How to improve earnings from your site

A frequent complaint from new AdSense publishers are that they are not earning anything, or they are not earning the amount that they expect, especially from those whose sites are new on the Web. This post is to address these complaints and more. Earnings from putting AdSense ads, referral text/buttons or Google searchbar on one's site depend on a number of factors. I will address them one by one. Some of them are inter-related. This will be a long post, so I will just summarise the factors that are needed to get increased earnings from AdSense: Good content, high traffic, easily visible and relevant ads, suitable template, ads optimized for placement, color and format.

Content

In the first place, the site should have interesting and/or informative content that will attract visitors and search engines. One cannot expect to start a blog with just one simple post, put ads, referral text/buttons and/or Google searchbar there and immediately start generating earnings. Earnings need traffic, and to get traffic takes time. Surprisingly, there are AdSense publishers who have just joined recently asking why he/she is not earning in the Google AdSense Help group.

Traffic

One can almost say that earnings are proportional to the traffic you get to your site or sites as the more people see your site (therefore ads), the more likely someone may click on them. There are various ways to increase traffic to your site. Have a look at this post: How to build traffic to your blog

Ads visibility

You should put your ads where people are most likely to see them, and this mean putting them above the fold. Above the fold means the section of a webpage which is first seen when someone land on your site without having to scroll vertically. It would be good also if they don't need to scroll horizontally to see the rest of the page for a good visitor experience. This is one of he main reason I am using Ramani's 3 column template as 5-20% of my visitors are stil using the 800x600 screen resolution. One should have a visitors (hits) counter like How do I track visitors to my site or other good counters which give you sufficient statistics. Statcounter, for example, has a "system statistics" which shows me how many of my visitors are using what screen resolution. And currently, it shows that 5-20% of my visitors are still using 800x600 screen resolution (small screen). Visitors with larger screen will see blank spaces on both sides of the content). If you are bothered by the "wasted blank space" in larger screens, you may choose a fluid width template like this blog Thur's 3 column old classic template modified to have narrower sidebars. If you are using a large screen and would like to see how the blog appears to small screen visitors, type of paste this: javascript:top.resizeTo(800,600) into the address bar and press the ENTER key (works for FireFox and Internet Explorer 6, but not for IE7 or Opera).

Ads relevant to the content

People who visit your site are people who are interested in the content of the site. If you have ads that are relevant to the content, it is more likely that they will also be interested in what the ads have to offer, and thus are more likely to click on the ads. For more details on how to get ads relevant to the content, go to How to Google ads that are more relevant to your site content

Use a 3 column template

Using a 3 column template will allow you to put your ads in one sidebar (I prefer the left sidebar as most people read from left to right) and navigation aids, etc., in the other sidebar. If you agree and want a 3 column template for your blog, for old classic Blogger template, refer to Thur's 3 column old classic template modified to have narrower sidebars, and for New Blogger templates, refer to Ramani's 3 column template for New Blogger (formerly Blogger Beta) and New Blogger 3 column templates modified by Charlemagne Stavanger

Ads Placement

Depending on the site, certain position for ads may tend to do better than other positions. In general, refer to the heat map below, where position colored dark red tend to perform best, going down to white which tend to perform worst.

The heat map is only a guide. In placing the ads, you should also ask yourself:

* What is the user trying to accomplish by visiting my site?
* What do they do when viewing a particular page?
* Where is their attention likely to be focused?
* How can I integrate ads into this area without getting in the users' way?
* How can I keep the page looking clean, uncluttered and inviting?

AdSense recommend putting the interest of visitors first in positioning ads when deciding on ads placement and numbers. One shouldn't have so many ads that it overwhelms the visitors.

For pages which visitors tend to only glance through without really reading the content, placing the ads in places that are most visible will do better. In pages where visitors read the post or article, placing the ads at the end of the post or article would do the best as after finishing reading, the reader will be asking himself, "what should I do next".

Blending the ads to the color of your site

AdSense has consistently recommended blending the color of your ads to that of the site so that they appear like part of the site. To learn how and to find tool to help you blend the ads to the site, refer to How to blend the ads and searchbar to colors of your site. However, you should be careful not to blend the ads so well that they appear almost invisible to your visitors.

Ads Optimization

AdSense has recommended wider ads format like the Large Rectangle Ad (336 x 280), Inline Rectangle Ad (300 x 250) and the Wide Skyscraper Ad (160x600) as readers absorb information in thought units (that is, several words at a time). The wider format lets them comfortably read more text at a glance without having to skip a line and return to the left margin every few words as they would be forced to do with a narrower ad. However, the ad format have to fit the position where you place the ad unit. For example, in my sidebar, I can only put the Wide Skyscraper ad unit as the others will be too wide. The first two will probably fit well into the content column.

Many have also reported better earnings by placing ads within (above, below or in the middle of post or article). If yours is a New Blogger blog, and you want to do this, you can find the instruction in this post: Incorporate AdSense ads in your New Blogger posts. If you are still using the old classic Blogger template, you should refer to this post: Old classic Blogger template: For ads after each post, where to paste the script. I have chosen not to do so as doing that may put off visitors from coming back to the site as ads within content are, in my opinion, too obtrusive. However, my choice may mean lower CTR (click through rates) and therefore lower earnings for me. What you choose to do is up to you.

Which ad format, which position you place your ad unit and how you blend your ads may depend on what kind of site you have, and AdSense has tools called custom channels to track which channels (channel may be the position of the ad unit, the ad format or the color of the ads) does better. You may create channels to track them, do some experimenting and then choose the ones that generate the best earnings for your ads.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization

SEO refers to the endeavour of trying to increase visitors from search engines by rank high in search result page of search engines. By getting your site placed in the first few pages of a search result, you increase the chances of a searcher clicking on the link and ending up on your site.

This is a big, time consuming and competitive field, and unless you are a full time professional, the time is better spend on producing content and perhaps doing some simple SEO by doing a cursory keyword analysis, and placing suitable keywords in the post title and content rather then trying to outdo the professionals. One of the elements that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a Web page. Those with higher frequency are typically considered more relevant. Search engines places great importance on keywords in the URL, the title of the blog and the post or article. Using some obscure word or a combination of them may lead to a high placement in search engine result page. From experience, I have seen many of my posts ending up first, and that without having to go all the way with SEO. Those observations obtained from statcounter statistics (recent keyword activities)

If yours is a yet to start or a relatively new site, you may put some attention to the choice of URL (Uniform Resource Locator or web address) as search engines uses that to figure out what your site is all about. Do not combine words into one as search engines cannot distinguish between them, but use hyphen or the underscore to separate them. As your choice of URl may already be taken, be creative to get a suitable URL that you want. For example, if health-information.com is taken, then choose good-health-information.com

You may want to read about my simple attempt to do SEO for the post Stroke rehabilitation: Brain scientist advice for stroke victims and caregivers. My attempt is described in this post: SEO tools for blog post: Overture and WebCEO. The analysis reveal that the competition for the good keywords will be very stiff, but still I got some hits from a Google search today. See Natural Treatment for Cushings Syndrome and Cushings Natural Medicines. (Information obtained from the statistics generated by statcounter).

Filtering MFA (made for AdSense) sites

There are people advocating filtering low paying ads to make way for higher paying ads. However, it didn't sound logical to me as AdSense works on a bidding basis. Whoever bid the highest gets his ad displayed. So if we filter low paying ads, will that not mean we may get even lower paying ads or even PSA (public service ads) or no ads?

However an article I read made me want to test this out. AdSense has implemented Smart Pricing for advertisers so that if the clicks they get don't convert into sales, filling in of forms or other response, they pay less than what they bid. This translate into lower payments for clicks for the publishers. There are AdSense publishers who uses arbitrage - that is, they use AdWord and bid low for some keywords and hope to get visits to their sites which probably have little or not content but links or ads, and hope to get paid higher for clicks on their sites. If this is true, then such ads not only get us low payment for clicks but can trigger Smart Pricing because such sites do not lead to any conversions. I have just installed the Preview Tool and monitoring my reports and when I get enough data as a basis for comparison, I will try to filter off such sites and see if they lead to higher earnings. I will report the results when it is done.