How I Doubled My Adsense Ad Income
Now this is a very simple technique and I have it set up on my sites already but this is the very first time I did it to a real garden advertiser.
If you have an Google Adsense account, you’ll see control tabs Adsense Setup>Allowed Sites and a box that allows you to ban URLs from advertising on your site. Normally, this is used to ban competitors. So if you’re Coke – you don’t want Pepsi targeting your Coke site with their ads so you ban their website.
But many of us use it to ban low-paying websites from targeting our pages and drive the CPM down. One example is to ban e-bay.com ads. This auction site trolls the ad system targting low paying keywords and then driving traffic to their site by using your pages as low paying traffic-generators. So in the box, you’d put www.ebay.com.
You can find the sites to ban for your blog by visiting this site. (Links opens in a new window).
Over the last week, I noticed that one of my sites – normally a decent income generator was slipping badly. I wasn’t concerned for a day or two because these things happen but this weekend, while waiting for the visitors to get up – I wandered over to the site to see who was driving down my income.
I had been targeted by a garden product and they had essentially taken over my site with their ads. And all those ad keywords were very low paying ones. I added their URL to the banned list.
24 hours later, the income from this site has gone back up to normal levels – doubling the Adsense income from the previous week.
Try it yourself. Check out your income levels for the last week or so. Use the website resource above and add those urls to your site. Then wait another week or so (a similar length of time) and then compare CPM’s and CTR’s.
Let us know if it worked for you.
That’s good advice but what I have gone on to do is carefully examine each of the advertisers that appear on my site. I actually perform a search on Google to see how high up in the sponsored search results they appear compared to other advertisers.
This is because even if they are totally relevant to your site they may still be paying peanuts and thanks to the handy scrollers on Google ads these days those ads still get clicked on.
Now obviously this is not something you should do on mass but I found that blocking one or two ads from showing that I actually had the higher paying ones being shown more often and this pushed my average revenue per click up a cent or two (which is relatively high in percentage terms for my niche).
It’s not exactly 100% since advertisers can, and do, set different bids for the content network that the search network so trial and error is important.
@Search Sponge -
Good points – thanks for adding that to the post – I think it will give readers another way of sorting out their Google income.