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More ads, less money
July 19th, 2008A common thing to monetize your website is to flood it with AdSense ads. While AdSense ads are a great way to monetize a website, more ads doesn’t necessarely mean more money. Many people think that by flooding the website with AdSense, they increase their chances of receiving clicks and thus, maximize their profits. We’ll have a look here why it is not always the case.
Why?
Let’s start with the base principle of AdSense. Google actually “read” the content of your website to figure out what your page is about and deliver ads accordingly. For the particular subject your website is about, Google has a pool of potential campaigns to show. In these campaigns, certain have a high CPC (Cost per click), certain have an average CPC and others have a very low CPC. Google wants to make you and their advertisers happy, so that’s why they’ll try to provide you with ads having a good CPC, but if you offer enough ad spots on your site, they’ll definitely provide you with some crappy ads as well.
Now, let’s say you display 25 text links on your page from Adsense. For the particular subject your webpage is about, Google may only have something like 5 extremely good targeted ads with high CPC, 10 average ads and 10 crappy ads. If you display these 25 text links, there are good chances someone will click on one of them because there are so many, but there are 80% chances that the clicks you receive will have an average or very low CPC.
Now, let’s say you only put 5 text links. There are less chances for you to receive clicks, but the clicks will usually be worth more money! This is for the simple reason that google won’t display (Well, not every time) 5 crappy ads on a total of 5 possibilities.
So what’s the perfect balance?
You have to test a lot of different ad placements. For some websites, having more ads might bring more money and for some other sites, a single ad might do the job. On another website I worked on, I displayed only two ads and this was giving me more money than when I was displaying three or four. I received less clicks, but the clicks were actually giving me more money.
This trick won’t work if you don’t optimize your ad placement. Less ads will only be efficient if you know precisely where to place them to get clicks. I usually achieve this by “flooding” the page with ads and then analyzing the ones with the highest CTR (Click through rate). When you know the top spots on your page, it’s time to get rid of the poor performing ads. This way, your top spots will always receive the best ads and you’ll make more money out of the same traffic.
If a page full of ads does the trick for you, keep it this way. It depends a lot on the type of website you run and the type of traffic, so that’s why you have to test a lot of different scenarios. It is not science, but this technique works for me most of the time.
26 Responses to “More ads, less money”
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Yeah when using adsense it’s best to experiment with different placements… I totally agree.
Thanks for you commenting!
Hmmm, I’ll have to try this…
I used to put a lot of ads inside my site. My frenz confuse wether this is information about travel site or money making making site. So i decided to pull out some of ads.
Thanks all for your comments!
Interesting theory, I never thought about the crappy Google ads…
Congrats for this blog, very rich in info!! Cheers!
same case with me on my videos site. Previously i put adsense unit at the top and other image units at other places.
I totally agree with Ben, testing is key and I personally hate landing on websites and blogs where I have to swim through a thousand Adsense just to get to the information.
Thanks,
JR
It’s a constant struggle between usability of your website with navigation elements and using that prime real estate up with ads.
Any advertising is essentially going to degrade the quality of your blog, its just finding the balance between reader quantity and site quality.
very nicely said
hello…I am agree with your opinion, I have experience about that…and I want to test about adsense suggestion above …thanks for sharing
Ingredient Surf & JR’s Internet Marketing: Good point there. I didn’t really mention the usability of the site, but it’s an important thing to consider: it tends to degrade the quality of a website.
Others: Thanks all for your comments
You are 100% correct. Placement is the key to keeping good ad’s in place and your visitors not bombarded with ad’s.
Nice info posted! I’ll probably give a try on those pointers above since I’m pretty new to ads placement. Thumbs up for u!
Thanks, I hope this will work for you, it’s really hit and miss!
On most of my niche sites, which are either Adsense or eBay, I only show a single block of ads and that block will be inline/blended with the content. I’ve found this converts best with the search traffic I’m targeting on these sites.
I occasionally try other things, just to test out ideas, but the single inline ad block that relates well to the content has been a consistent money maker for me.
Yes, that’s what I also use on some other sites. One block blended in-line with content. Works like magic!
There is one more aspect — the more ads you show, the worse is impression of your site. When I see 25 ads throughout the page, I understand that the site is not for people and will hardly ever go back to this site.
Your thought about crappy ads is also worth attention.
That’s a good point Romeo, usability is an important thing to consider before even thinking about the money.
I’ve noticed that whenever my page impressions increase there is a relative decrease in ecpm.
is this smart pricing?
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I have learned from personal experience that flooding the webpage with Adsense is counterproductive. Initially, I have three text link adds and three rectangles. Now that I have one triangle, I find that my Adsense earning have actually gone up.
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Ben,
You are totally right. When I limited the number of my Adsense blocks, my earnings actually went up.
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if u have content site then u can get more money with less ads …Its always need to improve on quality otherwise the cpc will dec when impressions inc …as Mr.Blogger Templates said
Thanks for the info.
My site has pretty much been doing what not to do. I’ve had 3 ad blocks on my site, each showing about 4 ads. I’ve been getting very low results… sometimes as low as 5 cents a click.
Hopefully my luck is about to change though!
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Very nice information. I guess it’s nice to have good content, with good ad placement and also, good traffic.
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When I limited the number of my Adsense blocks, my earnings actually went up.