This is for all the AdSense lovers out there, who have their blogging network thriving on AdSense.
There are situations when your much earned traffic does not really pay off on AdSense right? Like for instance, imagine you had 10,000 page views on a day and another day you have 5,000 page views.
1,000 clicks were made on each day, but you made more revenue on the second day compared to the first day.
I won’t be able to tell you the exact reasons why this happened as there are metrics beyond our reach that decides the revenue like “Click source” “Ad value” etc. For example a click from a US ip may give you more value for a click from Pakistan. Similarly a click on one ad may give you less revenue than another even though the number of clicks are same.
Essentially, it is evident that there are these “unknown factors” that decides the average CPC.
But one known fact is that if you are able to display ads to only the targeted crowd, and avoid displaying it to crowds that are likely to generate less revenue or are less likely to click on ads, then you have a better chance to generate more revenue.
One such target is “Search Engine traffic”. Traffic from search engines are basically “information seekers”. They don’t want to stick with one website. If they find the information they are looking for on your website, great. But if you are able to provide leads to other website that might have the information, that’s fine too. So, they are likely to click on your ads and link provided. So, why don’t you create a win-win situation out of this?
An ideal situation for generating maximum value and revenue from your AdSense ads would be to :
- Display ads to the crowd that’s “craving for information”
- Not display ads to the “Ad Blind” crowd
- Selectively chose the posts and categories that you want the ad to show up (so that you don’t end up showing low value ads)
To accomplish this, here’s a plugin from OZ, called “Who Sees Ads“. It’s been there for quite some time, but I’m unsure if anyone have used this plugin to this aspect.
- It helps you to selectively show ads, like for instance, it can show ads to users coming from search engines.
- It alows you to create custom criterias to selectively show ads (use this feature wisely)
Another plugin that will help you get selective with ads is the “Why Work Adsense plugin“
On this plugin, you can : -
- Select not to display ads on particular posts by providing their ID.
- Select the time frame after which a post will carry an ad after publishing.
In my opinion, it is safe to remove ads from posts that are intended to the social media like StumbleUpon. Because Stumbleupon crowd is not bothered about your ads and they are ad-blind. And while there are thousands of impressions coming from them, it is wiser to protect your effective CPC, by reducing “non-clickable-impressions”. (I may be wrong but share your thoughts on this, please.)
Install these two plugins today, if you have bee using already try out these methods to selectively display your ads, and see if it generates more revenue for lesser pageviews. Works for me, hope it will work for you too.
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Thanks for the tips Mani.
I am not using ads in my blog currently. (I don’t have that much page views anyway…. )
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I agree with you on the selective display of ads, though not sure but higher views with lesser clicks definitely reduce the pay per click.
I use a similar trick to not display the main ads on a new post lesser than 2 days old, my main reason was that search engines do not send visitors to new posts.
But my assumption was wrong and they do send visitors, but I have been able to increase my clickthru vs display rates with this change and I still keep ads disabled for newer posts since Digg and SU users do not like ads much and it would be good if you disabled them in newer posts.
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Mani Karthik Replied:
I agree Keith. I havent been able to find the metrics to prove it because there are more than one options out there, but that’s what I see from the revenue generated. Comparatively lesser page views and a couple of clicks are better than more page views and lesser clicks.
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[...] Increase AdSense revenue by selectively displaying ads [...]
nice post…
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