Improving Adsense Income
May 21, 2006 – 11:31 am
Getting the top paying adsense ads on your page can sometimes be a hard job. Heavy content, established pages will pull in the higher click payouts, however with most new sites, especially scraper sites, often the CTR (click through rate) is high yet the average PPC (pay per click) is low, lower than 5 cents even.
So how to increase it? The PPC on an advert is not determined by the advertiser but by Google. The advertiser has given a maximum amount they're willing to pay per click, however Google will first decide on the quality of the page going by its content and most likely (but I couldn't say for certain) links in (as we all know Google loves links into a page). This is why content heavy pages pull in more money as there is plenty of content there and makes for a higher quality page.
Google's Mediapartners bot reads over your page content and uses the keyword density to determine a set of adverts to display. From that, the highest paying adverts will be shown at a percentage of their max payout price. So how to trigger the higher paying adverts to at least be in with a chance of making more money?
Google has moved and finally made public its external Adwords tool for you to use, ideally to pull potential new advertisers in, however as a publisher you can use this to your advantage (this tool has been available for some time but it's only now that they're actively promoting it).
On visiting the tool you are faced with a similar screen as you would see with Adwords, if you've ever used Adwords.
First of all choose the region that your site is either targetting or getting the most visitors from. Alternatively choose your own region and the United States. There are major differences at times so be sure to check on both.
Then add in your keywords/phrases that your site is targetting. Remember the tool is free and unlimited so if you want to do several searches then unless they're related do one, print the results and move on to the next search, to keep your results separate. Keep the Use synonyms box checked to give you a better set of results. If you get too many try unchecking it.
With the drop down selection of "Choose data to display:" select "Cost and ad position estimates". Then change the currency to suit your own or use US Dollars as this is what you're paid in adsense anyhow. Finally give yourself a maximum cost per click amount. I would suggest 60 as this is the maximum that can go in. Then choose Recalculate or Get More Keywords.
The results are displayed below. The keyword or phrase on the left, and the second column has that all important figure of how much (on estimate) you can expect to see using that phrase. If the estimated Ad position is not showing 1-3 for all of the keywords then you will need to up your cost per click figure as you've not put in enough. If you click on the Estimated Av. CPC twice you can reorder your results to show the highest paying phrases first.
Remember, that this is the Adwords tool and so tells you the highest paying advert prices. However those advertisers may not be advertising on the Content Network which is the Adsense network, so even if you target some phrases, certain ones may still not pay out as much as ones marked as less, however if you can target the higher paying group of phrases then you at least have more chance of targetting a higher PPC advert.
So what to do now? You need to take a couple of similar subject phrases and work them into your content. Also provide quality content. If it's a page of links then get a paragraph or two at the top and use the section targeting for Adsense to give that content more emphasis when matching adverts. Remember also, that using channels on each of your adverts can show which pages have an increased performance and which need further tweaking or working on.
2 Responses to “Improving Adsense Income”
I've since read and realised that putting in the highest amount of £60 skews your results. You're better off putting in say £1 and then check on your key words/phrases. Those that estimate the position of 1-3 may need a lower amount, those that estimate position 4-6 can have a higher amount.
What does this tell you? When you're at the highest amount of position 4-6 then you have a more accurate reflection of the type of price people are bidding on. Position 1-3 can have a bid price of say £1 - £10, which isn't very accurate and after some experiments I've now realised is not likely (well the £10 one isn't!). By knowing what is definitely being paid for the 4-6th position gives you a more accurate figure.
By Sarah on Jun 9, 2006