More Money with less adsense ads?
I recently read an article by Taylor J argueing whether less Adsense units on your page will result in more money by Adsense. I know this is not a unique thesis, many bloggers suggest that less clicks equals more money. Is that really true or just another Adsense misconception?
Taylor says no and suggests to put the highest paying ads on the top of the page. Well, that won’t really help us because placing high-paying Adsense units somewhere else will most likely result in less money from that unit and consequently less money in total.
The Click Through Rate and the Cost Per click are the factors that determine how much money you will get. More clicks, or more money per click results in more money in total. That means you will want to optimize the CTR and CPC.
The theory that more money can be earned with less Adsense Ads is somewhat unreasonable. Less Adsense Ads will result in lesser clicks and as you lose clicks you will lose money. The only way to compromise your CTR loss would be to improve your CPC. Improving the Cost-Per-Click is very hard because you can not directly influence it, it is determined by the return of investment (ROI) for the advertiser. One aspect of the ROI is the conversion rate…. Influencing the conversion rate of your readers is somewhat difficult because Google has strict rules. Telling your readers to click on the Ads to buy a certain product is not allowed and will result in your account getting closed.
Drawing a conclusion – keep in mind the following factors:
- Click Through Rate (CTR)
- Cost per Click (CPC)
As said above, to optimize the earnings you will need to work on the CTR, simply because it is very hard (I am not saying it is impossible) to improve the Conversion Rate of your users whenever they click ads. So what does that mean regarding the idea of a lower amount of ads per page?
Lowering the amount of Ads will result in a lower CTR and consequently less clicks and less money. The only way of getting more money out of fewer ads would be to optimize them physiologically to attract more clicks to that single Ad unit than to all of your Adsense Units before. That is normally not possible, especially if you already implemented my adsense color-tips and positioning tips.
Of course- you could also achieve similar by upping your cost per click rate. In fact, that’s an interesting topic whether less adsense units lead to less false clicks and consequently an higher conversion rate. Certainly something that might be worth another blog post :-). All in all you can not influence your CPC greatly which means that trying to do so is the wrong attempt.
I can only advise you not to remove your Adsense units. Doing so will lower your clicks and consequently your income.
I’ve read about this too,and I tried it too but I earned less money with less ads.
Tried this, not worked for me. Well less ads meant less clicks and hence less earnings. I think this type of gamble will be ok with people who are having a decent amount of traffic like 10,000 visits per day or something.
Hey Mega,
I can only agree with you. There would be no reason for going for less ads. The only way of improving your earnings would be to either get an higher CTR or CPC which is in no way the case.
Hendrik
Hey man. Great post. I’m actually posting an article right now based upon this subject.
Here’s the deal. You really got me thinking. I now believe that AdSense basis their ads first on relevancy and second on the CPC the advertiser is willing to pay for the ad to show.
Let’s say there are two ads that have the same relevancy
Ad 1 – “Perfect Pushups”
Ad 2 – “Perfect Pushups”
However,
Ad 1 – Advertiser is willing to pay $3.00 per click
Ad 2 – Advertiser is willing to pay $1.00 per click
Thus, the advertiser that is willing to pay the most will snag the top ad spot.
Does this make sense?
Hey Taylor, thanks for the feedback and mentioning me in the video. Google is always interested in keeping the ROI for the advertiser as high as possible. That way Google makes sure that the advertisers will continue paying for new ad campaigns.
Knowing that you can make some reasonable thoughts about how ads are displayed. High Relevancy together with low CPC will result in highest ROI for the advertiser, however, low CPC means less money for Google. That’s why Google introduced the ad market where advertisers can bid on ad locations on different sites. You are right, advertisers who are willing to pay most for the ad location will have their ads shown and have their products sold. By bidding on the ads Google is able to automatically set the pricing of an advertisement, depending on what advertisers bid. Consequently the advertisers are able to adjust the ROI on their own depending on the pricing of the ad. If that system does not work Google intervenes with smart pricing and greatly cuts the CPC of the advertisement. An advertiser who pays a small amount is better than an advertiser who pays nothing.
Back to topic: Google displays the highest paying ads all over your website. I doubt that Google makes any difference between ad blocks in the upper area or in the lower area of your website. The clicks are lower of course, but still, clicks are not a factor for the ROI for the advertiser. The conversion rate in combination with the CPC are the factors and those factors do not change with an advertisement close to the of your website.
I’m new to this, but thought I’d toss in a possibility.
Could it be that this hypothesis of less equals more when a certain threshold is reached where the ads are intrusive because there are so many??
I run into sights that seem to be so much advertising and psychologically I just think that their content must be no good because they are just there to advertise.
In non-cluttered sites, your approach seems very logical and I would be reluctant to cut out ads.
Nice thought but I don’t think that’s the case. The first impression counts yes, when people open your website and encounter too many ads they will either just leave or live with it. The first impression counts it determines whether the human will click on the ad or not.
Of course, with too many ads you might danger returning visitors. It could be the reason that they won’t visit you again (which means less money of course).
The only thing I can think of would be that too many Ads could result in too many missclicks. Missclicks do not convert at all. Less conversions means less money for the advertiser and thus Google will cut the CPC of your ads (known as Adsense’s smart pricing). Less CPC could result in lower total earnings.
Good content is the best thing that attracts visitors to your site & it will automatically make clicks on the ads.There should not be something on the page which mislead people by bad behaviour of inputing N numbers of ads which does not add any visitors to you in long run.