Is your Blog Lowering your Adsense Income?

January 4th, 2008 | 15 comments

Google Adsense Smart Pricing For the longest time I noticed a trend within my Adsense account that was somewhat bothersome. When I had high paying days, all of my sites did well. When I had low paying days all of my sites did bad. I rarely had days where one site would do really well and others wouldn’t and vise versa.

I asked several people and posted the question on several forums etc. Noone knew why this would happen.

Then, a few weeks ago a sold a few sites that had extremely low CTR’s. I’m talking extremely bad, below 2%! Now for the past week or so my adsense has risen and I’ve noticed higher paying clicks and CTR’s throughout my entire Adsense account…why?

I just read an article by Courtney Tuttle, which I believe explains exactly why. It’s titled “How to Get Worthless Adsense Clicks.”

In a nutshell he explains how low performing sites can cause your entire Adsense account to drag due to Smart Pricing.

He explains that Internet Marketing related blogs normally perform poorly with Adsense, as most of us already know, but my thinking was, “I won’t leave money on the table, as little as it may be.” Well, now that I’m pondering this concept I’ve went ahead and removed Adsense from this blog, as it was bringing in very little income anyway and could have very well been costing me money.

I run Adsense on about 12 sites and with the removal of this blog I only have one article directory that performs under 4% that I need to deal with.

It’s somewhat exciting to manage my account, removing poor performing sites just to see what kind of a difference it makes.

I’ve already increased my Adsense income by simply removing a few low-performing sites and I’ve definitely seen the effects. But maybe I can increase it even more after removing this blog and working to increase the CTR of the one remaining site that has a low CTR, possibly with Section Targeting.

Food for thought, what do you think?

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15 comments

Chuck Brown (7 comments.)
4th January, 2008 at 8:11 pm

I will check out Courtney’s article. That’s a pretty compelling title.

I have…I dunno, 30-40 sites. I have pulled AdSense off some of mine where the CTR was infinitesimal (usually because of the nature of the site and because the pageview numbers were high…certain types of sites are very difficult to monetize), just because I know it’s supposed to drag the other sites down…and replaced those ads with YPN instead. But I didn’t really noticed my other sites climbing in response.

Part of my issue, though, is the nature of my sites. People don’t come looking to buy. I can’t change the nature of my sites, and I don’t really have a hunger to start a bunch of others built around higher-paying keywords.

But I’m always looking to tweak things a little to make them better. One thing I have that most others don’t is quite a bit of traffic. But, traffic is just eyeballs…and it doesn’t always convert.

It’s a fascinating ride, though…trying to learn how to get the most out of what you have.
Maurice (TheCaymanHost) (61 comments.)
4th January, 2008 at 11:39 pm

Funny you should post this as I’ve always kept Adsense off of this blog - not because I knew any of this, only that it doesn’t perform well on marketing focused blogs from personal experience.

I’ve recently introduced Bidvertiser on my blog’s pages as an experiment and so far it’s producing similarly low click through rates. I know Bidvertiser works pretty well elsewhere, so I’m still of the opinion that marketers bloggers who tend to visit sites like my blog, are pretty ad blind.

Adsense is already performing well at the new article directory (thanks for your optimization tips bte) and that’s only been around for a few weeks. I don’t think PPC is ever going to do well on my blog, even if traffic were to grow to huge proportions (unlikely).
Terry Heath (17 comments.)
5th January, 2008 at 3:05 pm

That’s really an interesting post, and it boggles my mind (I just noticed if you change one letter in “boggle” you can make “google”. Hmm). So I read Courtney Tuttle’s original post and the complexity of the Google Game just baffles me. Working for Google sounds so much like working for an insane boss.
Kyle Eslick (3 comments.)
5th January, 2008 at 3:17 pm

Interesting you should bring this up. I think I read (or saw in a videoblog) some talk about this type of stuff on David’s CyberCoder website a couple weeks ago.

I’m making decent AdSense income, but I haven’t been near the 3% CTR in quite awhile since my traffic started to grow. I have AdSense currently on about 10 websites and a few are very low traffic and don’t perform well. I have been trying to decide if I should pull the AdSense from those sites or not. I think now that I just might go and do that.
Josh Spaulding
6th January, 2008 at 6:34 pm

@ Chuck - My wife has 20-30 in “her” adsense account as well but 95% of them convert extremely well! My account has my higher traffic sites. The thing is, I don’t believe the traffic has anything to do with it. I believe the main thing is how they convert and how high the quality of visitor is that we refer to the advertiser. It’s definitely fun. Especially when the CTR’s start to rise and the clicks begin to become worth more

@ Maurice - I’d imagine any network that works like Adsense wouldn’t perform well, but testing is always your best bet, as you’re doing.

Article directories are a great way to get traffic, as they contain so much content. The problem I run into is getting the CTR above 5% and maintaining it. btw, I saw your email come in. Great article. I’ll respond to the email and get the article up tomorrow morning, thanks.

@ Terry - lol so many people advise against “working for google” and playing the SEO game, but I think it’s fun btw, I saw the meme and email and I’ll be responding soon. I’m not real big on memes, but I’ll participate in some way.

@ Kyle - I believe it all comes down to the niche and the approach. If they are marketing related sites you may be better off strictly promoting affiliate products. If they aren’t marketing related you may want to try to tweak the ads ie. color and placement. A good majority of my static, niche sites receive a 30% CTR, which is what I normally shoot for. However, not all sites have the capability to get CTR’s like that. It all goes back to the topic and presentation.
Chuck Brown (7 comments.)
6th January, 2008 at 6:50 pm

Google has been my largest employer, I think, since ‘04. I have no beef with that whatsoever. My beef is with those who get to that same place thru scraping and SERPs manipulation, rather than providing value and earning their traffic honestly.
Josh Spaulding
6th January, 2008 at 7:50 pm

Same here, Chuck. I think they’ve improved with the ranking of those sites though in the last year or so. Some of those trash sites used to rank well. Now they’re rarely ranked well if at all. From what I’ve seen anyway.
Google AdSense Smart Pricing…Re-Evaluating My AdSense Strategy
11th January, 2008 at 10:01 am

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Stephen Cronin (34 comments.)
11th January, 2008 at 1:42 pm

Hi Josh,

I read the article by Court as well and I’ve looked into it for an upcoming post (next few days). It seems smart pricing has been around for a couple of years, but there’s very little official info on it.

You might want to check out The Facts About Smart Pricing from Google’s official Adsense Blog. It’s more than two years old and contradicts Court - they say it’s not about CTR, its about advertiser conversion rate. Of course there is probably a high correlation between high CTR and high advertiser conversion rate because both are a product of targeted traffic. Of course they might have changed how it works…

Anyway, my CTR is horrible on my blog, for all the reasons I gave in my recent post… I’m going to keep Adsense for the time being, but now I’m only showing it to the search traffic. How I did this (I hacked the Shylock Adsense plugin, but you can use Who Sees Ads as well) will be in my upcoming post.

I’m really getting into this Adsense stuff lately, as you can probably tell!
Josh Spaulding
11th January, 2008 at 2:47 pm

I knew it had been around for a while, but I didn’t know anything about it. I actually thought it was an Adwords thing.

Thanks for the link, I’ll check it out.

Of course it all comes down to the advertisers conversion rate because that’s what it’s all about. But, I’d imagine, as you said, there is a high correlation between the two.

If ads aren’t converting, Google assumes that’s because it isn’t targeted. If it isn’t targeted then even those who close aren’t going to follow-through. If the CTR is high then it’s most likely extremely targeted, meaning there is a good chance that those who click will convert into buyers.

That’s just my thinking though and I have no idea if that’s how Google thinks. I’d imagine it’s close though.

I’ll be looking for your post.
Jordan McClements (4 comments.)
12th January, 2008 at 7:18 pm

I agree with Stephen.

leaving aside the fact there may be a strong correlation. It is ‘conversion’ that affects whether you are smart priced or not rather than the CTR according to Google.

(As of today it still says so in their official adwords learning center quiz).. :-

http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/text/breeze_quizzes/quiz-64888.html
Robert (1 comments.)
20th January, 2008 at 8:29 pm

Thank You!!! I though I was going nuts. I added a few blogs to some existing sites that I have had for years awhile back, the a strange thing happened mu traffic went up but my adsense earnings took a dive. In fact they went down to half of what I had been used to getting month after month.

I couldn’t figure out what the heck was going on until I read your article. I am definatly going to pull them off those blogs and see if my earnings go back up.
Thanks Again!!!!
Josh Spaulding
21st January, 2008 at 1:53 pm

@ Jordan, why leave that fact aside? It’s an important one.

@ Robert, Good deal! Hopefully your earnings start to increase now.
Rika Susan - Want Some Adsense Secrets? (4 comments.)
4th July, 2008 at 6:48 am

I get good results with blogs, probably because I put lots of effort into research and writing. Well-targeted content should up your CTR in most instances.
Walt (3 comments.)
27th October, 2008 at 7:50 am

Hmmm. I’ve tried to deal with this in the past. I have two questions that I’ve had numerous different answers to….

1) Is it site-wide, or is it channel dependent? In other words, I have a site with 3 different channels - Between the 3 the average is generally above 3%, but not always. However, I still get high paying clicks on the best channel. Does Google fine-tune it like that?

2) I’ve seen a couple of my sites go as low as 1% for a day, then bounce up to 5-15% the next. How does that much variation affect smart-pricing?