Adsense is one of the easiest ways to make a legit online income from your blog or website.
However, just because many people approach it wrong doesn’t mean you should too..
If done right, Adsense is, without doubt, one of the most stable income sources online.
We have been doing more than $3000+ every month (sometimes way more) and in this article, we will be sharing what has worked for us.
But before we begin, if you are here to learn about some shady tips and tricks then you may close this page immediately. This article is only for serious people who want to make a sustainable income from google Adsense without breaking any of their policies.
So without wasting time, let’s just take a look at the top 10 Adsense tips and tricks you can use today to increase your Adsense revenue.
1. Responsive Ads Won’t Always Work
Yes, you heard that right, you must have heard from many online gurus and even from google itself that running responsive ads will fetch you better inventory and therefore more revenue.
However, we tested fixed dimensions on some of our locations (especially mobile) and found them working better than responsive ones.
2. Ads Between Content Work Best
If there is one ad slot we can bet on then it would be the one after 1st or 2nd paragraph inside the content.
Advertisements inside the content or above or below tend to perform way better than those in header or footer.
Place an ad after the 1st or 2nd paragraph and place another after 7th or 8th para if it is a long article.
You can also place one after the title and at the end of the article.
3. Link Ads – Looks Spammy But High CTR
Link ads are detested by most of the publishers mainly because they look spammy. However, we have tried them multiple times against other responsive ads and every time they have come out to be the winner as far as CTR is concerned.
The CPM and CPC of link ads are most of the times lesser than other formats but they do provide higher CTR which almost compensates the overall revenue.
However, do keep testing placements and colours of the link ads as they tend to get ignored more than other formats.
For best results place link ads in between the content.
4. Avoid Ad Blindness By Rotating Positions
This has been said time and again by many experts but while experimenting with placements, make sure you change ad sizes as well.
For e.g. if you have been running a 300×250 px in the sidebar after the popular posts widget, try to replace it with a 300×600 px ad slot above the popular posts.
If you are using a fixed size ad slot in between the content, you may want to make it responsive to find out how it performs.
You can also replace your related posts widget with the “match content” widget of AdSense.
5. Try A/B Testing With Different Ad sizes (using a plugin)
This one is also frequently suggested. However, the internal AdSense A/B testing has been removed by google so incase you want to try it out you will have to take help of 3rd party plugins. There are both affordable and expensive tools out there which you can use.
The easiest and affordable way would be to use a plugin like Advanced ads.
You can easily split test ads by showing it to incoming traffic with different ratios such as 50-50, 40-60,60-40 etc.
The best way to do A/B testing would be to a 50-50 split-test about 10-15 days.
6. Use AMP – Higher Ranking = More Ad Revenue
This is a highly controversial opinion. Several publishers have switched to AMP and then switched back to non-AMP. However, our experience says that
As we write, there is no technology to do header bidding in AMP. So if you are opting for header bidding through advertising partners such as Ezoic or Adpushup then don’t go for AMP.
However, if you want to improve your SEO rankings and thus see an improvement in earnings go for AMP. You might take some time to see results but it would be surely helpful in a long way.
7. Use Ad Balance Feature
Improve your user experience by showing lesser ads without affecting your revenue by using the Ad Balance feature in Adsense.
Another advantage of using the Ad balance feature is that it would increase the competition among ad bidders for your website, and with fewer ad slots available, the average bid will increase.
8. Keyword Research For High CPC And Volume
This goes without saying and we are surprised as to how often this is neglected.
Ranking for keywords with high CPC is more important than just ranking for high volume ones.
For e.g
Let’s say you rank for a keyword “A” with a search volume of 25000 and CPC of $0.21 in the top 10 results of Google.
Now you have another keyword “B” with a search volume of 10000 and CPC of $5.7 in the top 10 results of Google.
Which one would you think would bring more revenue?
Yup. Keyword B will bring in more revenue even if the amount of traffic brought by keyword A is 10 times.
Now do note that there are several other factors that would play a role as far as revenue of the page is concerned and choosing a high CPC keyword won’t’ along help you bring more revenue.
Still, high CPC keywords should be chosen over low CPC keywords whenever possible.
9. Don’t Put Too Many Ads Above To Fold
“Put Ads Above the fold” is like a golden rule in the online publishing industry for a very long time now.
However, for the last couple of years, the trend has been changing.
One of the reasons is that if too many ads above the fold would lead readers to exit the page sooner than usual and thus increase the bounce rate.
This would lead to a drop in engagement, impressions and eventually revenue.
Google now gives more importance to user experience and engagement than anything else.
So do yourself a favour and don’t crowd you’re above the fold digital real estate.
10. Track And Keep Testing
If there is one useful thing that you can take from this article then this should be it.
When it comes to improving your Google AdSense revenue, there is one simple rule,
More traffic = more revenue
However, most of the publishers can double or triple their Adsense income just by testing different ads and placements.
See, no matter what Gurus or experts say, there is no blueprint to improve your AdSense income overnight. What works for us might not work for you.
A stable income from Adsense would require continuous testing along with consistently great content.
For testing purposes, apart from the report section of Adsense, you can also use tools such as crazy egg to find out user behaviour and see where they are clicking and engaging the post on a page.
Also, don’t forget to put some ads manually on your top 10 most popular posts.
If they are long, you can put more than 3 ads on the same page (Google Adsense has removed the maximum 3 ads per page rule)
So keep testing and find out what works best for you.
Over to you..
What experiment have you done which has helped you increase your Adsense Revenue?
Let’s know in the comments below.