How to increase your AdSense revenue

My proper website has been around for about 12 years. For most of that time it had very few visitors and the money I made from advertising was minimal. Then a couple of years ago advertising revenue started going up. It’s now plateaued but I earn a nice wedge of cash ever month, not enough to give up the day job but enough to add a decent amount to my income. So what’s my secret and how can you do the same thing?

Firstly, you can optimise the placement, colours and number of AdSense units. Now this may well improve your revenue but the problem is it is almost impossible to figure out if revenue increased due to changes to your ads or just due to random fluctuations. Take a look at my daily income over the past month.

There’s a lot of volatility in those figures. Admittedly you can slice the data in different ways which can produce better results but even with no changes to my ad setup, the daily numbers are all pretty volatile. And if you aren’t making a lot of cash from your ads, your figures are likely even more volatile. So I figure if you want to optimise you ad setup, then you need to be looking at weekly or monthly numbers, so the feedback loop on changes is going to be pretty slow. To be frank the limit of my optimisation of ads is to increase the number of ad units to three (the maximum allowed and also probably the maximum number that wouldn’t be too annoying to a user of you site).

So what did cause the increase in my income? Simple really, an increasing number of visitors. My graph of monthly visitors and my graph of monthly AdSense revenue are almost identical. So unfortunately the answer to the question of how to increase AdSense revenue is another question, how to increase the number of visitors to your site.

And the answer to that question is actually pretty straightforward I reckon. The first part is fully within your control - Produce a lot of content of a reasonably quality. i.e Content that search engines will consider to be of value and hence index. The second part isn’t completely within your control, gain some inbound links from reputable sites. I actually think this will naturally follow from producing content that people appreciate.

In some ways I can’t help thinking this is the business model that Facebook has adopted, get a shedload of content (although in their case its helpfully created by their own users) and shove ads on it.

What is click fraud?

There are plenty of examples of obvious click fraud, people setting up dubious websites with advertising then using nefarious means to get clicks on those ads, companies clicking on their competitors ads to drive up their competitors' costs. And these kind of examples of fraud are quite possibly detectable by the companies who run the ads. But there seems to be a whole other bunch of other stuff that may also be considered fraudulent, or at the very least not valid clicks.

For instance, my daughter can now use Google to search for stuff on the internet but she has no idea of what the difference is between a sponsored ad and a normal search result and since she can't read everything, she just clicks on whatever she feels like. And, until she works out how to use my credit card, she won't be buying any Charlie and Lola gear from one of the sites she visits.

Or what about me when I see an ad for some dubious debt company or some get rich quick scheme and I click on the link purely to cost them some money?

Or what about those websites that try to disguise their ads as just another link on their site?

These may or may not be fraudulent, but I'm fairly certain Google and the other ad companies can't tell they aren't real punters who are actually interested in the website's offerings. Presumably companies will continue to pay up until they aren't getting a return on their outlay, which is definitely one of the advantages of online ads. And that being the case, it seems like one great way to stop these dodgy companies from advertising is actually to just click on their ads...

Dude, where's my AdSense revenue?

I was never going to become rich from my AdSense income, but I used to get a small amount of spending money from it. But over the last few months, even though I'm getting more hits to my sites, I'm getting less and less money from ads. I think it's down to the fact that I'm getting less money per click. There was a time when some clicks would earn me a dollar or more (which, to be fair, seems ridiculous) but now I'm lucky to get more than 20 cents per click. So I guess the question is whether there is a general downward trend in prices being paid for clicks or if Google is taking a bigger slice of the action. Of course it could be just me who's suffering from this and it may be something specific to my sites causing the lack of cash. 

Is AdSense worth it?

I added AdSense ads to some of my websites as an experiment to see if it would be worthwhile adding them to the Random Pub Finder. I've now been signed up long enough to get a reasonable idea of how much money can be made. Based on my earnings, which may not be completely representative, you can get anywhere between $0.05 and $1.50 per click. But Google don't provide any information about which keywords provide the high-earning clicks, so it isn't possible to optimise your site based on that, which would be a pretty lame thing to do anyway. Earnings per 1000 pageviews seems to be about $5, so I'll never make a living based on it, but I might make a little bit of pocket money. So how many hits would you need to actually pack in the day job? OK, say you need to earn $6000 a month (which may be a bit high or low depending on where you live and your lifestyle) how many hits would you need? That works out at $200 a day, or 40,000 pageviews. My guess is you'd need to be running your own server to handle that kind of load (I'm sure any free host would throw you off their servers before you got to this level) so that's another expense. I've no idea how much that would cost but if you are getting that number of hits I'm guessing you also need support people to ensure your server is always alive (unless you want to provide the 24-hour support...) so add some more for that. Guy Kawasaki, who says he's in the Technorati top 100, also says he gets upto 1200 pageviews a day, so it certainly looks like it would be pretty hard to get near the 40,000 from blogging, doing IT writing at least. And more popular subjects lke the sex publishing industry seems pretty well covered already (so I hear). So in conclusion, I don't think ads are likely to finance mine or your lifestyle, but they could provide some useful extra cash. And are they worth it for the Random Pub Finder? Not until we get so large we get kicked off our free host. It's only a matter of time...