How to Increase your AdSense Income from Existing Traffic

Google AdSense is like the first teenage love in the life of a blogger. When a new blogger enters into this world of blogging, he often does so due to the potential of making money from blogging. Frequently, displaying ads on his blog using ad networks like Google AdSense comes at the top of a new blogger’s wish list, as it is the highest paying ad network on the planet.

Most new bloggers believe making money from AdSense is a simple process. A new blogger may think he simply needs to create a blog, drive traffic, and apply for AdSense, and he will be making money immediately. This is true to an extent, but there are a variety of tips one can employ in order to take full advantage of the money-making opportunities from Google AdSense.

AdSense works best when you have a quality traffic blog (target audience from U.S.), and you are

using high CPC keywords on your blog.

Let’s consider two blogs:

Blog A and Blog B

Blog A is a successful blog which attracts millions of readers every month, and blog B is not as popular a blog, with only a few hundred visitors per month. Both bloggers are using AdSense to monetize their blogs.

In this scenario, blog A will make more money as it gets more traffic, and blog B will earn less. (For the sake of this example, we are ignoring some points like keywords CPC, and we are assuming both blogs are in the same niche).

If you own a blog like blog A with high traffic, then you may not need to study the information in this post.  But if your blog is more like blog B, with comparatively minimal traffic, I would suggest that you pay close attention to the information in this post, as I am going to show you how you can increase your AdSense income from your existing traffic.

Working tips to increase AdSense earnings with little effort:

To ensure these tips will work for you, don’t simply read the following tips – take the time to employ them on your blog, as a little extra effort could help you to double or triple your total AdSense income.

Visibility factor

The visibility of your ads plays a major role in the number of clicks you are getting on your ads. The simple reason for this is, of course, if they don’t see the ad, they don’t click on it.

So the first thing you need to focus on is placing ads at highly visible positions, such as:

• Below or above the title
• Below the post content
• At the top, header or sidebar

Focusing on ad placement is a very easy way to bring yourself more income. You can also try using services like Crazy Egg to check your readers’ focal points.  Crazy Egg will create a heat map which shows the places where readers are looking and clicking the most. There is a fee for Crazy Egg, but if you don’t want to spend money on this type of service, you can try out clicktale, a similar service that is free for the first 100 page views. 100 page views may be enough to give you a sense of where you can best place your ads toward optimal performance.

Make your ads large and noticeable

A few days ago I was reading a report on engagement to content online. I read that updates with an image receive 39% more interactions than those without an image. The article I was reading related this statistic to Facebook, but this also holds true for advertising.

In the past few months AdSense has come up with the 300×600 ad unit and the 970×90 ad unit, because they understand that larger ads get more attention.

Let’s do an experiment: look at any two items – one large in size and the other small.

• Close your eyes for one minute, and then re-open them.
• As you opened your eyes, which thing did you notice first?
• 99.999999% people notice the larger item first.

Make your ads larger, because people will be more likely to click on your ads when it is easy for them to be noticed.

Use the units

I have heard many bloggers say that we can only place three AdSense ad units on one page.

Not so! You can place eight ad units on a web page.

You read it right – eight ad units on a single web page.

Those eight ad units include three standard ad units, three link units, and two search forms.

In order to take full advantage of the money-making potential of Google AdSense, take the time to focus on this point, and fit all of the appropriate ads onto your blog and wait to see more money rolling into your AdSense account.

Another reason why this works is that additional ad units increase the variety of ads, and the increased variety of ads in turn increases the probability of a person clicking on one of your displayed AdSense ad units.

Remember to place the ad units in prominent places in an effort to make the ads work for you.  Place them above the fold and around your content area. For example, you could place one AdSense search ad unit at the header, and another one after your content.

An example of poor placement of AdSense ads is at the footer area of your blog.

Color combinations

Remember – one key to the success of your AdSense ads is grabbing the attention of your readers.

If you are using the standard text ad unit on your blog, remember that you have control of the color combinations.

Also, if you are going to place the text ad unit in between your content, try to merge it with your post text.

These factors will increase the chances of your readers looking at the ad and clicking on it, because you have made it more noticeable and differentiable. Adding a thin boundary outside the unit is also a good idea, because according to AdSense policies, the ads must be differentiable from the content.

And if you don’t want to merge the ad with your content, then make it different in order to make it stand out.

For instance, if the background of your blog is white, then try using black or any other bold color that stands out for your ad units.

• Take a blank white page with some text written on it.
• Then take a sketch pen of a different color, and make an adequate size box on the paper.
• Close your eyes for a minute of two. When you open your eyes you will first notice the box that stands out because of its color, as it looks different on the page.
• Again, this will grab the attention of your readers, thus increasing the chances of them clicking on the ad.

Use DFP (Double Click for Publishers)

Google’s double click for publishers is a free ad server program which allows bloggers to sell ads on their blogs. If you need to make some money while using AdSense, you can sign up for DFP.

• Create your own ad space which you want to sell.
• Sell the ad space to advertisers.
• Create and manage your own campaigns.
• Deliver ads and get paid.

The  way this works with AdSense is that you create an ad space on your DFP account and set it up for selling. It will take some time to attract advertisers, and of course you don’t want the ad space to remain vacant because then you won’t earn anything. So you can link your AdSense account with your DFP account, and as a result the spaces which are not yet used will be showing AdSense ads until someone buys those spaces.

This can help you to earn more, as Google’s ad filter only shows the highest paying ads on a website. So if an advertiser is paying less for AdSense, but another advertiser is paying more on DFP, then the latter will be given preference and you will earn more.

Make your ads responsive

The responsive website interface is the trend nowadays as more and more people are browsing the internet through their phones and tablets. The problem is that if the screen width is less than the ad unit, the ad will not be shown. So if you have placed an ad unit of 728×90, this unit will not be shown on screens with a width less than 728px.

So to increase your ad revenue, you can try making your AdSense ads responsive. In theory this will allow you to earn more money, as the people who visit your blog through their mobile phones or tablets will also be able to see your ads. (At the time of the writing of this post, AdSense responsive ad unit is currently in beta, and is available for all AdSense publishers.)

If you have a responsive blog layout, you should add responsive AdSense ad unit codes.

Rotate your ads and experiment:

Ad blindness is one of the most common reasons for low performing ads, and that is why we recommend that you use ad units above the fold, and rotate your ads. When we use the term “rotating”, we mean using a combination of text and image ads, and rotating them with affiliate ads and AdSense ads.

This is also the reason I recommend that you tweak your ad placement regularly. Whenever readers see anything new, they are more likely to notice and thus more likely to click.

You can also try merging the first few tips I noted above, and attract your reader’s attention toward your ads to get more clicks.

For WordPress blogs, we have the AdSense CTR theme which is perfect for a website which is constructed to make money from AdSense (for example, a micro niche site), or you can use AdRotate WordPress plugin to rotate your ads, and run different ads for every page view.

Last but certainly not least, make sure you deliver quality content to your readers. It is best not to focus so directly on generating more revenue, but to work on getting more traffic. At the end of the day, that traffic is what will bring you the revenue you seek.

If you find the information in this post useful, please share it with your friends and colleagues on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.

This is a guest post by Hammad.