Wednesday, July 21, 2010

How I Doubled My Google Adsense Earnings

If you are reading my blog, you should notice an ad block from Google Adsense on every single one of my blog posts on the left. I didn’t double my earnings from experimenting with placement this time, nor did I mess with the color schemes of the ads, I took a different approach and that is by eliminating low paying advertisers.

I’ve been experiencing with Google Adsense’s new navigation features that are only available to publishers and have found that using the ‘Competitive Ad Filter’ and making use of the ‘Ad Review Center’ option, has doubled up my earnings from Google Adsense. If you are a webmaster, optimizing your advertisers list for Google Adsense to make sure no low paying advertiser is shown and the top paying advertiser ads are shown instead, is a must to increase your overall Adsense revenue. Taking this approach and eliminating low paying advertisers isn’t all that hard. It may take 30 minutes of your time but it is well worth your effort if you can double up or maybe triple up your earnings.

Using the Competitive Ad Filter

The main reason why Google incorporated this feature is for publishers to freely deny any advertiser they feel violates their web space at anytime. There could be many reasons. It could be because the advertiser ad looks spammy, is irrelevant to the overall website, the ad could be low paying, there are many reasons why a webmaster would add a website in the advertiser blacklist. Whether it be for quality or just for maintaining an user-friendly web environment, the purpose of this competitive ad filter feature allows publishers to meet their needs.

In this case, we will be using the competitive ad filter feature to filter out low paying advertiser sites from ever appearing on your ad block to maximize your earnings. To keep up to date with the lowest paying advertisers, I recommend copying the most recent low-paying advertiser list from AdsBlackList.com and adding it into your advertiser blacklist to prevent their ads from ever showing up. Although this may not make a noticeable difference, it contributes some level of optimization to filtering out the low paying advertisers from the high paying advertisers.

If you want to know the list I use, you can find it here. Just copy & paste it into your advertise blacklist under ‘Competitive Ad Filter’ when you log into your Google Adsense account.

How to use the Ad Review Center feature

Before you select anything at all, realize that this is the most time consuming part which may require some level of research. However, also realize that this is the most important step into doubling or maybe even tripling your earnings with Google Adsense by taking the bar even higher and filtering out low paying advertisers in BULK.

Basically the idea is to optimize your Google ads by relevancy is by filtering out categories you feel is irrelevant to your website. Here is where the fun part begins. Besides trying to optimize your ad blocks to contain the most relevant ads, lets also take it up a notch and research which ads from each individual category is the most paying by using a friendly tool called SpyFu. Using this tool should give you some idea of the overall pay for each respective categories.

Your first step is to eliminate irrelevant ads from ever showing up by ticking the irrelevant categories that doesn’t suit your website. Now after you have done this, your second step is to research which leftover categories is top paying and you think may work with your readers. The reason why I say to do this is because you are only allowed to filter out 8 categories. What you are trying to obtain by following this practice is trying to find the most relevant and the most top paying ads, and by following this procedure, you do just that.

Wait! We are not done yet. Stay on the ‘Ad Review Center’ page.

Allow and Block Google Certified Ad Networks feature

This is probably the most cruel part to maximizing your Adsense revenue and it does indeed require some hefty research. If you still can’t locate where this ‘Allow and Block Google Certified Ad Networks feature is, we are still on the same page. You can find this feature only if you scroll to the bottom of the page. Once you are there, you should see a nice long list of ad networks.

Basically your task like all the others is to eliminate small low-paying networks and to do that I usually hypothesize whether a network is low paying by checking the company’s Alexa Rankings. Anything above 100k, I block. Simple as that. The list can indeed be long, it took me 45 minutes to skim through them all however it was worth it. Ever since I made the change and blocked less known ad networks, I’ve seen a significant difference in my Adsense earnings per click. Think that your account may have gotten smart priced (smart priced – meaning penalized in earnings)? You may have thought wrong and it may be just because a lot of new low paying networks were interfering with the top paying networks.

Want to see exactly what I did?

If you think you are blocking too many ad networks, you probably aren’t. I currently block 40 less known ad networks and have set to block new certified ad networks automatically from appearing on my advertiser list unless I unblock it. This is to ensure that I keep top paying networks in and low paying networks out. It is as simple as that.

If you followed these tips and have seen a noticeable difference in your Adsense earnings per click, be sure to share your experience through the comment form.