Optimize Adsense Earnings By Reducing Ad Impressions

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.

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