Howdy all,
You may have seen my hissy fit message recently about closing my adsense account. Well I changed my mind and reopened it. In the process of doing so I had a revelation about why my adsense earnings had gotten so bad.
I was laying in bed thinking about it, and realized that two things had happened:
1. I changed my theme.
2. I switched to responsive ads.
One of the problems with the new theme (which has already been changed) was that I could not run my trusty 728x90 banners the way I was before. This proved to be a big problem for me in terms of earnings. I had to use responsive ads to fit into the theme, the content column was too small for a 728x90 ad. With responsive it seemed to default to 468x60 a lot of the time.
So after updating my sites with a new theme with a wider content column, I switched back to 728x90 across the board. And guess what? My earnings have gone back up to where they were before. It's shocking to see the difference when I look at my adsense reports.
I had initially been quite enthusiastic about responsive ads, they seemed like a good idea. But when I looked in my reports I realized that they didn't work at all for my earnings given the theme I was using. And even when I tried my new theme, they still didn't seem to do well for me. I don't know why but they just didn't seem to generate much in the way of revenue for my sites.
But 728x90 banners? They are kicking ass. Yes, they are as old as the hills. They aren't exciting or new but damn it they really do seem to work.
So I wanted to share my experience here with you all in case anybody else had been having a similarly difficult time with responsive ads. Try going back to the trusty 728x90 size and see how that works for you.
BTW, I initially also wanted the responsive ads for mobile because I thought that would help mobile earnings. But guess what? The 728x90 size seems to work better for that too despite the fact that you don't see the whole banner on an iPhone 5 size screen, you only see part of it. And yet I'm getting better mobile clicks than I did with the responsive ads.
Anyway, food for thought if responsive banners are causing you any kind of earnings headaches. I'm glad I switched back to 728x90.
