I have spent a long time trying to improve the advertising earnings on my websites and I have managed to go from a couple of dollars a month to 3 figures in a relatively short time, without increasing the amount of visitors to my site.
The tips I am about to tell you are what worked for me, but I encourage you to try different things as each site is unique.
1. Colour and Position
This is probably the optimization which is mentioned most regularly, but it's for good reason. You really should experiment with different ad positions and different colour combinations. Each time you make a change leave the ads for a week and see how your earnings alter. Make a note of what works and then try something new. I was always sceptical when I read these comments before but since I have started playing with positioning my adsense revenue has multiplied by 4 times (crazy but true). Personally I've found that blending ads into the site works very well but it's not the only way and you should try all the combinations you can think of.
2. Different date, different adverts
This is one of my favourites and I intend to write a post on how to do this next week, for now I will stick to the what and why.
In simple terms, the older the page the more ads you show.
Despite the fact that I have advertising, I don't actually like it. I have 0 to very few adverts on new posts, and increase the ads on older ones. This isn't so obvious here on Binary Moon, but on Binary Joy I have gone a little crazy - but there is a method to my madness. The theory is that older posts will be more appealing to search engines, and visitors who come from search engines are more likely to click on ads. Another side effect is that I "reward" regular visitors by not annoying them with adverts, so I feel this is a good compromise. As I said above I'll go into this one in more detail next week (with code).
3. Content Targeting
This one is a very simple change and is ridiculously straight forward to implement. Google have a simple comment tag that you can place around your primary content, and this is what your ads will be targeted to.
<!-- google_ad_section_start --> Key page content here <!-- google_ad_section_end -->
The idea is that you place these comments around your core page content. That is, the content which is mostly text, and which best reflects the content of your site. On a blog this will generally be the main post content. The reason you do this is so that the adverts don't target irrelevant content such as the links in your sidebar.
You can also add regions you want Google to ignore. I haven't used these myself but they are something I intend to try in the not too distant future. You can read more on the section targeting page of the Google Adsense help.
4. Referrals
Google Referrals don't make me a huge amount of money, but I like to include them on all my sites. Currently I only use one referral package and it only displays in Internet Explorer on the PC. It's for the Firefox browser, and earns me roughly a dollar for every new install I generate. Some sneaky css removes the ad for Firefox users so that they don't get pestered with unnecessary adverts.
To do the show/ hide css on your refferal code all I do is have a div with my referral button in it, which I hide. I then use conditional css comments to load some css to display the advert in IE.
I've put together a simple example of what I mean below. Just copy and paste the code below into a new htm document and then view it in IE and Firefox. In IE you will see the ad block at the top of the page, in Firefox is "magically" disappears.
<html>
<head>
<title>Ad Show Hide demo</title>
<style>
#adDiv {
display:none;
}
</style>
<!--[if IE]>
<style>
#adDiv {
display:block;
/* some extra styles to make the ad stand out */
border:1px solid #eee;
padding:10px;
}
</style>
<![endif]-->
</head>
<body>
<div id="adDiv">Stick your advert in here</div>
<h2>Ad test</h2>
<p>Some page content</p>
</body>
</html>5. SEO and Content
I get about 75% of my traffic from search engines and, in my opinion, search engine visitors are the ones most likely to click on adverts, far more so than the regular visitors (which ties into the date based adverts above). Search engine visitors are on a journey to find some information, if they can't find what they want on my site then they might as well find it on one of my advertisers sites, and that's the good thing about contextual advertising - the ads are relevant to my readers.
+1 for free - Experiment, Experiment, then experiment some more
I know I've said this already but I can't emphasize it enough experiment constantly. Things are changing all the time so it's always worth trying different advertising layouts and schemes.
Your turn
Do you run ads on your site, and do you have any hints and tips you want to share? I'm sure everyone would be interested in reading you tips in the comments below.
81 Responses to “My top 5 tips for increasing adsense earnings (without increasing traffic)” Leave a reply ›
pls how do i improve my adsense earnings on my blog. I dont have a website now but a blog. Now I have only generated $6 since january 2008. Pls send me the details
Making the ads as part of your site works best, but the link colour can also follow ur text colour so it looks like ur content, this is not a guarantee while it may attract ur visitor to view ur ads.
Hi,
Very interesting and useful tips. You make it straight forward so that people can easily understand.. Thanks for the sharing..
Nice tips for boosting Adsencse Earning
I quite like the idea of #2 as well. I'd like to see a future post on this.
I kind of let my adsense drop off for a while so i'm keen to see if I can get it back up again. Some nice tips in this post!
Great blog! Thx
Question- How do I keep my adsense ads at the top? Every time I add a post they keep dropping down.
And how do I place them on the side? I only know how to add them like I add a post?
Thanks again
Austin
These are some good tips, especially the "show more ads on older posts" one -- this is exactly what I have been doing. For the first two weeks or so, I don't put any AdSense on the page or any other obvious ads. After about 15 days when the older posts drop off of my home page, I wll put in AdSense units if the page is getting any kind of significant traffic. Usually it takes a week or two for the pages to get ranked well in the search engines anyway, so this works out pretty well. Most regular visitors to the home page don't even know that I'm using AdSense on the site, but I can still collect earnings from the older pages that are getting almost all of the traffic.
Good list, there is a couple of things which you didn't mention such as top ads having a very high ctr compared to ads lower on the page.
Cool Post though, Thanks.
If only EUrope servers colud have American net traffic, nice but not for us.
The only thing which brings and retain visitors is content.
thanks your blogs is very helpful. and honestly i like the the template you are using right now...the adsense add on the right side bar doesn't move at all. Can you share with us about where to get this template?thak you before
Good advice, I like your google adsense bar that has a fixed scroll, very cunning
I agree with Tim, your fixed adsense bar is cool..
I think that giving users a "similar posts" list at the bottom of the post can also be used to link the users to older posts, This would also increase earnings.
I like the post no 2 very much, I'll also implement it.
hi, great blog. Can you give us a hint on how to do #2?
i want to try that content targeting trick to optimize my adsense earnings
but i'm afraid i make a mistake . so i quit.. :p
maybe i need a little more deeper tutorial..
thx 4 your info
Thanks a lot for that really articulate adsense information. I just wanted to know if there is a reason for adsense to stop tracking clicks on ads once I changed my theme. I used to get $.50 atleast on a bad day and upto $3 sometimes on a good day. The moment i changed the theme, the impressions are the same, but the clicks and the eCPMs have stopped. any clues what has gone wrong?
I would assume the problem is the location of the ads. The new theme placed the ads in places that people don't click so you stopped getting the clicks.