Two weeks ago I discussed falling AdSense earnings and if it was a trend that webmasters could expect to continue. I reported that while my impressions were up year over year, my click through rate (CTR) had dropped 40% and my page eCPM (how much you make for every thousand impressions) fell by 30%. I decided that I would look at why my January 2007 was so much better than January 2008 (in terms of CTR and eCPM, not overall earnings) and make a few tweaks to hopefully improve my AdSense income. For full details please see the post Has Google AdSense Lost Its Mojo?
2 Week Update
When I looked back to my template in January of 2007 my content was cleaner, had less pictures and the AdSense ads really stood out. They were slightly higher up on the page and were obvious to anyone who visited my site. Over the year I changed the template a few times to add graphical elements that made it look more professional. The battle between having a website that looked good and that produced results was on!
I decided to run a sample test on half of my pages by changing the format to one that looked similar to my January 2007 layout. The other half I kept as is. This would give me sample data to compare against to make sure that any increase or decrease was because of the layout change. I have over 45,000 pages of content overall so I was confident that I would have enough data to make the test meaningful.
What Happened
After two weeks the click through rate on the pages with the layout change rose by an amazing 22%! Just by tweaking the layout on the pages I now have 22% more people clicking on my Google Ads – and I’m not doing anything against Google’s Terms of Service such as asking people to click on my ads.
So how much more am I making? My eCPM jumped an even greater 41%! This means that for every 1,000 people that visit my pages, I’m now making 41% more money than I was two weeks ago.
How did the pages without the layout pages do? After all, if they increased by the same amounts over the two weeks then I haven’t proven anything with the layout change. In looking at the numbers the click through rate on the pages without the layout change actually fell by 5% while the eCPM fell by 14%!
If you are not getting the results you want from Google AdSense why not tweak your template to improve the performance? While my test was only for two weeks, it was run on 45,000 pages of content and had over 100,000 visitors – enough to make the results meaningful.
It’s safe to say that I’ll now be looking at updating the rest of my pages in the coming weeks to reflect the new template.
What have your experiences with AdSense been?
Interesting post, I really set up methods of monetization on my blog last month. I had some ads here and there before but nothing serious. I am trying the ad placement that I have now for 6 months before I make any real changes. My site is still very small but growing quickly so I am not sure that if I made a change I would be able to measure it since I would not have a real bench mark to measure it against.
Do you have any suggestions on how long to keep an ad placement around?
Hello Creadiv – how many page views are you getting to your site?
According to awstats, last month I had 835 unique visitors, 1,926 visits, 12,389 pages, and 38,554 hits.
Testing is the key to everything. It is the future.
Hi Creadiv – 2000 visits is hard to run any kind of analysis on. I would try to build it to at least 50,000. But you can start small – try one format for a week and another for a second week. The more visitors you get the more reliable your tests will be.
I’m wrestling with this right now at http://chickensoupforthesocial.com but I’m a firm believer that good design breeds a better reader experience and thus longer visits and higher eCPM.
One of my other blogs has become frequented by 300 visitors daily and using the same strategies I applied there, this new blog is well on it’s way to being profitable.
This is a great reminder not to get complacent with your website if you want to continue making money. It’s so easy to get lazy and accept the declining results as opposed to paying attention and staying on top of it. Good post.
but
how exactly u increase your earning?????
is it neccessary to have immpression more than click to get good ads rate?????????
pls help…….
Does anyone have suggestions on how I can check if clicks are actually being recorded to adsense? I have a youtube adsense player but I’m not seeing any clicks. I am averaging about 200 visitors/day on my blog.
So I’ve never actually given an honest attempt to make a profitable website (Probably just made $500 over the pas couple years) but I really want to give it a shot when i get a little more time. Between school, work, girlfriend, etc I figure at most I can hope to average 2 hours a day at the computer to work on it. Does anyone know if it would be worth the effort and start to pay off? I’ve know all the ‘adsense tips’ and whatnot, so if I actually start up a site I’d be new at it but I’d at least be competent. What would 2 hours a day of blogging/commenting and linking with others/site maintenance start to yield after a month/3/6/12 months?
I know it depends on topic and much else, but I’d at least go for a decent niche…
just.another.mike@hotmail.com
Wow, this was noticeable difference just from changing the layout. I just might do some tweaking with this on one of my blogs to see if it makes any difference.
Text ads do better for the most part, but sometimes an image ad will start appearing on my site that gets a lot of clicks. For example, if one appears for the iPhone, people just love to click on those things ads. People also seem to flip over anything to do with music.
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