Don't take the pennies that AdSense gives you!

Don't take the pennies that AdSense gives you!
Hi hackeronthespot

I just wanted to put out some simple pointers with which you can possibly increase your adsense revenue, with your existing traffic. Depending on how you are currently set up, you may be able to increase your earnings many fold, by just implementing some of the tips mentioned below.

1. Interest based ads
If you have had a steady stream of traffic on your adsense site, log into your adsense account and click on the tab that says Allow and block ads. In that, go to advanced settings. If you have not experimented with this setting before, it will be set to on as default. Try turning it off for a day. Don't panic if earnings plummet. You can always turn it back on the next day.

This setting is a bit of a double edged sword that can either increase your earnings or decrease your earnings. If it increases your earnings, well and good. If not, just change it back on the next day.

2. Toggling text/image rich ads
This setting is again very niche oriented in terms of the results that it can provide. However, you should be bold enough to experiment with text ads as some niches can make you a lot of money with text ads and very little money with image ads. Worst comes to worse, you are going to have one bad day in earnings. Don't worry about it. At least you will assure yourself that you are using the right type of ads for your site.

3. Analyze your site's traffic.
Which country do most of your visitors come from? If they reside in a country other than yours, you will be well served by buying a proxy from that country. There are some companies that sell single proxies for as low as $2 per proxy. Buy one of those proxies and load your site. You can also use Adsense preview tools for this although they are not very accurate. A proxy will give you much better real time results.

When you go to your site, refresh it as many times as you can. Go to the inner pages and again refresh it again and again until you don't see any new ads. When you see all the ads, look for the ones that are complete junk. Every site will have at least one shitty advertiser. When I checked one of my sites today, there was a solar energy site advertising on a tech blog. Not what we want, even though the advertisement is good for the environment and its general cause.

There might also be some advertisements that are in line with your niche, but posted by shady looking websites. Just take a quick look at the website that sounds like a small time website. I actually found one that had adsense ads when I was doing a search on my site.

You MUST NOT click your own ads when you are trying to look for irrelevant advertisers who are bidding on your site, unless you want to get the G ban. Instead of clicking on the advertisement, look for URL's that are printed or displayed on the ad. Sometimes, image ads will not have urls displayed on them. In those cases, you will have to just open up Google and type in the brand name and find the advertiser URL.

Open up a notepad file and enter in the urls. Though I am not entirely certain, just to be on the safer side, I would advice you to make a record of the urls in as many formats as you can. Hence, if you see an advertisement that says www.advertiser.com, put down www.advertiser.com and http://www.advertiser.com in your notepad file.

Try to be as thorough as you can with this filtering process. If possible, do it at two completely different times of the day as many advertisers advertise during particular times.

Depending on your niche, you might find just 5 useless advertisers or you might even find 50.

Now, stop using your proxy browser and go to your adsense account and log in. Go to the allow and block ads tab again and copy paste those advertiser urls. Once you do this, it can take anywhere from a few hours to an entire day for it to take effect. Try to do it just before your adsense day cycle ends as it seems to go into effect when a new day starts.

If you have weeded out the advertisers in the right way, both CTR and RPM will increase for you, sometimes very nicely.

4. Blocking general categories
This is a bit tricky and it is easy to get the settings wrong on this one. However, if you have just installed adsense without ever adjusting your settings, you might be in a position to correct your bad settings as you have a history of ad performance to look at.

Go to the allow and block ads tab again and select general categories. Now, look for the categories that have the highest % of ad impressions on your site, with the lowest amount of earnings (Other than your main niche category). You will be able to see some obvious culprits right away. You will probably have to use some mathematical skills to really pick out the inefficient categories. However, for the average math paranoid guy like me, just choosing the obvious categories (High ad impression but low % of earnings) will be good enough.

When you see those advertisers, try to block them out. Some categories might be too big to block as a whole. If that is the case, you have to dig a little deeper and go into the sub categories to find out culprits there. Start with the worst performers and try to block your way out of that category.

You might not be able to block all of them although you might get rid of the really shitty ones. In place of the ones you eliminate, more ads from the categories that you are making money from will begin to propagate on your site, helping you make more money.

Important points to remember

If you are in a micro niche that doesn't have a lot of advertisers, many of the techniques mentioned above will not apply.

Not all settings go into effect immediately. Wait at least 5 hours before you make a call on your new settings. It would be preferable if you can wait 1 whole day.

Don't click on your own ads when you are trying to find out the bad advertisers. Even if they are difficult to find on Google search, take the time to do it as the last thing you want to do is get yourself banned while trying to make more money for yourself.

Repeat this process once every month or two weeks as advertiser lists keep changing every now and then.

I hope this helps some people get a little more out of their adsense sites.

Thanks
 hackeronthespot