When it comes to making money with Google Adsense, there is one variable that cannot be ignored and that is the click thru rate!
Making money with Google Adsense certainly doesn’t happen overnight. In fact, most bloggers I’ve read about that are making money worth getting excited over, state that they planned on making absolutely nothing during their first year of blogging
So if you are going to start a blog with the ambitions of making money from Google Adsense, and let’s say you are giving yourself the first year to establish your blog, you have to know how to maximize your Adsense revenue.
Maximizing your Adsense revenue means that you are, to your best ability, generating the most revenue possible from your site and in the most efficient manner.
Let me tell you right now – just filling your blog with Google Adsense ads is not the way to make money from Google Adsense.
You have to be strategic about ad placement, ad size, and ad types.
Optimizing for maximum click thru rates
One of the most important variables to track, and to optimize for, is click thru rates. If you optimize your blog, and your content, for maximum click thru rates with Google Adsense, then you are also automatically optimizing for best placement, best ad sizes, and best ad types.
Click thru rate is the measuring stick of performance.
Let’s take a couple of examples:
Let’s say you’re going to place a 300×250 banner on the right hand column of your blog. And, your banner is text only. This is a very common strategy, so I figured it’d be a good example.
Now, you decide to give yourself a 7 day period of measuring it’s performance. So over the 7 day period, your write a lot of content and see your traffic growing, and you are letting data build on your 300×250 banner ad.
After 7 days, your 300×250 banner ad has a click thru rate of 0.76% – a number a lot of people would be happy with.
However, you are satisfied with that number because a 0.76% resulted in a $3.75 eCPM – and you know that you can much better than that.
So after your 7 day period, you change the ad to a 160×600 tall banner and you decide to run the default image and text banner.
You make the changes, and continue pumping out high quality content, and then 7 days later you come back to your Adsense to see the results.
Low and behold, your click thru rate has increased to 1.11%, and better yet, your eCPM has jumped to $10.12 – and your revenue shows!
Looking at the two scenarios above, what is the option that you would chose?
I think that most people would chose the 160×600 banner that is also running the default text and image ads.
So that is an example of pursuing higher click thru rates with Google Adsense. You have two other ad placements on your blog that are running Google Adsense text ads, so now you have other sections to be test out.
This is the process that you must go through in order to maximize your revenue on your site.
And the click thru rate should always be your starting point for measuring success of Google Adsense on your blog.