How to maximise your AdSense profits
9 factors determine how much profit you will make from your AdSense participation.
How much traffic your site gets
How many pages on your site host AdSense ads
What the click thru rate from each page is
What the value of each click is
How many ads appear on each page
Where these ads are located
What format these ads are in - size, location, layout and color scheme
Google's fractional pay out rate
How much of your site's traffic is from new as opposed to repeat visitors.
To maximise your site's profits from AdSense you ideally should optimise all these factors. However, one is entirely out of your control: Google's fractional payout rate. This is the percentage of the revenue that Google earns from a click that it passes on to you.
Google doesn't at present reveal this but you could theoretically run an experiment to find out what the exact percentage is. (I'll tell you how when you sign up for the AdSense Insider course - there's a form at the bottom of this page).
Optimising all these factors could take some time so what you should focus on initially are the factors that are going to work in your favor most quickly with the minimum effort.
However I'm going to cover all the ones you can influence here for you.
1. Getting more site traffic
Getting more traffic is an art and a science. The best traffic is traffic that comes from search engines because it is free and because people who come to your site from a search engine are actively looking for things, they are not casually browsing around. They have a search mission in their head.
The tricks of the trade are:
search engine optimisation
using pay per click advertising, such as AdWords (but there is no point in paying more to Google to advertise your site than you earn in overall long-term revenue from it)
posting your link on forums - these effectively give you free links back to your site which helps you with the process of climbing up the search engine ladder
using viral marketing techniques to inform the world about your site
using offline advertising to drive traffic to your site - but give people a reason to visit it, don't just print your web address everywhere
using ezines to remind people about your site from time to time
include your web address in all your email correspondence
All these subjects are covered in more detail in the AdSense Insider Tutorial.
2. Increasing the number of pages that host AdSense ads
This is easy: you just paste the code that Google gives you to activate AdSense into all the pages you want. Google lets you use a range of different formats for ads and you don't need to use the same format on every page. In fact you can change the color scheme, shape and size of the ads on each page.
There are some restrictions though: you can't run more than one block of ads on a single page for example.
3. Increasing the click thru rate from your page
What you can't do is place big bold words around the ads saying "Click these ads to make me some money". In fact you are not allowed to say anything on your site that will actively encourage clicks. However, what you can do is write copy on your site that makes the products or services being advertised become more interesting to the reader. For example, suppose you host a page about casinos. If you write copy that explains why casinos are such fun, and how you can pit your wits against professional gamblers the world over in total confidentiality, and how you can try a casino out in total safety and with zero risk by visiting some of the best online casinos in the world, you will naturally arouse the interest of your reader. Now if your copy is clearly about casinos, AdSense will spot this and post ads about casinos on that page. In fact there is a risk that AdSense will post a casino ad on this page because I have mentioned the word casino quite a few times - we'll see what happens.
4. Increasing the value per click
The way to do this is to increase the quantity and quality of information on your site related to products and services that are of high commercial value on the internet.
This is not as simple as thinking, for example, that jewellery is a high ticket item, therefore you should write a page about jewellery because not that much jewellery is sold online. You really need to spot high profit items that sell well over the internet because these are things that advertisers will pay a lot to advertise. If they pay a lot to advertise, the likelihood is that any related AdSense ads will come with a high click through price.
But you can't just think that, for example, casinos are highly advertised so I'll post a page about casinos: it really has to be relevant to your overall site for two reasons:
If your site is about AdSense and you write a page about casinos, no one on your site is going to be particularly interested unless you are very lucky so the click through rate will be low.
Google prohibits you from writing pages solely to host ads - although it's a judgement call by Google as to whether your pages are solely to earn AdSense revenues or not.
What you can and should do is think laterally about what topics are related to your site that have a commercial value. You run a site about bird-watching, then host some travel pages about how to get to bird-watchers' paradise on a far away Pacific Island. These will probably show travel ads which will give you a reasonably good pay out - and just as importantly they will be relevant to your visitor and so will enhance the overall experience he / she gets from your site, so they'll come back again.
5. Optimising how many ads appear on your page
Google now provides 6 different ad formats. One format allows you to post just a single ad on your site, one allows 5 ads and most allow 4 that read from right to left, or from top to bottom.
Guess what: if you choose the format that shows up 5 ads, you will probably get more clicks than if you show 1. It is not necessarily true, but usually will be. But not all ads will earn you the same revenue - it will depend on Google's complex real time bid pricing algorithm that it uses to set your AdWords click thru price.
6. Optimising the location of the ads
People tend to read from left to right and the eye is trained to do this early on in life (actually some people read the other way round but not English language readers.) They also read from top to bottom.
This process lays emphasis on ads at the beginning and end of a page so don't place them in the middle. There's also a neat trick you can exploit that uses the psychology of reading to help you tip the balance a bit more in your favor - I go into the details in the AdSense Insider's course.
7. Selecting the best format for these ads
With a range of formats available, your first decision is to see which format will fit best into your existing website design. You really don't want to re-jig the whole thing if you can avoid it. Google lets you choose a vast range of color options too and there are two approaches you can adopt:
display your ads in your site's colors so that they fit in well
display your ads in strikingly contrasting colors so that they get noticed more
What you choose to do will depend on the nature of your site, and don't forget that a click on an ad, whilst it will make you some money, will lose you a visitor: don't let the tail wag the dog.
8. How much of your site's traffic is from new as opposed to repeat visitors.
People new to your site will be new to the ads on your site which means they won't already have looked at them and decided to click or not. Generally speaking, people often respond to ads once they've seen them a few times but if they don't at that stage, they probably never will. So your ideal traffic is people who visit your pages a few times. There's a great way of getting people to do this - find out about it in the Tutorial. If your site gets endless repeat visitors you should expect your revenues to peak shortly after you implement AdSense and then decline over time - unless you take active steps to generate more traffic.
