One Of The Most Overlooked Keys To Adsense Success
One of the most profitable revenue streams for a blog is Google’s Adsense program. Here’s how it works:
You agree to display contextual advertising served up from Google on your site. In exchange, Google will pay you for every visitor who clicks on the ads. Your blog becomes the online equivalent of a billboard and you are paid for getting cars to drive down your street to see it.
There are a few factors to optimizing Adsense profits.
One factor is getting traffic to your site. In order to get paid, you need to get clicks. In order to get clicks, you need to get visitors. Thus, many bloggers pay a great deal of attention to developing multiple traffic streams.
Another factor is choosing a profitable topic that attracts many advertisers. Some topics have more advertisers than others. So, it’s imperative that you choose a topic in a market that offers many products and services.
These are essential aspects of the process but they are not the sum total of the Adsense game. There is another, often overlooked aspect to the process that is critical in experiencing real success: Ad placement.
Let’s say you have a blog that consistently gets 1,000 visitors a day. Let’s say that your topic serves up advertising that earns you, on average, ten cents a click. If every visitor were to click an ad, your blog would generate a whopping $100 a day.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen. Many visitors won’t click on an ad at all. In fact, most will not.
If you discuss Adsense with bloggers who weren’t able to make the program pay, you will hear a consistent complain: “I put up the ads but no one was clicking on them. I didn’t make much money at all.” These bloggers abandoned Adsense, believing it is impossible to make a profit.
Their failures could be related to any number of factors.
- Their traffic may have been poorly targeted.
- The ads may not have been relevant.
- Their blog content may have been of poor quality.
- The blog itself may have been unattractive and uninviting.
But it could also be a matter of ad placement. The location of the ads on the blog plays a major role in profit generation.
One blogger, who operates a fan blog about a popular television celebrity, was excited to find his blog had taken off. He was suddenly landing as many as 500 visitors almost every day.
Although the Adsense ads on his site were only paying about seven cents each, he felt good about the fact he was making an average of seventy cents per day on a site that required little maintenance or effort.
Ten people were clicking an ad every day, for a 2% click through rate. And that translated to nearly $250 per year – well in excess of the cost associated with running the site.
One day, the same blogger decided to give his blog a facelift. He tweaked the design and in the process, he moved his Adsense ad blocks to different locations. A few days later, he checked his numbers and was absolutely shocked.
His blog had gone from making seventy cents a day to making seven dollars a day. The click through rate had shot up to twenty percent almost overnight. The difference, testing later proved, was completely based upon changing the location of the ads. That $250 per year blog was now on track to generate over $2,500 per year.
The moral of the story is quite simple: Traffic is important but ad placement cannot be overlooked. The results in our example may not be typical but the story is true and it demonstrates the difference that can be realized when Adsense is optimally placed.