Many bloggers us Adsense ad units to generate their blogging income. Some do very well, others struggle to make a few cents per day. There are however several traps when running Adsense ad units.
What many bloggers fail to understand is how Google handle their advertising and their advertisers. Google of course wants to make money. They want you to make money as well since their income is, to a certain extent, based on yours. At the same time, they want to be able to deliver to advertisers ads in situations that will deliver not just clicks, but clicks that convert to sales.
It’s basic common sense. If the advertiser is able to increase sales by advertising with Goolge, they will come back. If they run a campaign that chews up their dollars yet produces zero sales, chances are they will stop the advertising. No advertising – no income for Google.
With this in mine, Google tend to like sites that have a reasonably click-through-rate (CTR). Between 5-10% is considered to be a good CTR. If your CTR drops to below 5% for an extended period of time, your site will lose favor with Google. As a response, your Adsense ad units will earn a reduced per click rate. I have seen sites where their click rate is below 2c per click. There is not a lot of blogging income to come in that sort of scenario.
The real downside is that if one ad unit is performing poorly, all your ad units across all your sites will be reduced to a low per click payment. You can restore your sites income potential by making a few changes.
Each ad unit you run should have a separte channel. This enables you to measure how well they are performing. If you have poorly performing ad units, remove them or make changes to their size, color and placement.
Google Adsense ad units can be a big problem on home pages. The home page often has the highest bounce rate so this alone can affect your overall CTR. if this is the case, remove the Adsense unit from your home/landing pages. Instead, use the ads on dedicated pages only.
By removing those ads, you are removing from the stats a high impression rate with a low CTR. The impressions are made on dedicated pages with traffic either clicking through from the home page, coming from a search engine or from another link source. The impressions are lower and the CTR rate highe. This will be reflected in a higher blogging income share.
