For a couple of days now, I’ve been chatting with Rickey and helping him optimize his Adsense ads on his main blog. With over 100,000 page views on a hot day, he reckons he could have lost thousands of problogging dollars last year for an under-optimized ad layout.
My approach is simple. Set a target based on your existing stats and plug in your ideal figures to see how much you ought to be earning from your blog.
Total Monthly Revenue = total daily page views x CTR x CPC x 30 days
* CTR - click through rate
* CPC - cost per click
So, in his case, our target is a CTR of 1% and a CPC of $0.10 (all figures here are hypothetical and does not reflect any of Rickey’s actual Adsense stats). That gives us 100,000 x 1% x $0.10 or $100/day which gives us $3,000 a month. (Note to Rickey: Sorry my original computation was wrong when I said it was $900/day. My math failed me there.)
How to increase CTR?
1) Ad-blending
2) Increase ad relevance by using section targeting
3) Changing ad layouts or positioning
4) Using ad channels for tracking
These are very basic methods but if you use them very well and by tracking your ad performance, you could hit that good mix which will yield you the highest possible CTR. After just a day of tweaking (if you have 100k page views, a 24-hour experiment is enough), we increased his eCPM by 50% and his CTR by close to 90%.
How to increase CPC?
1) Reducing total number of ads
2) Positioning the first ad to get the highest CTR
3) Targeting higher paying but relevant keywords
This is a bit tricky and more risky to experiment with but once you hit the sweet spot, the returns could be two or three-folds.
So, when Rickey mentioned that we probloggers don’t share the secret sauce like them SEO guys (put name here), I’d like to prove him wrong by inviting bloggers to send in their blog for an AdSense Makeover. Of course, I will not guarantee that I could increase your earnings but I will try my best. Again, I think it’s easier to do this if you have a sizable traffic already (say 1,000 pageviews or higher). And yes, we will also discuss here how we did it and what changes we’ve made and how much we gained from the make-over. Anybody up for it?
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What??? It’s not $900/day? Yung mga pinapakain ko sa Pilipinas Abe, paano na sila?
Me! He he he!
ME!!!
o kaya asawa ko! Sige na please???? 
“1) Reducing total number of ads” I will try this, Since I am new to blogging, As of now what I did is to put the Filters for Adsense.
OMG, Rickey, you have kids??!?!
Oooh.. I’m interested.
I deliberately de-optimized my blog for Adsense because I’m trying to build more traffic at the moment.
But it’ll be cool to get a makeover nonetheless. How do we get started?
unfortunately i dont have adsense parin (ubo-miss-aileen-ubo-ubo)
“kuya abe’s” $ 0.10 CPC hits the mark.
what brings rickey (hello! hehe) a bigger problem is that the niche we’re in (entertainment) which is around $0.10 - $0.86 on adsense (that is according to my data) may mga ilan na keywords (http://forums.seo.ph/showpost.php?p=3345&postcount=5) din na maaring maligaw na mataas ang cost
it has somethin to do with seo parin.
Without adsense I’m earning uhm-erhm-ubo every month on 10,000 PageHits daily, no not adsense! (hmm parang sarap gawin libro ano? earning money without adsense)
My blog desperately needs an Adsense Makeover!
I don’t know what probloggers you have been reading, Rickey, but you need to change some things around. In addition to Abe’s generous offer there are no end to money-making bloggers I have found extremely helpful and generous.
As a start, for anyone interested, go to http://www.problogger.net and read Darren’s links up in the top header of the blog. There is a whole textbook worth of info he gives away to help … including things that often work better than AdSense.
FWIW the number one reason people don’t make money with AdSense is, there is no one paying for AdWords on the subject you are writing about. If your ‘thing’ is digital cameras, travel, what schools to choose, what cars to buy … people pay to advertise them … so paying ads will appear for them.
If your main area of interest is Kristina Bernadette Cojuangco Aquino-Yap and how Mr. Yap gets his skin treated … well I “Hope” you can see it’s great chismis, but who is going to pay to advertise?
About the only gimmick I could see her being a great “spokesperson” for is one of those little green, amber, red light gimmicks on a speaker’s lectern that tells when it’s time for the other person to speak …. but the number one rule is, make it fun and smile …..
Hi!
I’m interested. I just got more than 5200 hits in 10 days and i think i made around .50 cents only. Lol. My blog is http://waukeen.blogspot.com
Yuga! is there anyway to put Adsense Ads on non-english site. I have blog in URDU, spoken in Pakistan and India. Anway to get revenue out of my blog.
@ Wauks
I think You have tyo fill your Filtered Site. It will help you.
I wouldn’t mind getting an AdSense makeover for my site, but I don’t have nearly enough readers to qualify. Oh well…
100,000 page views a day ?! Nice, that is about what I do in one year…
Or do we optimize the stats ?
pede ba ako dyan sir abraham? hehe
Ok, let’s start with any of your blogs that has a minimum traffic of 1k pageviews per day. I-last natin yung tumatawag sa akin ng Abraham.
wahahaha blame the call-abe-abraham movement ni jayvee hehe
back to the subject of Rickey … why is it there seem to be _no_ AdSense ads there, optimized or not? The first day this was posted I saw noner, but I figured folks were working on the site … but still none? For an entertainment-oriented site over Academy Awards weekend? Hmmm … dunno..
I think that copyright issues could be a wrench in Rickey’s blog monetizing gears. His blog could be in violation of the Adsense TOS. It clearly states “Website publishers may not display Google ads on web pages with content protected by copyright law unless they have the necessary legal rights to display that content.”. It’s true that most blogs fall into this category but TV companies are the sticklers when it comes to enforcing DMCA.
Christian had a good thought (bad thought) indeed. It’s easy to dream up gimmicks revolving around entertainment and pictures/vids etc., because people in the news, especially show biz are popular, and popular everywhere.
But copyright is certainly a big elephant in the room. A lot of folks seem to never give it a a thought when they’re brand new and just getting started but if a site takes off and monetization comes into the picture then copyright becomes a huge consideration.
Google used to have little to say about it, but yes, absolutely, the last revision of the Publisher’s terms of service certainly makes it pretty clear you can’t build an AdSense based site on “borrowed” content, that’s for sure.
Hope we see some more on this issue or maybe some updates on how the rickey.org project is moving forward (pushing through ;-))
Just a few minutes after I posted here I found this on Brendon Sinclair’s site … how to go from winning a contest and getting free publicity for your business to being the butt of the joke:
http://www.tailored.com.au/2007/03/how-to-avoid-practices-of-others.htm
Certainly showing up fine now … was wondering that there haven’t been any other comments regarding the photo/video clips copyright issues. It would be helpful to get some more run down on how the project is going, income-wise.
By the way, anyone wanting to learn/improve on AdSense optimization really needs this:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/3943
It’s a script that works with the Greasemonkey extension to FireFox and it draws a red box around all AdSense ads … very useful for confirming what is going on with a site you are working with … or finding sneaky (sometimes very sneaky) ways that others have blended AdSense into their sites/blogs. I like it.