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This is a follow up post to my optimizing adsense for your blog article which talks about testing out various AdSense block sizes and placements on your site until you find which converts best into clicks and income for your blog. I have done additional optimizations recently and have let them soak in long enough to effectively tell you that I have managed to increase my AdSense income by around 30% simply by adding an additional small banner ad at the top of my posts.
The funny thing is when I added this small banner ad that you see now at the top of my posts it didn’t cause the # of clicks to be lower on my lower 350×200 ad you see at the bottom of my posts, I just saw an increase in AdSense earnings and clicks overall every single week for the past four weeks of using this new AdSense block. What comes more interesting is that this much smaller banner gets almost 2x as many clicks as my bigger 350×200 block at the bottom of my posts but has a lower CPC payout of around .23 cents per click vs a higher average of .40 cents per click for my lower AdSense block. Now, I have some days where a single click brings in $2 – $4 but these are my averages for the month where I just take total income for that banner ad and divide by the # of clicks.
Let me tell you why my top ad performs so well and my logic behind it all!
Think about when you want to introduce your reader to something they may want to click on and leave your site, conventional wisdom would say that you want the reader to actually READ your article and you shouldn’t distract them with a banner ad or contextual ad until after they had a chance to read your article or you can drive away traffic. This would be true but if you are a blog that gets a very high % of traffic from search engines as my blog does you have to assume that not everyone who arrives on your blog is going to stay and read the whole article.
They may have arrived and only scanned the first paragraph, not found what they were looking for and by having a contextual ad at the top of your posts this invites the user to potentially see something of interest and click on it. In most of these cases the reader wasn’t going to read your entire article anyway because seeing a banner at the top of your post wouldn’t not have distracted them to click away if they were that focused on reading the article. They would wait until after the read the article and more likely see my larger contextual ad under my article instead is the logic I am assuming with this information.
Provided you aren’t selling or pushing an affiliate product which I am not really doing with this blog, AdSense is a potentially good way to earn passive income. I recently ran across a blog that has 10x the traffic as my own but also earns over $1,100 per month in AdSense earnings too. I don’t know about you but that is some exceptional earnings monthly from a passive income source and I am really hoping to achieve those kind of earnings in the future from AdSense.
Improving AdSense
I still haven’t found the best method for optimizing my articles for higher CPC payouts from AdSense, again my average CPC is low and if I could improve it somehow it would make for much higher earnings without a massive traffic spike. In the end though I am keeping the double banner ads at the top and bottom of my posts as I was able to reach a 33% improvement in AdSense earnings from adding a second ad and I don’t feel it is that intrusive at all considering it outperforms my much larger block at the bottom of the post.
So if you are looking to earn with AdSense or other Contextual Ad programs that works by implementing banners I would suggest the following:
Analyze your traffic sources, if you get a lot of direct or referral traffic and you have a Bounce rate of less than 50% this means readers are mostly reading your entire articles. In these cases I would think placing a banner in the mid to lower portion of your blog posts would yield more clicks than a top banner ad. (Exception is homepage banner ads near the header space, I don’t use one here but I have heard that this is one of the most effective places for an AdSense banner).
If your traffic is mostly from search engines and your bounce rate is above 70% then it means many users are just hitting your site and leaving quickly, in this case you may want to keep a banner ad within the top portion of your blog post before a user has to scroll. In many cases you can try putting 2 banner ads in articles but make sure your articles are consistently of a decent length to make sure readers can’t see both banner ads at the same time which is kind of tacky and overdoing it. (Even though sometimes I am guilty of this myself).
This is my logic on Google AdSense ads and I am sharing what I come across, I am always eager to learn other people’s experience with AdSense and new tricks of the trade so to speak so share your thoughts and comments. I will always respond to feedback and invite you to start a discussion here, also you can ask me any other questions you may have on my AdSense practices.
-Dragon Blogger
We are influencers and brand affiliates. This post contains affiliate links, most which go to Amazon and are Geo-Affiliate links to nearest Amazon store.
I have been obsessed with computers, tech, gadgets and games since the early 1980’s having grown up on the Commodore 64 and Amiga computers.
By day I work in the IT Security Industry and have been in IT for over 20 years. On my spare time I am a Vlogger, Blogger, Streamer, Gadget Reviewer, affiliate marketer, influencer and entertainer. I am also an avid movie fan, TV Show fan, Anime fan, video game fan and fan of trying anything and everything new.