Adsense Competitive Ad Filter will NOT help you to earn more!

This was a test running for a long time and now I decided to stop. The reason is that my earnings from AdSense dropped considerably.

I manage a lot of websites and only two of them doesn’t use AdSense for monetizing; all the rest is monetized with AdSense. About three moons ago I’ve read on a blog which actually states that it’s managed by “AdSense Experts”, that filtering some ads (suggested by them), will boost the AdSense earnings.

One of the top level domains on the list was blogger.com, thus entering in the filter list blogger.com will block any advert which has as landing page specified any blogger sub domain. Basically I will potentially block hundreds of thousands of adverts coming from bloggers who advertise their website via AdWords.

Back to my test. AdSense suggests to keep the competitive ad filter short as possible because it can ruin your earnings. I had 15 top level domains, some of them suggested by the so called experts, some of them from a website called AdsBlackList.com. I activated the list on 10th of August because it takes 2 days for the filter to be active. Now it’s 13th of October, that’s two months, and the list was cleaned yesterday.

I can’t tell what’s my daily earning with AdSense since it’s prohibited by Google, but I have high CTR mostly because all the pages are optimized for adsensea and they are blended in the page. The high CTR gives me some cool earnings every day.
As soon as the list was activated, my earnings started to drop. Slightly going down every day until I reached a level with about 10% lower than the usual. I thought that this is just because I got different type of visitors who don’t seem to like clicking ads. Then the days passed and the earnings were still low.

Until today: I decided to end my test and cleaned the competitive ad filter list. I don’t filter anything now and today my earnings got better, slightly moving upwards.

Just a coincidence? What do you think?

AdSense CTR – What is the average click through rate?

I was asked many times by my customers whether they perform well with AdSense or not. The answer to their question is simple: if they have high AdSense CTR, they perform well, else they do not.

Since they have no reference, the problem appears when they ask what is the average CTR in AdSense. Now this is a very hard question to answer. Why? Because it varies, it depends on too many factors.

Let’s think a bit and see what is the average CTR.

First, what are the factors which depends the Adsense CTR on? Not an exhaustive list, but the following factors:

1. Type of the website: regular presentation site, blog, online service, social network, etc.
2. Whether the website is content-rich and the content keyword-rich
3. Content industry. Is the content about medicine, IT&C, etc.
4. Visitors’ location (!)
5. Ad blending

If you don’t want to read all the explanations, click here for the answer, else read on.
Usually, blogs and social networking sites are the platforms on which the AdSense CTR is the lowest. I didn’t think yet about why, this is just my experience. Anyway, I think the blogs’ AdSense CTR is low because the age and culture of the visitors which visits the blogs and because many bloggers think if they post a 3-4 lines it’s enough.
If you think a bit and have a good analytic subscription installed on your blog, you’ll know that most of the visitors are between 12-35-years-old, at least on the blogs I manage/managed. Most of them knows which links are AdSense ads and which are regular links. Most of them doesn’t think that clicking an ad supports the blog they visit, or they think clicking an ad “may harm their computer”. Yeah, you heard well. I encountered some juniors on a conference where I was talking about online-advertising, who really thought that *any* type of ad may harm their computer. We all know (or we should) that this is very untrue and the AdSense ads are less offensive than a snail in a glass.
On the other hand, social networks doesn’t perform well, because they have less content. Take Twitter as an example: you tell in a few words the world what are you doing at the moment. Is that content? I wouldn’t consider it content.
Of course, all the above doesn’t apply on all the blogs. Many blogs have incredible AdSense CTR, many have older visitors. The above is just a general rule.

Websites other than blogs and social networks perform much better with AdSense, usually they have pretty high AdSense click through rate. The type of visitors is much more different and usually they arrive on a particular website because they were searching for one specific thing. And here comes in the scene the AdSense content matching technology. AdSense is very smart and provides ads very well matched to the content, the users finds the ad useful and will click on them because they are interested in the advert. A presentation site, a service has very clear content so the ad bot will serve ads which are extremely related to the content.

As a general rule of the thumb, a website has to have content to perform well with AdSense, read, have high AdSense CTR; if there is no content, the ad bot can’t serve ads (under content i mean text). But not all content is good. Let’s not forget that we want to show our visitors always ads which are very related to the content, and to achieve this, we have to use keywords in our articles and posts, they have to be keyword-rich. What am I talking about: for example if you write a review about a notebook, use many times the notebook’s type, manufacturer, and keywords related to the notebook, like the words “notebook, laptop, PC, hardware”, and so on.
Also, never forget that the ad bots can’t crawl *any* type of content. For example, if you publish comics on your website, the ad bot can’t crawl the text from the bubbles, thus will have no information about what to serve. Also, even if the Googlebot can crawl Flash based content, the Adsense bot can not! Well, this is not entirely true. Google announced today that from now on they will accept publishers who wants to publish AdSense ads in web based games, including games. Here’s the video example of how does this work:

If the ad bot can’t crawl the content, or has nothing to crawl, depending on how the publisher set his ad up, it will show either a solid color or public service ads which earns the publisher nothing. No AdSense ads equals null AdSense CTR.
The industry is also very important. If you have content for example about “how to cure headaches” and if your visitors don’t find your content useful enough, they will click any link just to find a great cure for their headache, and in the same time increasing your AdSense CTR. Simple yet effective.

Another aspect is ad blending. Basically, when an ad block is blended with the content the AdSense CTR is way higher. For example, if the title of the ad looks like a link on your site, the background is the same as you site’s, your CTR will be higher.

Finally, the AdSense CTR depends on where are the visitors located. I was amazed like you, but this is very interesting. Who do you think are clicking the most? Which nation: Japan, Brasilia, China, USA? I tell you what: US visitors. 90% of the clicks I receive is from US visitors, and more than 10% of my traffic is from the United States.

So what is an average AdSense CTR? I’d say, if you have a blog or social network then 3-6%. On a presentation site or any regular website the AdSense CTR is around 9%.

The myth of the AdSense Premium publishers

Is this true?

Of course is true. But let’s clear some things up, because many confuses AdSense Premium Publisher with an AdSense account being invited in the optimization team. So, basically there are three clans, not two as many believed. I am a standard publisher, that’s why I can disclose some information about the other two clans. Well, only one as the Optimization Team is not interesting. And how do I got the information I will share now? Hmm, let’s say I know someone who is a Premium Publisher and he said one two things, which I am very grateful for.

So, how can someone get in the higher clans. This will be a great disappointment: it’s invitation based. You can search Google’s help articles until hurts, but you won’t find any information about the AdSense Optimization and Premium Publisher accounts. When you, better said your account meets some conditions, you will be invited to be part of the clan.

Conditions of being an AdSense Premium Publisher

First, let’s see some examples of AdSense Premium Publishers. Some Premium Publishers are (be aware that this is not an exhaustive list, just some examples) : Times, CNN, AOL, etc.
What is common on the above mentioned sites? They all get millions of visitors, daily. This is the condition most of us can only dream of. Many says you have to get users from 5 million search queries or 20 million page views. While this sounds logical, it’s doesn’t really true. The truth is that you have to have incredibly high number of visitors, more million of users to visit your site on daily basis. It’s not a fixed number. Your CTR also has to be outstanding, just as your CSS. You may wonder how, if the ads are coming through an IFrame generated by a remote Javascript.
And here comes the best part: they can choose whether the ads to be served as the usual HTML as we get the ads, or by Javascript. The latter means that a simple Javascript function is placed in the HTML of their pages. If you want to take a closer look on the Javascript, you can find it here: Premium Publisher’s Javascript Code. If the ads are served via this Javascript, they can generate their own ad structure, they can render the ads in a table, in a div, in whatever they want. The Javascript function from the above page will be used in the request which the ads are served through. If an AdSense account is enabled for serving through JavaScript, and only then. We, commoners can not use that function, no matter what.

So, the first obvious advantage is that they can edit their ads via CSS, this is the greatest advantage.

The second, i guess is that they can remove or edit the “Ads by Google” link from the ads which appear on their sites. Sincerely, I have nothing against that little link, more than that, if we’d all remove it, we’d confuse our users to hell, they wouldn’t know, or couldn’t make a difference between what’s an advertisement and what’s a common link.

The Adsense Premium Publishers can also choose how many ads to display on their website and in a specific ad-block too. Technically it’s possible, to get a page similar to a Google search result page, but with the difference that all the links would be advertisements. Again, I would be against this. This is, again, confusing for the user and is not good at all.

They also get a personal account manager and special technical support. The latter I didn’t realize yet what is used for, frankly, even a 5-year-old can copy-paste the ad code in the HTML, whatever. The personal account manager on the other hand can be useful. The Premium Publisher can ask about everything either by phone or email, starting from optimization tips to general how-to, everything related to AdSense.

Did you wonder why do you get only one cent per click? Would you like to filter out the ads which pays only a cent? The AdSense Premium Publishers can do it, and I think that’s their greatest benefit.

How much the premium publishers earn?

Due the optimization on their sites the CTR is higher with about 300-400% than the usual. That means, they can have incredibly high CTRs from 10% to 30% anywhere. Let’s say they get 5 million impressions. The 10% of 5 million is 500,000 (yeah, five hundred thousand) clicks… per day. Let’s say they get only 5 cents per click, that means 25,000 US dollars… again, per day. Go figure further…

Earn more with Adsense – Boosting Click Through Rate (CTR)

I will say nothing you didn’t hear yet. The only difference I think that this time you will hear my own experience, not the niche you can find everywhere.

First of all, you have to have traffic. If you don’t have traffic, you have no revenue… In adsense terms, there are no impressions. My experience is that you have to have at least 100 visitors on daily basis, to notice that you actually have some revenue. With 100 visitors your earning will be low, but there will be revenue and the feeling is very cool.
By the way, did I mention you have to have a website or blog.

Placing the ads AKA ad placement

This can be a massive factor and there are two possibilities: you place the ads in wrong places where you have low Click-through-Rate (CTR), or you place in the wrong place and you have low CTR. Simple as 123.
So what do I think about ad placements? I give examples, that’s the easiest way to explain. Each link opens in new window or tab so you are not distracted from this page.
First, I assume you have a menu on your website. Either a horizontal menu bar or links on a sidebar, where the navigation menu is placed vertically.
If you have a horizontal menu, you can create a horizontal link unit which you place below or above the menu. An example: http://hotnews-4u.com/. As You see, in the upper side of the page there’s a link unit, which performs very well, having a CTR always above 2%. Which is extremely good CTR.
For vertical example: this site. Look on the right side of the page, below the search box. A small ad unit, but with fair CTR. It’s always around 1%, sometimes a bit below, sometimes a bit above. I consider this CTR good because there are ads which are around 0% somewhere, so 1% is fair.
Another thing you can try is to place ads into the post. Like here: Emachines e510 Notebook Review. As you see, at the very beginning of the post there is an ad unit on the upper right corner. From this website, that’s the best performing the best, having a CTR of around 3%. Which is more than good.
If you scroll a bit down, you will see some ad units. That ad is also performing better than I expected, having a CTR of around 2.5%.
So, conclusion: To have a great CTR, the best positions are around the navigation menus and inside the content. That’s not a news, that’s what the Adsense optimization tips says, too.
But what it doesn’t say, that it does matter on which side you put an ad unit in your content! I’m not a ad marketing genius, so I tested something which shocked me. Here: Emachines e510 Notebook Review, the ad unit was on the left side of the post. As soon as I changed its location and pushed it to the right, it’s CTR has been boosted from ~1.5% to 3%! Why, I have no idea, but it has been doubled just because I changed the float value from left to right. Does this method always double your CTR? I have no idea. Test it and you will know. If possible report back, cos I’d be interested, too.

Having the right color AKA ad blending

Now this is weird. Or not. The optimization tips of AdSense says that webmasters should set the colors of the ads in a way to have the ads seamlessly integrated in the website’s color palette. That’s logical for me, but the some things were not. I elaborate, don’t worry.
An ad unit has three visible text portions. These are the title, the text and the URL. First I had the title color and the URL color similar to the colors used on Devoracles for the anchors. Both were some sort of orange, but they were not identical. The CTR was lower though. On a rainy day I decided to adjust these colors to be identical, now both the URLs on Devoracles and the titles of the ads are the same color. The CTR has been boosted a bit, not much though.
Look to the ads in Emachines e510 Notebook Review. I decided to set the URL to a color which is completely indifferent. In my case something which is almost the background color, cos the AdSense engine doesn’t let you to set it exactly to the background color. As soon as the color has been changed, the CTR arrived to its current state, around 3%.
So, conclusion: The color of the title and the text should be exactly the same as the color of the URLs and text on your website, the URL on the other hand something which is almost invisible.

An interesting thing

The other day I found a blog-post at Scratch99. Stephen, the author talks about the AdSense Smart Pricing, which basically (and in short) means that we, publishers don’t get the maximum possible PPC rate. So while the AdWords advertiser pays a lot for a given keyword, let’s say $50 (yeah, 50 US dollars per click), we, publishers receive only its tiny bit, usually 1 dam cent.
This is reflected on one of my post where I talk about a PC case which has been fireproofed using asbestos. Asbestos and the related keywords are extremely expensive, I think the US lawyers pushed the price in the skies, but that’s not relevant now. So, I received some clicks on the above mentioned post and what I earned? 1 cent per click, which is surrealistic, unfair and disappointing.
To learn what is and how you can avoid the Smart Pricing, read Stephen’s post on his blog.