AdSense AB Testing

Every website that I buy on Flippa – I optimize for AdSense. I have methods that work well, but I ALWAYS do Split Testing, to find Best Ad placement & Ad Size. A month ago I bought my first 5 figure investment website for exactly $10000. Obviously I immediately optimized the site, and in the first month it earned more than double of its previous months earning. $677.85 for 25 days in December versus $325 in November!

I will include details in my upcoming December 2016 income report. BTW, I recommend you look at my November Income report for my investment websites … if anything, just for inspiration.

As part of my optimization I usually run some AB Tests. Sometimes, I don’t see a clear mathematical advantage either way. But here I was running an AB Test in the top placement on Desktop and Tablets. The ad size that I was testing were 728×90 Leaderboard and 336×280 Large Rectangle. Guess which one did better, before you read down.

For this Split Test, I excluded Mobile devices using my Mobile AD Switcher PHP Plugin (which you can use for free!), because these two ad sizes are TOO big for mobile.

If you don’t feel like reading the whole report, you can watch this 3 minute video, to find out the results:

Here are the AB Test Results:

  • 336×280 made $41.05 during the test
  • 728×90 ad made $17.27 during the test
  • The 336×280 ad outperformed the 728×90 ad by a whooping 138%
  • Each ad was shown roughly 25500 times (page views reported by AdSense)

As you can see, there is a clear mathematical difference between the two ads’ earnings, so it cannot be a statistical error! Large Rectangle made 2.38 times more money that Leaderboard ad.

Here is screenshot – Red bar indicates pageviews, and Blue bar indicates revenue in USD.

AB Testing Results - AdSenseNinja.com

What you should learn from this AB Test

First – always, always test and try out new things. Once you have enough data (page views are the best method to determine enough data), make the switch to the better performing ad, but continue to test!

728 Leaderboard ad is NOT always worse – don’t just blindly go and swap 728 ads with 336 ads. Run a test for 3-6 weeks, until you have enough page impressions to see that you have a clear winner! You may get different results from mine.

What I’m going to do as a result of this test:

First I will remove the 728 ad, and test 336 ad alignment! I will leave ALIGN = CENTER as it is now, and will add ALIGN = LEFT to the test, and run again. I will have to make a new ad unit and new custom channel for this.

I will also run similar test on my other sites that get significant desktop traffic.

PS – Desktop traffic is still the king, and is making about 50% per visitor than mobile traffic, on this new website. You can test the potential income different for Desktop vs Mobile traffic with my new AdSense Calculator tool.

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