Here are some tips to consider when you feel you’re serious about adsensifying your blog. Take note that these tips apply to blogs that have been active for a certain length of time and have some fair amount of traffic. Usually, these are the ones who started blogging out of pure passion and only recently realized that they could also generate some income off of it.
So here are some points to consider:
- Ask yourself if you are willing to compromise your blog’s layout and over-all feel by adding ads in them. It’s usually a function of how much you can potentially earn against how much ads you’re displaying. From me numerous discussions with bloggers who are new to monetization, covering for the annual hosting and domain is the barrier to entry. Usually $100 a month is an ideal target income.
- Look at your traffic and see if it’s enough to draw the crowd. Look at how much of your traffic are coming from organic searches as this is the traffic where we base your potential Adsense income. My personal computation is this — Total Pageviews per Day x 3% CTR x $0.10 per click x 30 days in a month. Say you have 500 pageviews, you’d probably earn about $1.5 per day or $45 per month. Of course, the cost per click may vary widely depending on your niche. The 3% CTR is actually a good number for a regular blog. This could go down to 0.05% for poorly placed ads.
- Experiment on varying ad layouts and color scheme. There are 3 ways to layout your ads — first is on top of the fold just before the title — the perfect ad size for this is the 728×90; second is on the sidebar, you use the 160×600 ad here; then 3rd is just below the post where you use the 336×280 ad. The color schemes may also vary but there are two ways to go about this — blending colors to the current palette of your theme OR using very contrasting colors. So if you have a light colored theme, use hard and dark ad colors or the reverse if you have a dark theme.
- Make good use of the Ad Channels. This will give you valuable information which channels or ad formats are performing well. That way, you can fine tune the scheme and layout for the most optimal results, i.e. higher CTR or eCPM.
- Give it time. Don’t change your layouts everyday or so. My usual time frame is around a week if you have enough traffic or a month if you’re just under 500 uniques a day. In statistics, it’s called a sample size — the more sample size you take, the lower the margin of error, so you can be really sure that the results you get are more or less accurate.
Once you’ve done the considerations stated above, you can move forward and do additional optimizations such as fine-tuning ad relevancy, reducing number of displayed ads to achieve higher eCPM or ad targeting and filtering.
I’m currently doing this exercise on Eric’s blog at Byahilo. I will share the results of the exercise along with some stats (only the ones I can reveal after asking for permission) to show how high you can improve your blog’s Adsensification.
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i haven’t changed my adsense layout on my index page in more than a year. i used channels to see info for certain pages. and i don’t think my “talumpati” tweaks had anything to do with the fact that clicks have been increasing since i hit my first $100. so my guess now is that maybe advertisers or maybe even google pays more after you hit your first $100. tama ba?
And, when your old blog has enough traffic… start a fresh with a new one, and pad the old one with ads galore!
Oops, guilty!
@ vonjobi
Seasonal sya Von, may mga quarter na mababa per click meron naman months na mataas, like the 4th quarter mataas.
I believe it has got to do with commercial spending habits that drives advertising spendings that increases bids on keywords.
@ Migs
Nice one, my Padawan learner! hahaha!
i mentioned it to my roommate, and he said that it must have been because of an increase in traffic. and though he knows nothing about blogs, that was something i missed.
it’s true that clicks on the talumpati pages are far from beating my index page, but perhaps the higher traffic that started around september (after the talumpati tweaks), led some of the visitors to my index page and click there?
then again, i think that was also the time i posted about my first $100 on adsense, and so maybe some of my regular readers thought they’d help me out by clicking on the ads every time they visited.
maybe it IS the season that’s driving my blog’s earnings, but considering that i earned the first $100 in 18 months , and now it looks like i’ll be getting the next $100 in less than 5 months, maybe i should just accept it and not wonder about how i got here =)
Note that Abe hits a 3% CTR. The average CTR during the dotcom days was only 0.7% at best.
We are indeed in the midst of an online advertising boom.
@ Von
You know, you can dedicate an ad channel on that page to really see it’s actual CTR/eCPM performance.
@ Mike
It was just my example not really my own blog’s CTR, otherwise I’d be violating Adsense TOS. Mine’s a bit higher than 3% though.
3% CTR for me is very low. Proper ad placement, good blending of ads, good choice of colors, you can still double or triple that CTR.
@ kukote
A 10% CTR means that for every 10 pageviews, you get 1 click. I have heard of this type of CTR but not from blogs.
You’re loosing too many readers from your blog there if that’s your number.
The last time someone showed me a 15% CTR, it was a directory. Reasonable since mostly one-time visitors for directory, but not for blogs where you get daily repeat visitors.
Or if the 10% Adsense CTR on is a blog, it’s targeted towards click-happy users?
A few more tips…
Perhaps in the case of first-time bloggers, get your pageviews up to 1,200 a day before monetizing your site. That probably means you’ll be earning a little over $100/month, based on Abe’s computation.
Then, when you launch new sites, you don’t need to wait for 1200 pageviews. You could consider showing ads even at 500 daily pageviews, since your main account is already earning $100/month.
Never rest on your layout laurels. You just might find a layout to beat other layouts, or a higher-earning color scheme or ad size.
Please consider the case of two sites with identical layouts and related topics (almost matching targeted keywords) and which still have highly diverse advertising revenues.
My textmates blog has a CTR higher than 10%. Most visitors came from search engines. I don’t think I’m losing my visitors, actually, they are increasing every month. =)
Now if I could just convince Google to put their ads on my site. LOL.
very informative. I’ll try to implement this.
I started a food blog and it’s 3 months old and it’s doing quite well for a new blog. The CTR is higher than 10% and the trick there is probably that it’s a subdomain of a very old domain
Higher CTRs like that are often attributed to very narrow niches like yours, primarily because the ads are very relevant even without you making an effort. I doubt though you’d get the same CTR for general-topic blogs even if the layouts are the same.
Just be careful with your CTRs. I think the threshold is 20% and it could result to being banned (they’ll tell you due to fraudulent clicks).
Yeah, they will suspect that you have a “please click on your ads” campaign - if not on the site itself, elsewhere.
“Manual Ping”… hindi automatic sa blogspot eh. =)
I wish it was that easier