Are you struggling to earn a decent living from your site’s Adsense? Is one site earning a high CPM but another is struggling and earning a few cents for click? There could be a few things causing this, but the good news is that you can turn things around with a few tweaks and changes.
The way that Adsense works is that it will look to show ads relating to the content on the page it is on, as well as the things the reader is interested in. So, let’s suppose that fast food is the lowest paying keyword of all, but that health food is the highest paying and you run a food site.
If you discuss food hacks, KFC menus and other fast food related content, then you’re going to attract people who have previously searched for it and you’re also going to tell Google to trigger those ads. This means that high-priced ads won’t show and when they are clicked on, you won’t earn anything. If you only write about powdered greens and other super healthy food, then you’ll only attract ads for the upmarket stuff, which will ensure you get a high priced click.
There are ways to maximize your content regardless of your niche. Start writing more about costly products, start thinking about what advertisers are happy to pay a lot of money for and then start building content around it. If you have a financial site that usually discusses share trading, start branching out into forex, precious metals and insurance/loans; if you have a site about gardening, stop writing about seeds and start writing about tools, sheds and other big ticket items.
There’s a misconception that a lot of Adsense money comes from impressions. That’s not true and if it’s true for you, then you’re doing something wrong. 95% or more should come from clicks and if you’re getting impressions but not clicks, then your ads are not prominent enough.
I have worked on a lot of sites in my time and I own quite a few, so I have a good idea of what works and what does not. Take FreelanceWithUs.com as an example. You see that ad at the top? The banner that almost seems mandatory on all websites these days? Well, it doesn’t work, and in my experience, it never does. These days readers are almost blind to banners like that. It’s as if we’ve all developed selective vision in order to avoid seeing these because the early days of the internet made us despise them so much.
What does work, however, is a sidebar ad, but you need to make sure this stays as the reader scrolls. I have learned that the readers who click the most are the ones who stay the longest. The longer they stay, the more chance you have of getting a click. So, if your banners are all at the top of the page then they will disappear when the reader scrolls down which means that by the time they are ready to click, there is nothing for them to click.
You want big, bulky sidebar ads that stay on the screen at all times but don’t get in the way. Forget about horizontal banners, forget about the little banners. Go big and you can keep your site clean while maximizing clicks. Take a look at Can-Pets-Eat.com for an example of this, an ad that gets much less impressions than the horizontal banner above, but gets 1,000% more clicks.
One of the biggest factors that determine how valuable your visitors are to Google is where they are from. If you are attracting a lot of visitors from the US and UK, then you are hitting a premium demographic that should earn you good money. If you are getting a lot of hits from certain countries in Eastern Europe, as well as the likes of Bangladesh, then you will struggle to earn.
As an example, I own a directory that has ads all over that site and it gets about 1,000 hits a day. On other sites I own, that could equate to between $5 and $20. But because those directory hits are mainly from India, it works out at about $0.10.
The more regional and specific, the better.The more US visitors, the better. Take a legal site like https://injurylawservice.com/ as an example. It’s at the top for many of its categories and while I don’t have any role in the site, they probably get the same number of hits as my web directory. However, those hits are targeted, they are in a major niche and they are all in the US (because no one else would be interested in a US-Based attorney). As a result, they would potentially earn upwards of $50 CPM if they setup ads.
It’s similar to comparing a site like forbes.com, which has a global appeal but is huge in the US and the UK, to a site like the Indian Times, which is mainly for the Indian market. It goes to prove that big numbers don’t always earn big money.
The country you target plays a massive role and needs to play a big role in helping you to decide what site to create.
