good content, people are going to want to come back with or without adsense on the homepage.

[scotland]

andrewshim

Thanks for that, I had read about removing adverts from non performing pages, however I don't actually know how to monitor this accross dozens or hundreds of pages.

I guess I need to invest time in understanding Google analytics - or is there an easier way?

[andrewshim]

Create channels for each category of webpages:

Log into your account > Adsense Setup > Channels.

You need to create separate adsense code for each of these channels, then use the specific code for each channel in your pages. Monitor the performance of each channel. One month should be enough to gauge whether your channels are performing or not, although 2-3 months may give you a better picture.

Important to group relevant pages into each channel. eg... one channel for pages about "diets", one channel for "exercise routines" etc. The ads that appear will generally follow the these topics, so you will more or less gauge whether people are clicking on the ads for these categories and also how much you are earning for these categories.

How to best categorize your channels are entirely up to you.

[potentialgeek]

URL Channels can give you useful data. If you've got many folders for your site content, set a channel to the folder. Later you can get more specific (individual webpages).

One of my sites gets 95% from the home page; another 50%; and another 30%. What the public thinks of ads on your home page may or may not affect revenue. How respectable does your site need to be?

p/g

[europeforvisitors]

I've gone both ways (AdSense on the home page, AdSense not on the home page), and for the last few months I've stuck with "not."

Why? Mostly because AdSense occasionally serves wildly off-topic ads on my home page for several days at a time, and it look stupid for a site about European travel to display ads for hotels in San Diego or New York. Plus, most of my traffic is on "long tail" or inside pages, so I figure that any losses from not having AdSense ads on the home page are minimal. (If most users arrived via the home page, I'd probably bite the bullet and display AdSense ads there.)

[scotland]

Thanks

I had not considered using channels in this way - by topic, I have just used them for complete domains. That is really helpful, thanks.

Google was delivering rubbish sites to my websites for a while and I kept blocking the ads - basically I don't want visitors to be directed to MFA sites that provide no content, just adverts. In the last week or so I have not seen any of these poor quality sites coming up - so that is good news to me.