For a little over a month now, I’ve
been looking at my AdSense earnings
in Google Analytics to better
understand my earnings, and I’ve
stumbled across some rather
interesting results. Without even realising it, I’ve come up with even
more ways to increase my AdSense
earnings each month. They range
from simple ad placement, to writing
specific posts, and appealing to a
certain referrer. Here’s how you can increase YOUR earnings. Setting Up The first thing you’ll want to do is set
up your AdSense so that you can
study it in more detail, in Analytics. To
do this, when you’re viewing your
report overview, just click the link to
integrate Adsense with your Analytics account. It’s just one click and then a
small amount of information on your
Analytics account. You have to be an
admin on your Analytics account,
otherwise it won’t let you make the
changes necessary, but if you’re the only person running the website, this
shouldn’t be a problem. NOTE: Because
you’re adding new information, GA
will not transfer over details from the
past, you will only see new results
from when your join the two together. Now that you’re set up, it’s best to
have a run down of what all the terms
mean, so that you can understand
your results better. AdSense Revenue is the amount of
money you’ve made in your selected
time period (2 weeks for me). / 1000 visits, is how much money
you’ve made for every 1000 visits to
your site. Ads clicked, is the amount of ads
clicked by viewers. Ads clicked / visit, is the total number
of visits, divided by the number of ads
clicked. CTR stands for Click Through Rate and
this is the percentage of clicks you get
for each ad impression.
eCPM stands for effective Cost Per
1000 impressions (M being a roman
numeral). It’s the total earnings per
1000 impressions. AdSense Ads Viewed is the total
number of ads seen, from all multiple
ads on all the pageviews. AdSense Unit Impressions / Visit is the
number of ads that are viewed by
visitors, per visit. AdSense Page Impressions is the
amount of pages viewed that have
AdSense ads on them. AdSense Page Impressions / Visit is
similar to pages viewed per visit, only
it’s pages with ads viewed, per visit.
Tip #1 – Appeal To Your Top
Referrers By far, my favourite thing about using
Analytics to look at your AdSense, is
that you can then find out which of
your referrers are worth the most in
terms of AdSense revenue. My results
were rather shocking for me. For quite a while now, I’ve been featured on the
homepage of a photography forum
with about 7000 active members, but
that’s grown a lot more over the last
month or so. I don’t get a massive
amount of traffic from them, as I currently only have 1 link on their
homepage, but when I do, it’s worth a
lot to me. Let me show you an example of what
happened. When you go into the new
GA, click on Content, then AdSense,
then AdSense Referrers, this will bring
up a list of all the websites that sent
visitors who have clicked on an ad, as well as a timeline of your earnings. The
results below are for a complete
month, and unfortunately, due to
Google’s rules and regulations, I’m not
allowed to show you them, so you’ll
just have to take my word for it. The most important part of the results isn’t
the ads clicks, viewed, or even the
revenue; it’s the Click Through Rate
(CTR) and eCPM (effective Cost Per
1000 impressions). As we discovered earlier, the CTR is the
percentage of ads that are clicked, per
impression, so you want that to be as
high as possible. The reason the CTR is
much higher than some of the other
referrers is because of the quality of visitor that I’m receiving from that
referrer. StumbleUpon has a
particularly poor CTR, because the
people who use it aren’t looking for
anything in particular so it’s hard to
get their attention, which may result in them clicking on an ad.
UglyHedgehog
on the other hand is a forum for
photographers, so the people on that
site are actively looking for content in
my niche. The eCPM is also substantially higher
than the other referrers, which tells me
that if I can increase the number of
impressions that I’m getting from
them, then I will earn a lot more
money. The quality of Twitter user is usually pretty poor, as they don’t
typically spend too much time on the
site (00:01:47), and even though a
link a lot to my website around 10
times a day through Twitter, I still get
less traffic from them than Facebook. Facebook on the other hand has a
better quality of visitor, with people
looking at more pages and staying for
longer (00:02:29, but their eCPM is
actually lower than that of Twitter. From these findings I can conclude
that very high quality traffic, such as
forums in your niche
(uglyhedgehog.com has an average
time on site of 00:04:09 and 2.19
pages per visit), will make you much more money, just so long as you can
get the traffic you’re after. People are
less likely to click on ads when they’ve
come from websites such as
Facebook, as they’re more interested
in the content that you’ve written. They provide a good quality of visitor,
but their time on site is almost half that
of the forum in my niche, so it’s
important to find a good balance of
visitor quality. Twitter users seem to
behave differently to other users, as they’re in a browsing mode, and are
clicking on content that they see in
their feed before it disappears. It
would appear that they treat the
websites they visit in a similar way, by
clicking on more ads. I actually get more traffic from Facebook, but my
earnings from Twitter far outweigh
those of Facebook, which is good
really, because it’s much more
acceptable to post multiple links on
Twitter.
Tip #2 – Write Content That Links
Within Your Site This step produced shockingly good
results for my earnings. If you look
have a look at my graph below, you’ll
see that on the 6th of November, there
was a massive increase in earnings.
The first thing I did was look back to that day to see which post I had
published, and I found a post titled ‘A
Beginner’s Guide To Photography’,
and this was simply a collection of my
tutorials. This meant that anyone who
had viewed the page would have to click on another if they wanted to
learn anything. This forced them to
increase their pages per visit, which
produces more ad impressions. When I break down my earnings so
that I’m only receiving information
from the 6th of November, I can start
to see which referrer is earning me the
most money. T.co is the URL shortener
that Twitter uses, so I can see clearly that a small number of page
impressions has yielded very strong
earnings. With a large number of clicks
from 76 page impressions, I have an
unusually high CTR. From this
response, I can see that to earn money, this is the sort of content that I
need to be promoting, though as
many sources as I can. I’m currently
combining this content, with the forum
mentioned in the tip above, so that I
can drive top quality traffic, to the content that earns me the most
money. After just 2 days of doing this,
I’m already starting to notice a massive
improvement.
Tip #3 – Text and Image Ads Enabling your ad units to display both
text and image/rich media ad types,
increases the number of ads
competing to appear on your site.
More advertisers in the ad auction
drives higher bids and more revenue for you. On average, publishers see a
59% increase in eCPM earnings when
they make these recommended
changes. If you’re not already using
both, then it’s as simple as going into
the ‘My ads’ tab, and clicking on ‘Edit ad type’, next to the ad in the list. This
will increase the cost per click, so even
if you’re not improving the number of
clicks that your website is getting,
you’ll still make more money.
Tip #4 – Increase Ad Size Advertisers prefer wider ad units for
their premium inventory, resulting in
higher bids for your ad placements.
Though all sites are different,
publishers typically see 0.35 eCPMs
when using the wider ad size. You can start by simply changing single ads on
popular pages to see how well they
work, and if it’s not too intrusive, then
you can start rolling it out across your
whole website. I didn’t do this in my
sidebar because I was aware that the whole width of the sidebar would
have to change, and that would not
only take a lot of time, but mess up the
spacing that I had laid out for posts.
Instead, I added a wider ad at the end
of each post, that differs to all the other ads on my website, and this saw
a good improvement in ad sales.
Tip #5 – Ad Placement Where you choose to place the ad on
your site will make a big difference to
the amount of clicks that you get,
because the more obvious the ad, the
more likely someone will be to see it.
It’s hard to judge on your own website because we look at our sites
differently to how other people view
them, so the best way to start seeing
results, is to experiment with ad
placement. When I first started, I had
two ads on my website, one at the top of the sidebar, and one at the bottom.
Since then, we’ve added another ad to
the side bar, and reloated the bottom
one to under the subscribe button,
added an ad to the bottom of each
post, and put a small text ad just below our header. The small text ad below our header
made the biggest difference to our
results because it stands out the most
to new visitors, and could even be
possibly mistaken for a link within our
own website. It’s a very simple ad, and less appealing than a flash one, but it’s
much less intrusive, and in a better
position. Overall, I don’t like to add too
many ads because I don’t want to put
off visitors or make my website look
bad. I always find it odd when people choose to include an ad block in their
header, because that makes me find
their website much less appealing.
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