How to Increase AdSense profit using Ad Optimization

There are several ways to increase your adsense earnings. One of the best ways, is to increase traffic to your site, using content marketing and SEO. Create interesting and useful content for your readers, and over time number of visitors will to your site will grow.

However, there are MANY monetized (with AdSense) sites that get 1000s of unique visits each day, and make only a few bucks (literally).

My experience shows that you can increase the earning potential of your site by optimizing ad placement, without sacrificing quality of content or user experience!

Example: A client of mine, has a site that gets more than 500,000 visitors per month, mostly from US, each month (WOW), and a lot of them come back (and often). However, until recently, he was making “only” $1000-1500 per months – given the best case scenario ($1500 / month) that is a mere $3 per thousand VISITORS!

After we applied my A/B testing and placement techniques, he started making $5000+ per month, and with growing traffic, his earnings will only increase.

Think about it – his earning per visitor increase more than 300% by adjusting ad placement.

How I measure success (with RPM)

Here is my RPM (revenue per 1000 ad impressions) growth graph (Jan 1, 2013 – Apr 3, 2014)

AdSense RPM and TRAFFIC graph over 18 months

As I mentioned above – I use RPM as the main metric to measure the success of my experiments. RPM is independent of traffic fluctuations (because it is a metric that calculates revenue PER impression or number of times the ads were shown). So even if traffic to your site goes up or down, you can still measure how well you are doing.

Second most important metric is CPC or Cost Per Click. However this metric is statistically irrelevant, since you cannot do much to increase CPC, which is based on the auction inside AdWords system. However, CPC can be used to determine how good your “topic” is, and what you can do to attract higher paying ads.

Third “metric” that I use is the actual ads format and using A/B testing to determine which style of ads and colors works best to maximize profits.

Through years of testing, I’ve developed one of the best ad positioning (placement) methodologies which considers the following factors:

– Ease of use of your websites! You don’t want to have 3 ads above the fold, before your visitor even sees the TITLE of your page! You want your visitors to want to come back to your site.

– Maximizing Profit! While your visitors love your site and are not bombarded with ads, you want to make some money. Optimal ad placement is the key here. You want the content to look good and ads to stand out. This is also important as AdSense prohibits you from blending ads with site content, as it provokes invalid clicks.

– Placement! Most people are immune to ads – they just block them out. If your ads are intrusive, the visitor will leave the site and never come back. You want to place ads so that as many people as possible will click on them, while not taking away from  User Experience.

Using these and other optimisation techniques, I was able to achieve a three-fold increase in RPM, and in cases where traffic to the site dropped, even increase earnings!

Basically, you can increase the profit from your site WITHOUT sacrificing user experience and satisfaction!