Have you tried the 300×600 unit on your site yet?
I finally added it to one of my higher trafficked pages (within the content) just to see how it will pan out.
The first week…
I had deplorable click-thru rates and less-than-stellar earnings.
I was tempted to take it down, but then I remembered a situation where the earnings got better with time so I decided to be patient.
Next week…
Earnings were up a bit and the click-thru rate began to improve slightly (still lower than my overall average but better).
Week three…
The click-thru rate surpassed my personal average and the Page RPM (earnings per 1,000 impressions) is also better than my site’s average.
Due to the AdSense terms and conditions, I am not allowed to reveal my CTR or Page RPM.
So What Happened?
Could this unit have attracted a placement advertiser?
Maybe.
Of course, it’s hard to really know for sure, but sometimes when this happens it’s because a placement advertiser has outbid the contextual ads that are displayed.
For those who don’t know, Placement Advertisers can bid on an individual unit on your site directly and they outbid all the contextual ads.
So imagine an AdWords advertiser telling Google…
Hey, I want to put my ad on this particular page.
In order to land that spot, they have to outbid all the other contextual advertisers — which of course earns Google and the Publisher more money.
As I’ve already mentioned, I’ve noticed this before with other new units. They’ll start out with terrible earnings, but as the unit matures, the Page RPM (earnings per thousand views) begins to pick up.
Many times this could be due to Placement ads taking over that spot.
Understanding The Different Ads
Contextual ads are the most popular kind of ad. These display because the content on your site is relevant to the ad. There is an auction taking place behind the scenes and the highest bidders (along with other quality signals) win the placement.
Placement ads are not as common, but can you earn you the most money since they advertiser has to outbid all the contextual ads.
Interest-based ads are shown based on your visitor’s web surfing activities. So if they just went to Overstock.com to do some shopping, they may see an Overstock ad on your site instead of an ad that is related to your content.
You can actually turn off Interest-based ads in your account, but I’m not entirely sure why this is even an option since my units are still showing Interest-based ads. I see them myself and I also notice earnings from “Interest Based Ads” in my account.
So that’s always been a bit of a mystery to me. If anyone has insight on this, I’d love to hear it.
How to Check Your Earnings Breakdown
To see how much you’re earning with the various kinds of ads, go to the Performance Reports tab and click “Targeting Types.”
This will display a pie chart and reveal what percentage of your earnings come from Contextual, Placement and Interest-based ads.
Most of you will find that you earn more from Contextual ads. If you are earning more with Placement, congrats because you are really maximizing your earnings and you’ve attracted the attention of advertisers who want to advertise on your site specifically.
By the way, to ensure your units are available to placement advertisers, always create a Custom Channel for your units and opt to target it.
Wait it Out
So the moral of the story is experiment and be patient with the results — especially if you are adding a unit to a high-trafficked page.
Remember, advertisers love pages that get a decent amount of traffic and have units in a prime location (especially if it’s a larger unit.)
So don’t be so quick to remove a new unit for low performance. It may pick up in the long run.
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Need more tips? Check out this overview of Google AdSense.
I added the new 300×600 unit a couple of days ago. One downside to it is that it doesn’t always show ads that take up the entire space. I keep seeing the wide-skyscraper sized ads on it. It’s new, so maybe publishers aren’t that aware of it. I’m keeping it up to see what happens.
Hi Lisa. Thanks for sharing this. I haven’t tried the 300 x 600 yet (TOO BUSY!), but I might give it a go. From my experience to date across a dozen or so niche sites, I’m generally finding that bigger is better. CTR increases the more ads that are displayed in an ad block. I tinkered with using a smaller 468 x 60 ad units thinking that the fewer ads showing per ad block would mean higher CPC… After changing the ad units back to 250 x 250 blocks my RPM on that site jumped by 55.7%! I then upped the size to 368 x 280 and got a further 12% increase on that. I’ll continue to tweak moving forward, but the bigger the better is what I’m seeing.
Good for you! Patience is a vertue and will everything Google, I practice my patience. I’ve added similar AdSense on my blog two weeks ago and am also seeing an increase in CTR this week. Can’t wait to see how the next two weeks will look like.
Thanks for awesome tips Lisa, Actually Google adsense is no doubt one of the largest platform for the publishers.The earning through Google adsense is not so difficult and thing that i have learn through my blogging career is “Traffic”, “Experiments” and “Patience”.
As there is an old saying “Patience is a bitter plant but bears sweet fruits”.
Same applies here too…since i’m a new blogger and have just entered into the blogospehre recently.
But really sometimes if we wait a bit things surely work. The same applies with adds too
keep sharing!!!
I recently had Adsense send me a notice that Adsense had been disabled from a blog of mine. They said it was because it violated their TOS. The page they said that violated their TOS was a category page. The only problem that I can see is that it contains duplicate content… because it is a category page….
I have serious problems with google adsense. My first account disabled. I am currently trying to register again, but it was almost 4 months there was no notice of whether they receive or otherwise. Do you have a solution? I register it through Triond. Thanks in advance.
This is real good and encouraging article. Thanks for this
Although Google has not approved my application at all but I have chitika and infolinks account. I will try to apply what I have learnt from you on them and I hope Google will approve my application one day. Thank
Google adsense really annoys me sometimes when I get 30 clicks with only earnings of 5 cents. Such a low CPC.
Nice article. Though I am really annoyed because I haven’t received PIN for 2 months. I have already earned 100$ and waiting for that pin to get payout. Will follow your steps after I get my adsense address approved.
Not sure how google adsense works. Thanks for info though.
It takes a whole 1 year to get started from ad-sense and we require much patience and a lot of content creating ability to reach our target.
Lisa, Thanks for this encouraging post. It is really good to be patient with Google Adsense. I have been blogging seen 2009 and have been using Google Adsense as my main way of monetization. But Adsense has hardly earned me something tangible all this while. I began to contemplate removing it from my site and think of something more realistic. But on a second thought, I decided to leave it for some time.
Recently I implemented the 300×600 unit, and since then, my earnings have skyrocketed. I don’t know which of the ads type is being implemented on my site; all I know is that my earnings have gone up astronomically.
During my last business with Adsense I had to loose my $340 which was very sad for me after doing lot of hard work.
Do you know any other less risky ad network?
You have shared plenty of Information however I am not sure about adsense earning, nowadays a very miner mistake can ban us from Adsense
Absolutely! Very risky. Just talked about this in my video today. Glad it’s not the majority of my income.
I have just tryed using adsense so ill have to play around with position and size a little and see how i go.
I haven’t tried this size yet and you’re actually the first person that I’ve seen who’s had a conversation about it. I’m up for trying it!
I am not aware of this kind of categories, I think I have to start experimenting which one works for me.
This is a very useful article for me. I am going to a very tough phase these days as per Adsense income point of view. After reading your article I found it very useful and learnt a lot. Thanks for providing helpful guide everytime.
Hi Lisa, please answer this. I really need to know this. Until now, i have been using blogger to create a site for me. But now i want to take website building seriously and want to go for a wordpress website. I have read your blogs and have seen all your videos. I am going to buy a domain name and will be able to work with wordpress hosting. But i want to know about themes. Are there great themes available free from wordpress? Just want to know whether i’ll have to spend some money or not to get my site exactly how i want it.
Thanks.
Hi, there are definitely many great themes. I just don’t agree with using them because they could “break” with a wordpress upgrade and you have no support.
Google AdSense really works, and we have used it on several websites with great success. We only wish it was easier to target the ads. Great blog btw.
I guess I need to be more patient with adsense, everytime I’ve tried I ended up removing due to lack of clicks.
I agree with this. It really pays off if your are patient enough to wait for the perfect timing when it comes to leveraging revenue with your online marketing efforts.
Good experiments done with Google Adsense and i think it’s very useful for those who all have adsense account . Its really good post regarding bigger ad unit by Google .
Hi Lisa,
Nice article. Very informative and helpful as always. I never really though that having a customize unit can bring profit. I like how you broke down the kinds of ads and how they are different from each other. I also like the screenshots because it makes your article clear and easy to understand. Expect me to try this one out Lisa. Thanks for the informative post.
Great post! still haven’t tried it out. May be should remove one ad slot and try this for two weeks.
Hello Lisa how are you? I just want you to know that I really love reading your blog and I was thinking to share this to all my social media friends. Keep it up and hope to see more interesting blog coming from you.
Sounds interesting Lisa! Will try to check this out as well. Thank you for sharing!
You are right Lisa. To earn more from Google AdSense, blogger have to be patient. I have so much patience for this. I can also do hard work. But I do not get directions from anyone that when, what I should do and how.
However, thank you for your information.
Hi Lisa,
Thank for sharing this tip. I didn’t know the different between targetable and non-targetable Ads. Now I set up all my Ads to be targetable.
As you advice, I need to wait for a while to see if any chance my income is improving.
Thank again.
No problem, Santel!
I confess, i have not tried these units yet. I guess i’m an “if it aint broke, don’t break it” kinda guy.
BTW, I credit 2 Create A Website with getting me started in my ‘online career’.. So, $450k later.. Thank you!
Hi Rand, wow!! Congrats on your success!
Very interesting as usual Lisa. I haven’t tried 300×600 yet in between my posts on some sites and this gives me a new challenge and task for next week. Cheers as always.
i second your thoughts on this Lisa. i did this with the large rectangular banner as well, usually on the top header of most of my niche sites. performance has only gotten better over time. i don’t know the reason but both CTR as well as overall earnings have increased for this ad unit.
this is the same ad unit i talked about in my post which covered my notes from my meeting with the Google Adsense staff. i questioned their recommendations initially, but over time i am seeing progress in earnings.
I have also placed 300×600 ad unit on one of my blog and after 2 months there is no changes in ad revenue. i am using only 2 ad unit on my blog should i need to use 3 ad units and 3 ad link ad for more revenue?
Thanks for the helpful post, Lisa. One quick followup re: Placement ads.
How do the advertisers even find out about your site enough to want to bid on ads? Is it based on them just seeing you in the search engine?
And to get them to bid on it, do you already have to have a Placement ad showing on your site?
Thanks!
They use the Google AdWords interface to find units to bid on. To get them to bid you only have to check that box that I displayed on the post when you create a new unit.
I am happy reading your article. But I am now lazy. I have ever been banned from Adsense program. Then I re-list with another name. At first, the results are good. But suddenly my income changed to little. Is this because I use the same computer? Maybe there are clues for me?
Hi Lisa,
Thanks for the update and sharing great information. but can you please tell me that what will be effects to turn off the interest based ads. should my account get max. CPC or lower CTR..please explain?
yes I am on my way to try the best placements in my blog
Thanks lisa for sharing. Surely will try today itself in my blog. What is your suggestion … we might use text ads or image for getting greater impressions on this big ad?
This is cool, thanks for sharing Lisa,
I’ll have to test the larger ad size on my niche site.
Have you ever compared adsense ads to affiliate?
I’ve been reading that affiliate banners can bring higher revenues.
Yes, I’ve always made more with affiliate marketing. AdSense is a much smaller percentage of my income than I think people realize.
Oh but I also wanted to say, I don’t have as much success with banners — but contextual affiliate links. Banners have always been a low yield for me unless I pre-sell the product and talk about it a lot on my site. For example, the Genesis banner converts well on this blog because I talk about the theme a lot and people know I use it.
But in general just throwing up a banner doesn’t really convert as well by itself.
Great tip about the custom channel for advertisers to target. I’ll have to try that out.
Hi Lisa
I have been experimenting with my ads and do not think I have got it right yet but maybe I am being impatient for it to show results because I have changed them after a couple of weeks maximum if things do not improve. Will leave things longer to see if they mature at all and pick up.
Great advice thanks lee
Very Good post for Google AdSense with detail information. thank you lisa for share this.
useful . Thanks again
Great write up as usual Lisa. I have not tried the 300×600 size yet. I’m currently playing the waiting game to see the results of my current changes.
I will def try it at some point though. Thanks again…
Hi Lisa,
Google was kind enough to send me an email with a recommendation to start using the 728 x 90 unit on my blog. I didn’t want to put it at the top of the page as they suggested so I put above the footer instead. In less than a month my earnings have increased by 30%!
I’m going to take your advice and replace some of the ads I have inside of selected posts that get a lot of Google traffic with the bigger ad. Thanks for reminding me about testing this out. I completely forgot about the new bigger ad units.
Seriously? That’s great, Ileane! I have a footer ad on my static site and am actually surprised at how well it performs. Like you, I’d prefer not to have one at the top of my sites.
Sounds interesting. I might have to try this out with one of my sites.
The patience is ‘painful’
LOL, hang in there, Peter!
In my personal experience what I feel is Advertiser used to pay for feed ads most. In 2011 I did a dirty little experiment, I used proxies and clicked my own AdSense ads and the result was insane I clicked the State Farm ad on the Feedburner feed page and they paid me $16 for 1 click. Later that year a report was out showing State Farm was a top Google advertiser in Finance and Insurance Industry (http://www.wordstream.com/articles/google-earnings) and when I did the same thing in 2012 I was expecting top dollars again but only got pennies they only paid me a few cents. That was my own experience. Not making much from AdSense now and not even using it on new sites.
Hi Lisa, since Google has made so many changes, even though I am publishing pages rather consistently, it’s like my Adsense earnings is constantly being compressed. For the past two years I’ve seen no increase in earnings even though I’ve published plenty of pages. I think it has a lot to do with Google’s constant changes and with the excessive amount of competition on the Internet. I can see how your suggestions would help. Thanks for the reminder about paying attention to what is already getting traffic and improving monetization upon those pages.
It also depends on your traffic though. You can have tons of pages published but it does not matter if they’re not ranking for anything. It goes back to the old 80/20 rule. On most of my website only a few pages make up the majority of my Adsense income. It’s those pages that get 150+ visitors a day from search. If you have enough of those pages ranking, and the keyword they’re ranking for has a high CPC AND your website is about a specific topic (instead of being about lot’s of random things) then you’ll see your earnings increase. From my experience at least, this is true. Others might disagree.
Oh absolutely. I’m hoping that having enough traffic goes without saying but yes it’s good that you pointed that out.