How to make more money with Google AdSense

In today’s article we will talk about the 12 ways to increase your income with AdSense.

I’m here to show the SOS WP audience twelve key points to help anyone who wants make AdSense a source of income more and more conspicuous.

You would be surprised to see the results my team and I have achieved with small and medium-sized online magazine publishers, which in just over a few months have brought us from around € 1000 / month to over € 3500 / month in revenue.

I must point out that the programmatic advertising, the infrastructure and the technical dynamics that are behind the AdSense processes, can reach a level of complexity such that in comparison the financial analysis on the shares from Bloomberg (I also spend time at their headquarters ) is like comparing Fruit Ninja against the game of chess.

When we are faced with AdSense accounts with over € 250,000 / month of earnings (I have seen more than one), the optimization strategies become much more sophisticated, however the rules that I am about to list always continue to apply.

First of all, know that increase your income with AdSense it is a process that is directly proportional to the quality of the Ads (or Ads) you will receive.

It therefore becomes very important to optimize and make the best use AdSense to improve profits and the quality of the user experience.

We talk about it in detail in this guide, which I advise you to read carefully in all its points.

1) What is Ads optimization

Optimizing means taking the necessary steps to make sure that all the pages of your website convert to the maximum, also improving the user experience.

Quite often we have advised our publishers to remove some pages instead of adding others, and unlike what many may think, this step has generated more profit and increased conversions.

2) Why Optimize Ads

Optimizing ads is a crucial step in achieving your business goals, both to increase the revenue generated by them, and to improve the usability of your website. Consequently, it will increase the quality and visibility of the ads, also increasing the ranking on Google.

Always keep this in mind: when will you start increase your earnings with AdSense, even Google does more with you, so it is certain that your content will be better indexed by the search engine.

Choosing the right ad style, especially for text ads, greatly improves visibility and reduces the effect we call “banner blindness”, which occurs when users swipe over ads without lending you any. attention.

There are three main strategies for choosing the style / type for your ads, namely:

To blend Ads (to blend in or blend in): make the background color and border color of your Ads identical to the background (background) of the web page. This works well with white pages.
To complement Ads : use colors that already exist on your site but don’t use the same background and border color of the web page exactly where the Ads are placed.
To contrast Ads : Choose the colors that best stand out from the background color of your web page. This technique is particularly suitable for web pages of dark people, in order to make the ads stand out more and make them more visible.

4) Test and optimize the different sizes of Ads

While I am of the opinion that ad hoc testing for your site is always the best strategy, there are sizing factors that always perform better than others.

As a general rule, wide ads are more profitable than long ones. This is because users consume information in what we call “ thought units” . Long ads (those that extend in height) interrupt the flow of reading and the user has to move the eye to the head to read the full text. This difference determines that, statistically, the efficiency of wide units (developed horizontally) is better than that of long units, developed vertically.

Based on data relating to user interactions, Google has determined that the most effective formats are the following:

300 x 250 Medium Rectangle
336 x 250 Large Rectangle
728 x 90 Leaderboard

For Smartphones and mobile in general they are the following:

300 x 600 Half page for Mobile
320 x 100 Large Mobile Banner

Suggestion:

In 2014 Google introduced the 970 x 250 Billboard and the 300 x 1050 Portrait. So it was possible to use both text ads with images within their frame (frame space) and such larger spaces increase your possible revenue.

5) Test and optimize the different ad placements within the pages

Beyond styles and sizes, we have another factor that has a huge impact on performance and therefore could lead you to increase your income with AdSense. This factor is the positioning of the different ad units ( ad inventory ) on the pages of your site.

The first step to understand how it works and find the best location to place your Ads is to understand which sections your users spend the most time on.

Of course, to analyze your site in this regard, you need to link your Adsense account to your Google Analytics account.

The important thing is to understand that a good positioning structure for one page will not necessarily work as well on another page, with different content.

Please note: when Google’s guidelines say 3 ad units per page , what they mean as a page is not what WordPress means!

That is, a page is defined in about 800px in length in Google Adsense terms, and by scrolling even further below you move to another page. This is a subject of great confusion with our publishers because all those who work on a CMS like WordPress are used to thinking of a page as all the content it contains, without dimensional limits.

Vertically, there are 2 fundamental areas of the page, understood as the one included in the vertical 800px: the one we call Above The Fold (ATF) and the one we call Below The Fold (BTF).

Typically, we place AdSense units in the header, sidebar, within the content, or under the content.

The way to understand what works best for you is the method we here at Adottimo call rotary. That is, rotate the ad units, and move them. Then compare the results, and repeat the process until you have found the best performing set-up for your site / page.

Warning: remember when comparing the results NOT to compare the absolute profit but always the economic performance by number of pageviews. This is to eliminate the factor of the increase or decrease in traffic between one period and another, and consequently having a more sincere result.

As far as possible it is desirable to use more than 1 AdSense unit per page and, according to the AdSense guidelines, no more than 3. Remember, however, that a page includes 800px from top to bottom, so if you have more content in what is a page in terms of WordPress posting, you can easily exceed the standard 3-unit AdSense limit.

You can also use 3 link units and 2 AdSense for the search boxes within your site for each page (AFS Adsense For Search).

Maximizing page coverage in this way is especially useful for sites that require a lot of scrolling per page.

AFS ( Adsense For Search ) units, i.e. those that appear when there is an internal search function within your site, are extremely performing and in our experience canincrease your income with AdSense affecting up to 10% of the entire ad revenue, if implemented correctly.

7) Use link units for small spaces

Link units work a little differently because they display a list of topics related to your site’s content, and when the user clicks on them they are taken to the advertiser’s page. The click naturally has a higher return than the display ( CPA cost per action ) and determines a higher payout. Of course these ads can be a little annoying but they usually only become annoying if they are not relevant.

They are generally great ad units to place in very small spaces. You can place 3 per page so make good use of it. Remember to position them strategically and move them to make comparative tests and thus find their best distribution.

In Google AdSense, you have the option of having text ads and display ads, or both.

Google naturally suggests selecting the use of both options to maximize profit.

The reason Google suggests this is pretty simple.

The advertisers through the AdWords platform (the AdSense consideration for those who buy advertising instead of receiving it) participate in real time in an upward auction for your spaces. If you choose to have only text ads or only display ads in a given space, you are automatically cutting one of the two categories out of the auction, decreasing the competition and therefore lowering the value of your space.

9) Don’t filter the ads too much

What does it mean to “filter ads too much”? AdSense makes it so that you can, for example, exclude your competitors from buying advertising on your site or simply make sure you exclude a specific category. For example, on a site that specifically talks about vegetarian cuisine, I definitely don’t want to see an advertisement for a sausage brand, also because nobody would click on it, significantly lowering the yield.

However, you shouldn’t take the risk of filtering too much, not least because some categories are quite broad.

For example, it happened that one of our publishers had almost all the major car manufacturers cut out of the filters, as they sold direct advertising to local dealers. In reality there was no conflict, and so we opted for a filter revision which brought many benefits.

Our advice is to filter only the very strict necessary, and leave the rest to competition.

10) Use pagination for content

AdSense doesn’t allow self-refresh of content that’s left to the user, and publishers are left to fend for themselves when it comes to maximizing new content.

If your site is on WordPress, you can install a plugin to enable paging.

The 2 primary benefits of this technique are as follows:

from a user point of view, infinite scrolling is eliminated and posts become easier to read
from the publisher’s point of view, it ensures that a new set of ads is served by Google AdSense every time the page is reloaded.

Increase your income with AdSenseit will be significant for all Ads in CPM ( Cost per thousand impressions ) and increases the probability of clicks on Ads in CPC ( Cost per click ).

With so many ad setting variables in AdSense, it becomes difficult to determine which combination performs best, and luckily we can use A / B testing.

The A and B of A/B testing simply indicate the two scenarios to be tested: for example, a set of Ads with color in prominence ( contrast ) and a set in line with the color of the site ( blending ). Using A / B testing you can create an experiment and reading the related data after a few days or weeks, you can decide on the basis of the same which of the two options yields better in terms of economic performance.

In Google AdSense you can do A / B testing by defining your parameters in the tab called Experiments. Within the test you also have the option of dividing visitor traffic between various tests (A and B).

There are publishers who make millions of euros a month in AdSense revenue, of course they also have a lot of visitors, but the Internet population and therefore your potential market will always be growing globally and nationally because even in countries like the United States (88 %), Italy (65%) and the United Kingdom (92%) Internet penetration is not yet 100%. Furthermore,increase your income with AdSense it will also be possible thanks to the generational change, as the use of the Internet will grow even more strongly in the years to come, and there is still a lot of market to conquer.

Our next step with publishers who are starting to get over 2000/3000 € / month from AdSense income is to get them an AdEX contract, always a product of the Google ecosystem but with very different potential. The latter in fact, changes the revenue share (the percentage that goes to Google) in favor of the publisher by about 20% and opens the publisher’s site to a few thousand other linked bidding platforms, giving access to many new advertisers of upper level.

I do not dwell too much on the technical characteristics of this platform but if you have reached this level of income from Google AdSense do not hesitate to contact us and ask for information on our performance management contract using the form below.

To conclude

In this article / guide I wanted to show you the essential rules to achieve the highest monthly income from your AdSense ads.

I count that these tips are useful to you and that you can increase your income with AdSense progressively. My team and I are always available to provide you with professional and dedicated support.

Just fill out the form above and you will be able to get in touch with us promptly.