For just over a month, I've been looking at my AdSense earnings in Google Analytics to better understand my earnings, and I've stumbled upon some pretty cool results.Without even realizing it, I've come up with even more ways to increase my AdSense revenue every month.They range from simple ad placement, to writing specific posts and appealing to a particular referrer.Here's how you can increase your earnings.
Post
The first thing you'll want to do is set up AdSense so you can study it in more detail, in Analytics.To do this, when viewing your report overview, click the link to integrate Adsense with your Analytics account.It's just one click and then a small amount of information about your Analytics account.You must be an administrator of your Analytics account, otherwise it will not allow you to make the necessary changes, but if you are the only person who manages the website, this should not be a problem.NOTE: Since you are adding new information, GA will not transfer details from the past, you will only see new results since you join the two.
Now that you've set up, it's best to have a summary of what all the terms mean, so you can better understand the results.
AdSense earnings is the amount of money you earned in the selected time period (2 weeks for me).
/ 1000 visits, how much money you earned for every 1000 visits to your site.
Ads clicked, is the amount of ads that users clicked.
Ads clicked / visited, is the total number of visits, divided by the number of ads clicked.
CTR stands for Click-through Rate, and this is the click-through rate you get for each ad impression.
eCPM stands for Actual Cost Per 1000 Impressions (M is a Roman numeral).That's the total revenue per 1000 impressions.
AdSense ads displayed is the total number of ads viewed, from all multiple ads across all page views.
AdSense unit impressions/visits is the number of ads visitors see per visit.
Impressions on AdSense pages are the amount of pages viewed that contain AdSense ads.
AdSense Impression / Visit Page is similar to pages viewed per visit, only pages with ads viewed, per visit.
Tip No. 1 – Appeal to the main referents
By far, my favorite thing about using Analytics to look at AdSense is that you can find out which of your referrers are worth the most in terms of AdSense revenue.My results were quite shocking to me. For quite some time, I've been appearing on the homepage of a photography forum with about 7000 active members, but it's grown a lot more in the last month or so.I don't get a large amount of traffic from them, as I currently only have 1 link on their homepage, but when I do, it's worth a lot to me.
Let me show you an example of what happened.When you sign in to the new GA, click Content, then AdSense, then AdSense Referrer, you'll see a list of all websites that have sent visitors who clicked on an ad, as well as a timeline of your earnings.The results below are for a full month, and unfortunately, due to Google's rules and regulations, I can't show them to you, so you'll just have to take my word for it.The most important part of the results are not clicks on ads, displayed or even revenue; is the click-through rate (CTR) and eCPM (actual cost per 1000 impressions).
As we found out earlier, CTR is the percentage of ads that are clicked, per impression, so you want it to be as high as possible.The reason why the CTR is much higher than some of the other referrers is due to the quality of the visitor I am receiving from that referrer.StumbleUpon has a particularly poor CTR, because people who use it don't search for anything in particular, so it's hard to get their attention, which can cause them to click on an ad.UglyHedgehog is a forum for photographers, so people on that site are actively looking for content in my niche.
The eCPM is also substantially higher than the other referrers, which tells me that if I can increase the number of impressions I'm getting from them, then I'll earn a lot more money.Twitter's user quality is generally pretty poor, as they typically don't spend too much time on the site (00:01:47) and even though they link a lot to my website about 10 times a day via Twitter, I still get less traffic from them than Facebook.Facebook on the other hand has a better quality of visitors, with people looking at more pages and staying longer (00:02:29, but their eCPM is actually lower than Twitter's.
From these results I can conclude that very high-quality traffic, such as forums in your niche (uglyhedgehog.com has an average time on the site of 00:04:09 and 2.19 pages per visit), will make you much more money, just like that as long as you can get the traffic you are looking for.People are less likely to click ads when they come from websites like Facebook, as they're more interested in the content you've written.They offer a good quality of visitors, but their time on the site is almost half that of the forum in my niche, so it's important to find a good balance between the quality of visitors.Twitter users seem to behave differently than other users, as they are in a browsing mode and click on the content they see in their feed before it disappears.It would appear that they treat websites they visit similarly, clicking multiple ads.
Tip 2: Write content that links to your site
This step produced surprisingly good results for my earnings.If you take a look at my chart below, you'll see that on November 6th there was a huge increase in revenue.The first thing I did was go back to that day to see what post I had published and I found a post titled "A Beginner's Guide to Photography", and this was simply a collection of my tutorials.This meant that anyone who viewed the page would have to click on another one if they wanted to learn something.This forced them to increase their pages per visit, producing more impressions on ads.
When I analyze my earnings so that I only receive information from November 6, I can start to see which referral is earning me the most money.T.co is the URL shortener that Twitter uses, so I can clearly see that a small number of page impressions produced very strong earnings.With a large number of clicks from 76 page impressions, I have an unusually high CTR.From this answer, I can see that to earn money, this is the type of content I need to promote, although as many sources as possible.I am currently combining this content, with the forum mentioned in the tip above, so that I can drive high-quality traffic, to the content that earns me the most money.After only 2 days, I'm already starting to notice a huge improvement.
Tip 3 – Text and image ads
By allowing your ad units to display both text and image/rich media ad types, increase the number of competing ads to appear on your site.More advertisers in the ad auction increase bids and increase revenue for you.On average, publishers see a 59% increase in eCPM revenue when making recommended changes.If you're not already using both, it's as simple as going to the "My ads" tab and clicking "Change ad type," next to the ad in the list.This will increase your cost per click, so even if you're not improving the number of clicks your website is getting, you'll still earn more.
Tip 4 – Increase ad size
Advertisers prefer larger ad units for their premium inventory, resulting in higher bids for ad placements.Although all sites are different, publishers typically display 0.35 eCPM when using larger ad sizes.You can start by simply editing individual ads on popular pages to see how they work, and if it's not too intrusive, you can start rolling it out throughout your website.I didn't do this in my sidebar because I was aware that the entire width of the sidebar would have to change and that not only would it take a long time, but messing up the spacing I had laid out for posts. Instead, I added a larger ad at the end of each post, which differs from all other ads on my website and this saw a good improvement in ad sales.
Tip 5 – Ad placement
The fact that you choose to place your ad on your site will make a big difference to the amount of clicks you receive, because the more obvious the ad, the more likely it is that someone will see it.It's hard to judge on your website because we look at our sites differently than others view them, so the best way to start seeing results is to experiment with ad placement.When I started, I had two ads on my website, one at the top of the sidebar and one at the bottom.Since then, we've added another ad to the sidebar and moved the one at the bottom below the Subscribe button, added an ad at the bottom of each post, and placed a small text ad right below our header.
The small text ad under our header made the biggest difference to our results because it stands out more for new visitors and could even be mistaken for a link within our website.It's a very simple ad and less eye-catching than a flash, but it's much less intrusive and in a better position.Overall, I don't like adding too many ads because I don't want to send visitors back or make my website look bad.I always find it strange when people choose to include an ad blocker in their header, because this makes me find their website much less attractive.
