Most of you would have been observant enough to realize that I don't publish Adsense on this blog, yet I seem to write a fair bit about Adsense. I used to display Adsense here up till early September 2007. I have 2 reasons why Adsense doesn't appear on some of my sites :
- I'm trying to keep my Adsense earnings at an optimum by reducing impressions.
- I'm trying to reduce my dependence on the big brother Google.
Your earnings per click (EPC) is derived from a complex calculation and no one is privy to that formula except Google themselves. However, it is generally accepted that to optimize your earnings, you want the have the following :
- Optimum CTR (Click-through Rate - Not too high and not too low)
- High number of impressions corresponding to targetted traffic
- High Earnings Per Click (EPC)
Now, just to explain things a bit, there are many other factors (just like any other business) which may also influence your Adsense EPC at any one time, causing the fluctuations that you see in your stats :
- Number of advertisers in your niche at any one time.
- Advertisers' budget.
- Seasonal trends - holidays, pre-Christmas, etc
- The general economy
- Many other reasons...
Many newbies to Adsense get all excited and display the maximum allowed Adsense blocks (three blocks are the maximum) on every page, only to see a sharp decline in eCPM, EPC, CTR and earnings. The reasoning is simple. It's called the dilution effect.
Adsense works because relevant ads are displayed based on your content. When people looking for information see relevant ads within your content, they are more likely to click on those ads. When more ads are clicked within a given number of impressions, your eCPM increases. eCPM is the predicted earnings for a thousand impressions.
If you add 3 large Adsense rectangles to every page, chances are Adsense will have a hard time finding 12 advertisers that match your page content EVERY time someone views that page. What happens then is you will get off target ads (ie. ad relevance is diluted). When you get off-target ads, your visitors are either going to ignore those ads altogether or worse, get irritated. Either way, they won't click on your ads AND you will probably lose any chance of that visitor returning.
In an experiment 18 months ago, I removed every Adsense block leaving only had ONE ad block per page. I tracked the performance of those ad blocks by creating channels for every category. Even after a week, I noticed a marked improvement in my eCPM and also my EPC. Of course earnings still fluctuated on a daily basis, but they were trending upwards. I waited another 3 weeks (to collect sufficient data) and then reviewed the performance of each channel. What I found was :
- article pages were performing very poorly despite the high number of impressions they were generating. I deduced this to mean that folks who visited these pages were interested in the content and not inclined to look elsewhere (or click on ads) for more information.
- pages with technical (how-to) information were also performing poorly. This again I deduced to mean that visitors were finding what they needed on those pages and did not need to click on ads.
- free services pages (eCards, downloads etc) were the worst performing.
We don't know for sure how Google arrives at the Earnings Per Click figure, but I'm sure that it varies from one publisher to another, based on a myriad of factors including those listed at the beginning of this post. Put together, my non-performing pages were generating thousands of impressions that were just not converting into clicks, so I removed Adsense altogether from those pages. Reducing impressions obviously meant that CTR increased but more importantly, EPC also increased.
I'm sure you understand now why there are no Adsense Ads on HomeWithAndrew.com. I've always read that blogs are NOT the best performing platforms for Adsense, especially when your blog doesn't focus very tightly on a specific niche. Another reason why many blogs report low CTRs and EPC is that visitors to a blog are more inclined to be repeat visitors who are more interested in the content or to keep in touch with the blogger.
HomeWithAndrew.com is still relatively unknown and most of my visitors are friends and fellow bloggers who visit mostly to keep in touch. This means that it is generating Adsense Ad impressions that don't convert to clicks. WHEN this blog starts to receive higher traffic, I will consider adding Adsense again, although it will be done on a controlled basis. I will add ad blocks one category at a time and monitor their performance.
I hope I've help you to understand how reducing Adsense impressions can actually increase your earnings in the long run! Remember that every blog or website is unique and the only way you can truly know if reducing impressions will optimize your Adsense earnings is to experiment.
thanks Andrew for the research
I have high page impression but ecpm is not even a Single $. What to do to improve it?
It's possible that your site is being site-targetted for CPM ads. That means you earn a certain amount for every 1000 impressions of the advertisers' ad. To know for sure, you need to go to your Adsense control panel > Advanced Reports > select order by date and/or channel. If you are being site targetted, you should see 2 different types of entires in the "targetting" column : Contextual and Placement.
Technically speaking, it is NOT a bad thing to be site-targetted for CPM ads, because you earn irrespective of whether someone clicks on the ads or not.
However, if you do NOT see any entries for "placement" ads, then you eCPM is indeed very low. There are way too many possible reasons for your eCPM being very, but here are some :
- your niche is not a high paying niche.
- the advertiser pool in your niche is not big enough for a high payout.
- your CTR is very low. A low CTR indicates to Google that many of your
ad impressions are being "wasted" on pages where no one is looking or clicking.
- you are getting low quality traffic. For example... if you are depending on free traffic networks or paid to surf networks, they are ONLY interested in opening your pages in a browser to earn money for themselves. They are NOT bothered by your content OR your ads. So when this happens, your CTR is very low and the above point comes into play.
- your site may have a low "trust rank" score. Many webmasters have indicated that they believe one of the parameters that go into determining your eCPM is the age of your site and how "trustworthy" Google thinks it is. In other words, if you site has been penalized in any way for hidden keywords, black hat SEO etc, you will get a low "trust rank" score and therefore, low eCPM
- seasonal trends. It could be that you are in a seasonal slump. Most niches have slumps. Mine seems to be in December, when people are interested in shopping and enjoying themselves and NOT on making money.
Hope that helps in some way. I can suggest an experiment though... set up channels for ALL your pages (group them into segments) and monitor them for at least one month. Then based on the numbers, REMOVE adsense from the channels (pages) where your CTR is very low.
Excellent article - This is well written and seems to touch on the truth about explaining the point of view from Google's perspective about our web sites...
CTR and ECPM vary wildly and finding a valid explanation for this is somewhat frustrating - there are many rubbish websites with a high ECPM and there are also many hardworked genuine web sites that suffer from a low ECPM - like what is going on?
The explanations here on "homewithandrew" seem to be clear and reasonable - I have read literally 1,000's of blogs without success at finding a reasonable explanation - this blog has proved to be different.
Let us take the advice offered here and try it out, and let us publish our results here - maybe this way we can build a compendium of what works and what does not work.
Best wishes to all on "homewithandrew"
I got thousands visitors, still ecpm is very low. Dont know what to do now.
Any idea?
Stay updated with Technology-
Technology Update: http://feedshub.blogspot.com
Hello Sunil. If you're referrring to your URL in your link, then there are a couple of possibililties. Please bear in mind that these are just my 2 cents and my first impressions :
- You may be getting untargetted traffic. Judging by your many categories, it "could" be possible Adsense is not displaying on-target ads to your visitors. Often, if you participate in non-targetted link-exchanges or if your site is part of a "pay to" network OR you buy traffic from low quality (penny) ad networks you will get visits from bots of spiders that may be registering as actual visitors.
- I notice that you have 2 adsense tower blocks on the left and right of your homepage. This is not confirmed, but by my own experience, when visitors land on the homepages of my blogs, they tend to "glance" through the content. Visitors often click on a link to one of my pages, looking for what something specific. What this means is that the ad impression on my homepage is "wasted". If you have not created a Channel to track the performance of your Ad blocks on your homepage, I suggest that you do it and do an analysis after 30 days. In fact, I dare say that you should even get a clear picture after 15 days. If you are generating high numbers of impressions on your homepage without clicks, then these ads are being ignored and you can safely say they are lowering your eCPM.
Hope that helps a bit Sunil...cheers.
This is a very nice article. Thanks. What the author calls "dilution effect" is also called "bid gap". Here is a good description of that bid gap.
With the economy crisis, MYR may go down to 4.0 good news ah?
Really nice post. Today I got in my adsense report very low impression, where my statcounter report show more page impression. Why it happen?
I have always experience similar problems too. my quest for answer landed me here. Nice articles I will put your suggestions into use and check it for 15 days if the result doesn't change,
I will come to ask questions and hope to find some!
thanks
Uhuh.. Is that so.. Hmmm you just gave me a really really great tip. Thanks andrew. great blog! Wish I can have as well as yours soon.