How many ads for Google ad sense? (2 versus 1)

[206Melody]

Hi all - I'm a newbie. I apologize if I'm not following protocol. I've been reading the April 2016 Google ad sense earnings thread. I have a website which has one mobile response Google ad sense ad in the right side bar. It's been that way for about 18 months (I put ads up about 18 months ago, before that there were none). Like many here, my revenue has dropped.

I'm trying to figure out if it is valuable or not to add a second ad to the page? I know the Google ad sense rules say no more than 3 per page. Is there an incremental benefit to having 2 ads (say, a banner ad and side bar ad)? Or is it possible (I don't know just thinking ahead...) will Google penalize you with a lower page RPM because you now have 2 ads? If you've had experience with one ad versus two, I'd love your input.

I appreciate the help.

Thanks,
Melody

(Edited for typos)

[IanTurner]

In the past I had a policy of only having one ad visible on screen at any time - and if the page was long enough I would add second and third ads to the page. This always use to increase revenue and and RPM although the second and third ads on the page never made as much as the top ad.

However I'm not too sure about this any more since Google started putting more stock in the Active View Viewable stats. I am currently experimenting to see how increasing Active View Viewable affects page RPM.

[netmeg]

You won't get penalized in any way, but it might cause less competition amongst the advertisers for your available space. But really all you can do is test it - the answer is not going to be the same for me as it is for you or anyone else.

[Rasputin]

I have no ads in the right hand side because they perform so badly (as I imagine google also recognised since they have removed them from the search results). Ads within the natural flow of the page do much better and my guess is you will find that replacing your current ad with one ad in the middle of the content makes a big difference.
I also never have more than one ad visible but if an article is long why not have two, or three if it is very long...
Ps never had much success with banner ads at top of the page and since they make a page look ugly I don't use them either