I recently ran a test on this blog to see if I can confirm what I posted some time ago, about making more money with Adsense.
I actually did a pre-test months ago and then repeated it a few weeks ago, just to make sure I can actually get some conclusions out of it.
As you can see in the post linked at the beginning, I recommend removing Adsense from low performing pages, in order to raise your Click Through Rate (CTR). It worked for me before, but I wanted to make sure again.
Introduction to my Adsense tactics
I keep Adsense on one of my sites only on pages that have very high amounts of traffic and don’t have a suitable product I can be an affiliate for. I make sure I have one most wanted response per page.
That isn’t a lot of pages on the site in question, but those pages make a lot of money. I don’t even have the three allowed ad blocks on them, usually I keep one or two on each page.
That is one of the reasons why Adsense sent me an email recently (automated thing), saying I am missing on some income and that I can add more ad blocks to my pages. Which I didn’t and don’t plan to.
Every Adsense click is a lost reader, so I would rather have a higher CTR with better paying click than send them all away for 2 cents a click.
I don’t have any Adsense units in my sidebars, header or footer that display on each page of the site either.
The test
I wanted to test the performance of Adsense on this blog by including ads in the sidebar or header, so it would display on almost every page of the blog.
In the first test, I had a unit in the sidebar, in the second one, I had it in the feature box that was placed below the header (this feature box is now only displaying on the home page, with the newsletter opt in form).
This means that pretty much every visitor to this blog would load a unit every time he loads a new page. That’s a lot of unit displays.
Another thing to take in consideration is that blogs like mine tend to perform a bit worse than niche sites (not 100% proven, just my estimate and experience) for the sole reason that the visitors here are very internet savvy and they know those are ads.
Note: when you come to my blog, you may already be signed up for an email marketing service like Aweber so although the ad for Get Response is targeted for my blog, there are not many people that will click on it here.
On the other side, if you are on a dog training site and you see an ad that says “training collars 50% off”, you may not know it is an external ad and you will go to check it out (this is what happens with regular visitors that are not in the same business as us).
OK, so to get on with the details of the second test (the results of both tests were the same). I put a 728×90 unit to the feature box of this blog, selecting image ads only. Feature box is one of the perks of Thesis theme, the theme I used on this blog for more than a year and ran this test on.
I ran the test for about two weeks, as I figured that will show me enough data and I think it did.
I had about the same number of clicks, actually a bit more since the ads on this blog were clicked too, but dividing the page views with clicks, resulted in a very low CTR.
Not only did the CTR go down, the money earned per click was lower as well. Per Adsense TOS I can’t display the numbers, but this will give you a good overview of what happened anyway.
It makes sense, if your blog/site has low CTR it means it isn’t preforming good. If it isn’t performing good, high paying Adwords users will go for the better performing blogs.
Did I make any money by displaying ads on this blog? Yes. Actually the amount of money per click was very nice. But overall, including all the sites I have Adsense on, the income went down.
After two weeks, I removed the ads from the blog and monitored the numbers. Literally the next day, my CTR went back up and after about 2-3 days, money earned per click went back up as well.
Conclusion
I believe we can be pretty sure that by displaying Adsense on high trafficked pages in optimal spots, is the best way to go. Remove Adsense from low performing pages. Remove them from sidebars and footers, if they are not performing, as well.
What else could I have tested
I could have tested text ads but the reason I didn’t is that they would look ugly in my feature box.
Image ads for this type of blog are actually great. I run into more image ad problems on niche blogs, because some of them don’t have great matches so you have to go with text ones (more people using them).
The blog with same ads and great performance
Lisa wrote about the same ad unit some time back (the post inspired me to test the ad in the feature box) and her ad is performing great. The reasons behind it? Here is what I think and hope she will chime in:
- A lot more traffic than I have. Traffic is essential for Adsense performance which I can see on some other sites of mine.
- A lot more of Search engine traffic.
- More targeted traffic in sense of – beginners searching for ways to make money online vs. returning blogging friends.
Bullseye
Test, test, and then test some more. I plan to run this same test again in the future, as my traffic, especially Search engine traffic grows. But if you are already running Adsense ads on your blog, try removing it from a few low performing pages to see how it works for you. Then come back to tell us about it 
Have you tried this before?
Related posts:
You know I love posts like this! And this is a great example of why everyone has to find what works best for them. Good for you for taking the time to do this extensive test and showing us the results. Very informative!!
Hey Lisa, thanks so much. Your post about the feature box inspired me to test it.
Wow, what an article. Superb, Fantastic, Excellent – Experiment. You are very knowledgeable. Infact this post shows you how much you learned in AdSense. Still there are so many things left. According to me you reached the dead end of AdSense Optimization. If I want to say you covered 90% of the AdSense Optimization. Still 10% left but I am sure you cover that 10% within this year or too. Congrats for excellent article. Keep your good work
I don’t think I am at 90%, I think there is so much more to do with this. I always try different stuff. Even if I had only 10% left, it can still make a big difference
Nice Info!!!!
We all know very well on which base CTR depend if our blog post performing well then CTR will give great response because it’s totally depend on the result of blog post.
So we should try always create our every blog post with nice idea which give to us good response in the end.
That is right, but on the other side if the post is too good people won’t click on ads but go and read more, lol
Hi Brankica, I found one of the best ways to reduce your CTR was to remove everything else your visitors woudl want to click during their visit. Anything they can click and leave your page using will dramatically reduce your CTR. I removed buysellads, Kontera and my CTR increase it was easy as 123. Maybe I was lucky but it does actually make a lot of sense right?
That is why I mentioned the most wanted response at the beginning. If you have more than one, people get confused with what to do next. Compared to other ad services, Adsense works the best for me and the only other one I use is Infolinks but only on pages that don’t have Adsense and aren’t that important. Thanks for the comment, Brian
oops I meant to say Increase not reduce LOL! You know I was using Kontera for the longest time and I made a killing with them but people started complaining the ads were unrelated and to “in their face” I don’t’ even use Google anymore it’s all Google Adsense Sharing at blog engage now.
Yeah I followed your advice the first time about removing Adsense from low performing pages and it worked. I only have it on like two pages and the performance is much better.
You’re right you’ve got to keep testing,moving, trying different styles and checking the results or you’ll just sit there wondering why you can’t make any money.
You should add it to some pages with nice traffic to see if it will pick up. If there is some traffic and you aren’t selling anything on that page, it may convert good with Adsense
Another boost is to show ads to only search visitors. If the page layout needs it then display a backup ad. e.g. from CJ when the visitor is not from a search engine.
Even though the AdSense impressions are lower the CTR and CPC (relevance quality) goes up. If the Page RPM goes under $10 I remove the ad code.
This is one of the most comprehensive advice. The results will be clearly shown even if you have less ads in quality pages rather than more ads on low performing pages
Yes i did exactly same thing , i removed adsense from low quality and blogs with low unique content… others are doing okay.. important two components of adsense are content+se traffic
Thanks
Does it mean that running adsense on low performing sites might affect earnings on other sites?
I’m asking because I have a few sites on one AdSense account. One of them has very unique content which I develop myself and relatively good traffic (about 15K views/day). A few other sites are very small with low CTR. Unfortunately my main site performs very bad. CTR is low, CPM is low, overall earnings are low.
I’m thinking that poor performing ads on smaller sites somehow affecting earning on the main site. Is it possible? Should I just remove them from smaller sites?
Thanks.
Honestly, I think that is the case. I ran some test similar to this on different smaller sites and every time those sites would drag my CTR overall and result in less CPC on the main money maker for example… Try removing it for about 2-3 weeks, and see, you will probably notice the difference.
Thanks. I already removed all Google ads from smaller sites. Also, I minimized Adsense appearance on my main site. Hopefully it will help.