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?
