Crowd Mountain and my Google AdSense Site Update

Posted by Rochelle in Niche Store Tools on 07 21st, 2009 | 11 responses

For no particular reason, this morning I decided to see how my site with Google AdSense has improved since I joined Crowd Mountain and applied the techniques learned.  I was not surprised by the results, as I’ve been viewing my Google AdSense revenue on a regular (ok, sometimes hourly!) basis, but it is interesting to see the improvements month-over-month.

Perhaps you recall me mentioning a few times that I have a site that uses Google AdSense ads to generate revenue.  This particular site won’t convert anything else.  I’ve tried Amazon products, eBay auctions, and Clickbank products.  The earnings on all of those is pathetic.  But, for some reason, people like the AdSense ads.

If AdSense is what works, who am I to question things?  After taking many months to confirm that Google AdSense is the right product for this site, I have worked to improve my earnings.  Much of the improvement in earnings is the result of what I’ve learned at Crowd Mountain.  Those efforts have pushed this site up to the #3 spot in Google for the keyword phrase I am targeting.  The traffic to this site has increased dramatically because of this, which makes sense.  This site is currently flirting with the #2 spot, and I hope to get there within the next month or two.

What Are the Changes?

I took snapshots of this site’s AdSense earnings from the first of the year until now (I probably should have done this at the end of July, to see how this month ends, but I can estimate that I’ll earn around $140 for July).  Here is a visual breakdown of each month for 2009:

January 2009 (averaged $2.12 per day, total earned  for month $65.62)

February 2009 (averaged $1.45 per day, total earned for month $40.63)

March 2009 (averaged $0.94 per day -- joined Crowd Mountain this month, total earned for month $29.20)

April 2009 (averaged $2.50 per day, total earned for month $74.86)

May 2009 (averaged $2.77 per day, total earned for month $85.79)

June 2009 (averaged $3.57 per day, total earned for month $107.09)

July 2009 (averaged $4.12 per day, through 07/21/2009, 8:57 am, total earned for month so far $86.42)

As you can see, the earnings were floundering in the range of $1 per day January through March.  Then, come April, there has been a steady increase each month.   I am very curious to see where July will end up.

Also, the totals for June are not completely accurate.  I removed Google AdSense ads for about one week while I made one final attempt at seeing if I could convert a Clickbank product.  It didn’t, so I put the AdSense back on the site.  June’s earnings would have been a bit higher had I not done this.

As you can see, the things I have done since joining Crowd Mountain have made a difference on this site.  There was a huge jump in traffic starting in April (when my Crowd Mountain efforts started kicking in), as well as a huge jump in monthly earning.  I can’t wait to see how my earnings improve after I get this site up to the #2 spot in Google!

Site Improvements Made that Increased Earnings

Some time last week I came across someone’s blog that offered information on how to increase AdSense click-through rates.  I meant to bookmark the page, but didn’t and now I can’t find it again.  That’s too bad, because it was excellent information and I really wanted to checkout the rest of the blog.  Oh, well.

Fortunately, I did what the blog’s author suggested before I lost the page.  Would you believe that, in my site’s case, it worked literally overnight?  The results were immediate!  It has now been a week, so I feel confident that the changes I am seeing are the result of my tweaking, as opposed to an unrelated spike in things.

The changes I made were simple, but effective.  The following are the changes I made:

• Removed clutter.  Sure that sounds simple, but take a look at your own sites and remove anything that could distract a visitor from your AdSense ads.  I removed everything from my sidebar except the site’s categories.  I removed various plugins that showed related posts, etc.  I removed all non-AdSense ads.
• Changed the number of posts showing on the “Home” page to one post.  This is a continuation of removing clutter.  If people have to scroll waaaaay down to see all posts, they stop seeing ads.  Now, I have just a single post, which leaves little need for scrolling.  And, if they do need to scroll, they are likely to view the site’s footer, which leads to the third change I made.
• Added AdSense ads to the footer.  The footer is valuable real estate that is underused in most cases.  People are accustomed to looking down there for things like the “Home” link and sitemap.  Add a text ad unit, that blends with the rest of the footer, and you have increased your chances at more clicks.
• Changed the size of primary ad unit.  There are only two ad units on this site: one in the footer (which I just added last week) and one in the content area of any given post.  This is my main ad, as it gets most visual airtime, so to speak.  This ad is positioned to be displayed at the beginning of a post, aligned to the left.  The reason for this is because we read from left to right, so this is the first thing the eyes will see.  Previously, I had been using the 250 x 250 ad block.  But after doing some research, I found that people had better luck with larger ad blocks, so I changed it to the 336 x 280 ad block.

Of course, I made sure each ad unit blends with the colors of the site.  This is usually important, but sometimes a blaring contrast will also work (if you do this, test it to see if it performs better than an ad that blends with your site).

First, here are the earnings for this site, day by day, prior to my making the suggested changes:

And here are the day by day stats since I made those changes (up to about 8:50 am this morning):

I would like to comment on the stats from Monday (yesterday), July 20th, which took a huge dip.  Yesterday I decided to change the background image for this site.  Prior to this change the site had a floral background (the one that comes with FlexSqueeze, if any of you are using that theme).  It is a pretty, subtle background with a light pink color under it.  It is not very noticeable.

The change I made was to use a food image.  It was MUCH more noticeable than the floral background.  I am not sure if this change accounts for the drop in the click-through ratio (ctr), but I switched back to the floral background this morning, and the ctr has already gone back up.  If the drop in ctr yesterday was related to the background change, then my guess is that the food image was too distracting.

If I remember to do so, I’ll post an update with how July’s AdSense earnings end up.

For those of you who use Google AdSense, what have you done to increase your earnings?

Edit: I made the mistake of including images from my AdSense account, which I now realize is against Google’s TOS.  I have removed them to remain compliant.  Sorry if some of what I wrote doesn’t make sense without the images…

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