Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Amidst all the doom and gloom of late, I'm proud to say that this is shaping up to be my first ever $300 day with the Google Adsense program.
After reading some of the posts here at the WW adsense forum regarding the amount of ads on pages being related to EPC, yesterday I went and removed one low performing ad unit from about 3000 pages on one of my best sites (easy to do when you use php includes).
Guess what... CTR dropped a little, traffic was the same, but EPC increased immediately - so I removed a few more of the underperforming ad units. EPC went up again.
Then late last night I said "To He! with it" and went so far as to switch from the 336X280 which displays 4 ads, to the 250X250 square which displays 3. I also tweaked my css so the font size for the surrounding text is exactly the same as that of the ads. I went to bed.
Now, with 8 hours left in the "Google Day," my earnings are at $265 and going strong.
I only have one 3-ad block in the middle of the content above the fold on about 3500 pages, and one Adlinks block in the upper left of my nav bar on that particular site.
I'm going to wait this out til the end of June and if the results of these changes are fairly consistent I'm going to roll it out across my entire network of sites.
Of course, like anything Google, this may not last but it's a major milestone for me. It's one of those things you want badly but it's always a little out of reach.
$300 every day is a huge incentive to keep writing content, and enough to buy a lot of painkillers for the resulting carpel tunnel problems. LOL
So here's what's working for me, for today at least ->> Less ads per page. Who woulda thunk it?
K
Nice try ;-)
K
I have since removed all ads from non performing pages and never (almost) have more than one ad on a page and tried adlinks and stopped them two weeks later...
I had one day under $333 this year... my site was down for 18 hours that day :)
My motto is 'Blending is better'.
Can you enlighten us poor people on your motto of 'blending is better' ;)
with almost 5000 or more unique visitors a day and over 35,000 ad impressions a day, im doing like $7 to $10.
Seriously, I cant figure out what im doing wrong.
sigh.
But with 3000+ pages, how can you tell which ads don't perform without setting up a channel for each page (impossible, given the 200 channel limit)?
Also, was there a threshold you used before removing AdSense from a page, such as not attaining a minimum CTR?
If you only had one ad on your page, the ad that would take that spot would be the highest paying ad. Therefore if that ad is clicked on you will get a high earning for that click.
Whereas if you have 8 ads (two sets of 4), you'll have the highest paying ad plus a few others, maybe including a few $0.03 ads! The chance of the highest paying ad being clicked reduces dramatically.
I am already testing combinations of ads, but think this makes a lot of sense. Here's hoping!
I'm still looking to break $10 a day on a regular basis. $300 seems a long way away at the moment.
Can you tell us please what you were
earning before the changes....
Yes, this was my thought too...
Also, could you please give us an idea of totals (pages, impressione etc)?
And now for the envy section, my situation is the following:
1 major site, almost 20.000 pages, all PR4 in Google, over 2.000 keywords with SERP 1, a huge lot in first page, avg 10k impression per day, and ... avg under $20 per day.
The problem here lies with the contents: it's a reference/dictionary site, so what can be the CTR rate earned with a good position for terms like "elucubrate" and "syncretism"?
Also, even when people are getting to more marketable keywords, if they are looking it up in a dictionary they cannot be very interested in buying one...
I must find some other way to make money out of that site....
Use it as leverage for a new site in a more profitable niche. Some sites are always going to be loss leaders.
it's a reference/dictionary site [...]
I must find some other way to make money out of that site
I'd use it to drive visitors to interesting articles about topics that perform good with Adsense.
These articles would have to be around issues of general interest, since your site has no particular audience or theme.
Put a few randomly rotating 'headlines' on all of your pages, that link to these articles.
Good copywriting is essential.
I'd use it to drive visitors to interesting articles about topics that perform good with Adsense
Yes, that's the direction I am moving to.
I have been experimenting with strong linking to well targeted pages, and in about 2 weeks I can get a page to SERP 1/100.000, which (for the italian-speaking world) is quite interesting.
TJ
Up about 30% both traffic and earnings. Whooooooppppeeee
Ann
No, I took a 40% hit yesterday but have already earned today as much as that so it looks like a one off.
Kokaroach
Nice work. It pays to experiment. I have altered the layout on some of my pages and changed colours for the ads etc and have noticed up to a ten times increase in earnings over the ads on the unchanged pages. After a month of testing I'm ready to roll this out to the rest of the site. Hard work though. Around 4000 pages, all hand coded. It should be worth it in the end though.
You say you removed a few ad blocks. Was the HTML code of these blocks placed before or after the code of the ads that now perform so well?
On the other side of the screen... visitor clicks and goes somewhere unexpected, off of your site and thinks what the heck? Jumps out immediately. AdWords advertiser looks at stats and goes what the heck? Drops out of content network (like me). Google investors look at results and go what the heck? Stock crashes. .com boom v2.0 dies a slow, lingering death.
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Really, making the ads look like content will eventually cause Google to require/force that ads be easier to distinguish. Enjoy it while you can.
The changes I made to my site, actually separate the ads out from the content, and although the colours compliment the page they do not make them blend into the content
Great post. It's great when those who find success give back to WW.
Question.
How did you define an underperforming page? Wast it pages with low clicks, low CTR, low EPC, low CPM?
I'm actually going to try some moves today when I see your answer so I know what I'm looking for.
It's as if, lets call it the "smart pricing discount" SPD, goes away after a delay, after the site edit, for a couple of days, thereby increasing income.
My primary point being sometimes the change itself causes the increase, not the new design or site layout. Of course if your visitors are familiar with your site then their familiarity could explain this effect. In my case I think most of my visitors are new.
Either way if you wait a week and then see how the numbers really go, only then do you have a hint if you were successful.
It is always great to hear about new milestones, Congratulations!
I am thinking this is enough evidence to suggest I should move forward and roll out the new design to the rest of the site. Would you agree, or have you seen this Smartprice discount decay thingy take longer than this? Do you think I should test a while longer?
I have a lot of sites and a lot of pages in different sections on each site. So for each site I have a url channel, within each site I have a channel for each ad type, in each section.
So lets say my site has an article section, a directory, a blog and a forum, and I have an adlinks block, a 250X250 ad block, and a 468X60 banner at the bottom on every page. That site would have 13 channels so it's easy to isolate which ads are performing and which aren't.
I removed the banner from the bottom of certain sections and found that the epc increased.
Then I switched from 5 links in the adlinks blocks to 4, and converted the large rectangles to the smaller square with 3 ads.
So instead of 11 individual ads on each page I now have 7 - 3 in the square and 4 links in the adlinks units. Ad impressions are obviously way down, and ctr is down a little because the bottom banner is gone, but overall epc is up by about 20% to 30%.
When you have a lot of pages like I do, it's hard to isolate pages or one ad block on a particular page, unless you're doing specifid testing on that page and need to keep a close eye on it, because you can only have 200 channels.
By splitting the site up into sections and then further by isolating different ad layouts for each section, you can narrow it down enough to accurately judge what's what on what type of page.
Then if you pull the ad units into your pages using php includes you can change things like the url color or link color of an ad block on the article section of your site with one file, and it changes on all the articles.
It's confusing trying to explain it, but I hope this helps.
K
Pageviews on that site: 17,000 per day
epc about $15m increased 20-30% afte changes.
The site is health related.
K
I think a 2X change in income is normal from day to day, depends on site size and topic. So it took me quite a while to be convinced there is a delayed "after edit" effect on income. I would guess this effect is something Adsense would ultimately want to make go away too.
I do still tend to panic a little when I see a day's earnings drop by 40% but I'm starting to get used to waiting for the overall monthly picture after reading so many similar posts on WW
