There is a lot of focus on monetising websites via Adsense, but what many people don’t realise is that there are four key factors in developing income from Adsense:
- 1. Integration
2. Traffic
3. Sector
4. Audience
There is a lot of focus on integration of Adsense ads and generating traffic, but often little focus on sector and audience, despite that these will be key for earnings.
1. Integration
There is already a lot written about this and Google certainly provide tips on blending Adsense into a site. It’s still surprising to see sites that fail to make basic attempts at blending and putting at least one main block above the fold, so here are a couple of fundamentals about integration:
- the 250×300 block is commonly the best performing. This is not least because it is optimised for image and video ads, which makes it easy to get high-end campaigns running on your site
- draw attention to the ads, but not at the expense of the site. In other words, place your Adsense around your content, rather than your content around your Adsense. It’s better to keep users on your site long enough to read, bookmark, and want to generate a conversation about it before they click out.
- more ad blocks means lower paying advertisers therefore lower paying clicks therefore lower revenues. So consider restricting the number of ad blocks you use. Personally I usually limit it to two: one in the content, and one at the foot of the content.
- make sure site colours are continued into the Adsense block so it looks a natural part of the site
TIP: Limit attempts to advertise on new sites, and instead push for developing traffic and return visitors through strong content and good presentation. Once you build up traffic, advertising will seem more acceptable to users.
2. Traffic
Theoretically, the higher the traffic, the higher your clickthrough rates.
However, the traffic needs to be targeted so that visitors to the page can have a need served by the Adsense.
So don’t think about traffic volume as much as volume quality traffic - ie, users who are more likely to be drawn to the topic in the page and therefore more easily engagement by the ads.
TIP: For high traffic pages with fewer clicks, consider running Image-only ads to run as a banner program by proxy.
3. Sector
The topic area of your pages and site are key to earnings - some industries pay a lot higher than others.
For some reason this is little discussed, but your target sector can mean the difference between running a high traffic site where Adsense barely pays for the server, and a high traffic site that could pay your server and mortgage bill.
For example, financial services ads are more likely to pay more per click than ads about self-publishing.
So try and put some effort into developing a site or pages which could attract better paying industries and advertisers to build traffic at.
TIP: Don’t try and tap into higher paying areas for the sake of it - instead, consider your interests and try and ensure you have enough passion in the sector you choose to keep your website fresh and interesting.
4. Audience
This bit is absolutely critical but remains little discussed, so remains something of a secret that I’m sharing with you now:
The less intelligent your audience, the more likely they are to click ads.
It sounds somehow nasty yet common sensical at the same time - after all, web savvy users learn to recognise ads - and how to avoid them.
It can be especially hard to monetise content where the target audience is industry professionals, because they have the intelligence enough to spot ad types quickly, and that includes Adsense, no matter how well integrated, and avoid clicking on them - unless there’s something that really pulls them in to click.
As you have no control over the ad content, it can therefore become pretty hard to earn
General consumers are much less likely to know the difference between a menu link and an Adsense link, and therefore click through.
TIP: In earnings terms, a niche can easily outperform generic sites. Just as advertisers will tend to avoid generic keywords in PPC bids, so niche sites with a tightly focused audience will often be more attractive to advertising.
Summary: Earning from Adsense
There’s no secret formula to earning well with Adsense that everyone can follow - each website and its audience are different.
However, the four factors above are ones I see as key.
Not every site will hit all four elements well, but a decent website will usually be able to hit a few of them together.
If you can find a way to connect general consumers with a high-paying vertical then you are probably onto a winner as you build up the traffic.
On saying that, though, do remember that Adsense earnings are only as good as the advertiser payments into Adwords.
When times are hard, advertisers tend to lower budgets, and content network targeting is often avoided because of too many people setting up junk sites in the past.
However, so long as you can develop a strong voice in your niche, keep content fresh and users engaged and returning, there is always a chance of attracting site advertisers who pay per impression rather than per click, which is one of the most lucrative areas of Adsense.
In the meantime, hope that helps, and enjoy. :)
