How To Improve Adsense Earnings On Your Blog
In certain niches including the niche this blog falls within you can run into problems when using Adsense.
1) Your readers may be savvy and recognise Adsense blocks, and they don’t click on them.
2) None of the terms which relate to your topic/ niche are very competitive, and so even if readers click them, they only pay very little.
3) A large percentage of your traffic comes from social media sites which lowers your CTR (see smart pricing).
4) You don’t want to alienate your readers by placing large Adsense blocks at the top of your articles.
So what do you do? How can you make good money from Adsense on these types of blogs?
Basic concepts:
- Adsense performs very well when you use the large rectangle format, and place the ad blocks in your content, normally at the top, so it is in front of every person who views the page.
- Visitors who arrive at your pages from search engines (particularly Google) are those who are most likely to click on Adsense ads.
- Your regular readers probably don’t deserve to look at Adsense, and they probably don’t click Adsense ads anyway.
After considering this information it makes sense not to put Adsense on every page of your blog, but just on those articles that are getting a lot of visitors from search engines. For this you need to look at the stats for your blog. I use Google Analytics. Look at old posts and select those that are getting traffic from Google or other search engines. Place a large rectangle ad block at the top of the content on these pages, probably beneath the title.
Problems and Solutions:
The first problem you might have is that even with only having ads on old posts, none of the clicks are paying well, because your topics are in a niche where there is no competition for keywords.
The second problem you may have is that you don’t get a lot of search engine traffic.
Both of these issues can be addressed by doing a little keyword research before you write your article.
Since this article is about Adsense, I will use this as an example. For the information below I used a tool called Niche Inspector, but you can use : This Free Wordtracker page for basic keyword research.
The “Searches” heading gives an estimate of the average amount of searches for that term each day. So the more searches, the more potential. However some terms will obviously have much more competition than others.
Google and MSN Pages gives you an estimate of pages out there that relate to the term, which shows how much competition there is for the term.
CPC (Cost Per Click) gives you an estimate of how much a click will pay out for that term.
|
Keyword |
Searches |
Google Pages |
MSN Pages |
CPC |
|
adsense |
110,459 |
48,800,000 |
3,260,000 |
$20.01 – $27.93 |
|
google adsense |
29,176 |
22,300,000 |
10,800,000 |
$18.27 – $24.18 |
|
adsense publisher |
10,980 |
224,000 |
137,000 |
$4.87 – $6.08 |
|
adsense ad |
4,863 |
171,000 |
140,000 |
$3.75 – $4.69 |
|
google adsense publisher |
705 |
171,000 |
66,900 |
$3.41 – $4.27 |
|
template adsense |
439 |
3,530 |
5,950 |
$5.85 – $7.30 |
|
adsense tool |
370 |
26,900 |
9,360 |
$5.85 – $7.31 |
|
adsense format |
259 |
18,500 |
33,700 |
$6.55 – $8.19 |
|
adsense alternative |
227 |
61,000 |
41,300 |
$1.56 – $1.95 |
|
adsense earnings |
191 |
385,000 |
176,000 |
$7.43 – $9.29 |
|
adsense tip |
189 |
23,700 |
14,600 |
$9.07 – $11.34 |
|
adsense ready |
156 |
219,000 |
224,000 |
$2.30 – $2.87 |
|
adsense program |
126 |
359,000 |
366,000 |
$9.68 – $12.10 |
|
google adsense alternative |
125 |
13,100 |
6,770 |
$3.41 – $4.27 |
|
adsense keyword |
123 |
65,300 |
28,900 |
$2.37 – $2.96 |
|
adsense web site |
108 |
45,100 |
10,500 |
$3.75 – $4.69 |
|
adsense site |
106 |
192,000 |
90,900 |
$1.72 – $2.15 |
|
adsense secret |
103 |
112,000 |
14,900 |
$0.95 – $1.18 |
|
google adsense program |
90 |
198,000 |
198,000 |
$12.62 – $15.78 |
|
msn adsense |
90 |
5,630 |
1,040 |
$3.07 – $3.84 |
|
adwords and adsense |
88 |
94,300 |
72,700 |
$8.02 – $10.02 |
|
how to make money with google adsense |
88 |
98,600 |
21,700 |
$3.24 – $4.05 |
|
how to make money with adsense |
86 |
81,700 |
18,100 |
$2.19 – $2.74 |
|
adsense income |
85 |
313,000 |
125,000 |
$2.81 – $3.51 |
|
adsense google |
84 |
711,000 |
1,110,000 |
$21.02 – $27.45 |
|
make money with adsense |
79 |
308,000 |
78,200 |
$1.71 – $2.14 |
|
adsense template |
77 |
35,700 |
9,510 |
$1.27 – $1.59 |
|
adsense tracker |
74 |
79,900 |
54,600 |
$1.00 – $1.26 |
|
google com adsense |
72 |
280,000 |
175,000 |
$18.74 – $23.43 |
|
adsense forum |
71 |
163,000 |
163,000 |
$6.65 – $8.31 |
|
adsense money |
71 |
241,000 |
81,900 |
$2.08 – $2.60 |
|
adsense revenue |
70 |
630,000 |
343,000 |
$6.52 – $8.15 |
|
adsense adwords google |
68 |
37,500 |
129,000 |
$15.13 – $18.91 |
|
making money with adsense |
67 |
205,000 |
53,700 |
$1.81 – $2.26 |
|
adsense ready site |
66 |
8,220 |
1,670 |
$0.95 – $1.19 |
|
adwords adsense |
64 |
171,000 |
225,000 |
$4.05 – $5.06 |
|
google adsense keyword |
60 |
39,400 |
9,040 |
$3.06 – $3.82 |
|
google adsense secret |
58 |
86,400 |
1,570 |
$4.21 – $5.27 |
|
adsense make money |
58 |
71,500 |
27,000 |
$1.59 – $1.98 |
|
yahoo adsense |
54 |
18,900 |
16,700 |
$2.97 – $3.71 |
|
adsense profit |
53 |
35,900 |
12,100 |
$2.65 – $3.32 |
|
adsense exchange |
53 |
3,010 |
456 |
$1.71 – $2.13 |
In an ideal world you would rank in Google for all the main terms, and you would make bucket loads of cash. However this isn’t realistic. It makes sense to target keywords that still payout well, but have less competition i.e fewer pages that relate to that term. There is a point where the phrase doesn’t get enough people searching for it, so it isn’t worth targeting. But it is worth considering, if a term has 50 people a day searching for it, but no competition, it will be so much easier to rank for. If you find yourself ranking first you will get many of those visitors hitting your site each day, something like 90% of people click the first result in a Search Engine Result Page (SERP), and as low as 3% click the result at the bottom of the first page.
Once you have selected some appropriate keywords and phrases, make sure you use them as much as possible with out spoiling your reader experience. You should also use your main keyword in the title of your article, or if it sounds ugly, use a post slug to get it the URL. I also recommend WordPress users using the plugin Headspace, and adding the keywords into your posts meta data.
I hope this article helps you improve your Adsense earnings. I have found that most people a not so happy to share how they earn using Adsense.
New content about Making Money Online is now on my new Blog Make Money Online.
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Comments (51)
I blog about carbon offsetting, my issue is the majority of my readers use firefox as a browser. Adsense has great ads from carbon offset providers that are very pertinent to my readers. Since I have firefox readers, they are blocking the ads. Other ad companies don’t really have the “right” ads.
What do I do?
Good question Matt, I think it’s a hard problem to deal with, and it is only going to get worse as more ff users blanket block ads. Here is a solution that makes it more difficult to block your ads, and displays an image that only those who have blocked your ads will see. You can make that image what ever you want… very good read on a very good blog. Pro Blog Design
I think that Google will have to change its smart pricing policy as social media continues to grow. Google should not want to miss out on publishers serving their google ads in fear of being smart priced.
Sorry if this question is too basic – adsense hasn’t really been my thing up until now. How can you estimate how much you will make per click?
Hi Jon, You have to do research, and find tools to help you. As a general rule, competitive niches which relate to highly profitable products tend to pay more. Credit cards, Buy Viagra etc
Simon / Jon
I have experimented with various blogs and find that the type of niche your blog is in dictates all of your potential adsense earnings.
OK… Pretty obvious stuff so far…
Here’s what happened when I ditched all adsense on my blogs -
Adsense earnings jumped, within a couple of weeks, by up to 1000% on some sites! I kid you not.
I might add that your ‘Smart Pricing’ post is invaluable to those caught in that particular trap.
As a result of being hit with Smart Pricing, I now ONLY use blogs for the sole purpose of driving traffic to another offer, or website, and have removed adsense from all from my blogs completely.
I find that using adsense works incredibly well and can achieve a 25-30% ctr on sites built around B2C type products/services.
I want to assure you that it is possible to earn an average of .25 cents for everyone who merely visits your site when you can create a good ctr, in the ‘right’ niche, with the ‘right’ keywords (long-tail).
A typical example of a ‘HOT niche’ (to coin a phrase) would be any type of insurance product (my favourite) because there is huge demand. AN example would be ‘car insurance’.
By then homing in on a sub-niche you can create multiple sites targeting different countries and include many affiliate products to compliment your adsense earnings.
Yes, I know that something like ‘car insurance’ is hugely popular with tons of competition but I have a technique that’s almost laughably simple.
It can help you to find many keyword phrases to build your next adsense/affiliate site around… and you can beat those PR5 – PR7 sites to the punch and bag a PAGE 1 slot in all three of Google/Yahoo/MSN searches.
This reply has gone on long enough… so apologies all round… but if you’re interested in seeing how I complete this simple task, I’ll post the ‘system’ back here if you’d like to see it.
Here’s to more profits!
Adrian
Adrian, thanks for the very informative comment. I would love to hear any further info you have on the topic….as long as it doesn’t involve signing up for any free ebooks, or buying anything. Cheers, Simon
Thank you for the information. I’ve only just recently placed Google Ads onto my blog seeming as my blog has started rating #1 in Google search for terms like stmusic code amongst others.
Very informative post, I’ve got your RSS feed bookmarked in FireFox.
I’m not sure I’d even bother with Adsense personally at this point. Eventually the market will have to even back out and make promoting Adsense worthwhile.
My adsense account got higher clicks when i started using my current theme.
Anyway, nice post!
Simon
Apologies for the delay in posting back.
I’ve included a video because it’s easier to explain the niche marketing system and how it’s possible to rank page #1 in the search engines.
It’s explained in detail if you’d like to take a look.
I like your Youtube post and I can confirm your article contents form the bedrock to produce money online.
Here’s to getting richer — quicker!
Adrian
A very informative post, only hope this bring some great returns.
wow, nice post and very informative
thanks
Thank you for providing a valuable article.I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog.
how can i increase my blog’s page rank..also i hv joined bidvertiser …
Thanks for the good tips. I have several blogs but must say that my main earnings dont come from Google. Would love to improve but just not getting the right visitors from social media websites. Only search engine visitors will actually get click rate up.
gud info for newbie like me…thanks a lot for this gud info!!!
Good post about adsense ads format and position. Thanks for the info about headspace plugin. The plugin should be tried to get higher rank. For keyword analysis, I usually use http://www.nichesearcher.com. The tool also account number of my keyword competitors.
I have tried almost everything to get my adsense earnings up. Not working for me. Thanks for the tips anyway.
Adsense can be a real bitch. Thanks for going to the effort to show how it can be done right. Cheers.
man, I wish adsense wasn’t so confusing because it can make you some decent cash. I’m still struggling on how to trigger specific adsense keywords.
This is a great guide. I had a lot of trouble with smart pricing because I owned a forum (really bad CTR) but now my CPC has gone through the roof!
I think they are wrong, and that is why I no longer participate in their program. (It’s not like it cost me anything to quit.)
I have tried the Who Sees Ads plugin to avoid the problem of smart pricing with social media traffic but it isn’t as nice as Shylock adsense plugin with the placement of ads. So I found a hack that combines both – show only to search engines but with also the ability to place the ads easily wherever you want.
But I heard that the best ad server is openx. Do you have any opinion or tutorial on that?
I am still trying to make some money with AdSense. I didn’t think it would be this hard. I am going to try your suggestions and hopefully it will increase my CTR.
Smart pricing is a real problem on certain terms. Sometimes your better off trying a new keyword to try and get rid of the people who smart price your site.
I think the main problem with adsense is that you need thousands of visitors to make money but thousands of viitors will get you into smart pricing. Google is so smart right ?
@ Post: You do need lots of traffic to make money from Adsense…but lots of traffic won’t get you smart priced…lots of untargeted traffic will. The best traffic for converting adsense is traffic from Google search. If you improve your SEO, you can make heaps with adsense.
I also get better adsense earnings sometimes with text links or search box. For some reason they do not seem to be smart priced as much and you can earn more somtimes.
Great article on how to improve adsense earnings. Everyone should try your points they do help increase adsense earnings on most sites.
I usually earn more now by testing different ad position and sizes on my blog. Testing is best thing you should do.
I think keyword research and niche make the most difference in adsense earnings. I also noticed that more adsense ads are not better use less and keep CTR rate high to earn more money.
My AdSense earnings were down somewhat for November. I’m not sure why; perhaps it’s the holiday season or the slow economy. I hope it picks up soon because I was getting close to the $100/month mark.
I alos use less adsense ads now. I found out the less ads at the same click thru means more money most of the time.
i definitely find that adsense in content works the best
I only use 2 ad units atmost and one text unit. I found if i have 3 the click thru rate is lower. If i can have only one ad unit or just text ads i seem to make more as long as i still get clicks.
The best way to improve adsense earnings is target keywords. Make sure to not use to many on any page or you will wind up with alot of low paying ads. Find higher paying terms and make niche for them.
I tried making money with Adsense but i couldn’t for one reason and that reason is patience. All the pages i wanted to create for Adsense took too long to rank. Either that or i wasn’t doing something right…lol. But i’m sure i will try again in the future.
I know this post is kind of old but I just had to comment to let you know how much your site has helped me. After reading from you, Griz and Court I realized my account had been smart priced. After some investigation I found the culprit… removed ads on that site and now I’m back up to .50 cent and over clicks again… Thanks so much!
Adsense works best when your blogging for money and by that I don’t mean MMO blogs, I men researching keywords and than targeting them from the get go and sticking to that group of keywords and related groups of keywords. Multi niche blogs works for thus who know their stuff but sponsored links on thus types of blogs converts best in my experience.
Great post. Like the idea of using headspace. Makes sense to get keywords in post. If one site is not paying well take ads off it can make other sites pay more.
I think useing correct keywords and terms makes alot of differance. Makes sure to make niche for eah page so you do not get smart priced.
One thing you didn’t mention is the importance of getting backlinks to your site / post using your target keywords as anchor text – this is crucial for achieving good search engine rankings for those keywords.
@Rod – Maybe not in this articl, but in just about all of my other Make Money Articles I do.
Nice ideas. I like the fact you show how to choose keywords that still make money and are easy to get listed in search engines for. That is half the battle to making money on adsense.
I seen some codes to only show ads when people find site from search engines. They say it makes your click thru higher and you earn more money. I still have to try it but it sounds like it does work.
You could also add the adsense section targetting codes to improve contexual relevancy and increase overall adsense revenue!
very nice post, I also uses google analytics to keep in track of the things that are happening to my website as it gives me a lot of idea on how to work things out with my adsense account..
This post was very well written, and it also contains a lot of useful facts. I appreciated your distinguished manner of writing the post. Thanks, you have made it easy for me to understand.
I’ve never had any luck with adsense, I think I’ve made about $80 in a year
I’ve almost given up on it.
I’ll try your advice though and see if it helps – cheers
the plugin are doing there job …as a emerging trend SMM need a new plugin
I have spent a long time trying to improve the advertising earnings on my websites and I have managed to go from a couple of dollars a month to 3 figures in a relatively short time, without increasing the amount of visitors to my site.