Home About Articles My Business Life The office Links Contact Me

AdSense advice - Ride the tide

So you've got AdSense on your site and things are moving along quite okay, you've used various tips to improve your click through rate (CTR) and make the adverts more focused. Out of the blue your earnings take a dive for no apparent reason, what do you do?

First and formost, don't do anything to your content immediately. AdSense is reknown for going through these glitches and they can last up to a week at times where your earnings are dreadful compared to the "long term" earnings. Why exactly this happens is something that only Google truly knows, for the rest of us it's all speculation. Quite often it's a case of just waiting it out for a week. "Ride the tide, not the waves".

While you're waiting, you can perform a few checks to ensure that there's nothing else that might be affecting your earnings or quality of adverts

• If your EPC (earnings per click) has dropped
  • Are the adverts filled with MFA's?
    MFAs (Made for AdSense) are unscrupilous sites that serve no other purpose than to be a page full of AdSense adverts. The essential strategy is to attract visitors with clicks that cost less than what they earn on their own AdSense adverts - it's a simple enough business strategy but it's widely frowned upon due to it poisioning the quality of the click destination in the eyes of the person clicking. Instead of landing on a relevant site, clickers now are just in another page of adverts. MFAs typically have names like "top5clicks" or "best3sites". Use your AdSense competitive ad filter to block these domains and adverts.
  • Maybe you're being Smart-Price'd down.
    Smart pricing is a reflection of the conversion rates advertisers are obtaining from the people who are clicking to their sites from your AdSense. If there is a very low conversion rate (ie, people are going to the advertisers' site but aren't buying anything) then the advertiser and google will tend to Smart-Price down the value of the click. Smart pricing should be seen explicitly as a negative thing, rather it can be very rewarding if the conversion rates are good. It's better for everyone if when a vistor clicks on an advert that they actually turn into a sale or positive gain for the advertiser.
• If your CTR (click through rate) has dropped
  • Are the adverts relevant to your viewers and content?
    Poorly focused or inappropriate adverts won't be likely to attract visitors attention. In this case you may need to add the domains of the advertisers into the Competitive Ad filter. Look at providing hints to AdSense on the content of your page. Use the <-- google_ad_section_start --> and <-- google_ad_section_end --> tags around your relevent text sections.
  • Have your visitors become Ad-blind?
    Leaving the adverts in the same places with the same colours all the time can often lead to Ad blindness. Make small positional changes, or colour adjustments periodically to stop your visitors ignoring the presense of the adverts.
• If your impressions have dropped
  • Are you still ranked well in the search engines?
  • Consider using AdWords to drive people to your site.
    While at first it may seem somewhat counter-intuitive to spend money to drive people to your site in order for them to potentially click on your AdSense adverts, you soon realise that without traffic you're not going to go anywhere. If you have quality content then you have good reason to spend some money to drive people to your site, at least initially. Once people have become exposed to your site, if they like it they will return without having to use AdWords again, this means you have gained a new regular visitor. Regular visitors mean more traffic. More traffic means potentially more AdSense revenue.
  • Sponsor or be active in relevant forums. One of the great places to pick up a lot of low-cost and well targeted visitors are forum sites. At forum sites you already know that the people there are interested in a given topic. Quite often forum owners provide opportunities to sponsor the forums, giving you the chance to have your own site exposed to all the visitors. If you cannot provide sponsorship, quite often being an active contributor to the forums, providing relevant links back to your own site can provide good quality visitors.

Summary
You will notice that throughout this article there's been nothing said about changing the actual content of your pages. The reason why is that google tends to negatively react to altered page content. On proposed reasoning for this is because it poisons the statistics for your page that google has built up, when you change the page google has to rebuild the stats again. If you have a page that does need to be frequently changed then it's probably better to keep AdSense adverts off that page so it doesn't negatively effect the rest of your site.

All in all, for the best Adsense return, ensure that you have quality content and that you have a good flow of visitors. Be realistic in your expectations, a 2 to 5% click-through ratio is fairly reasonable. Don't try to cheat the system, it'll only bite you back.