Home » Google Adsense » [Case-Study] How to Improve Adsense Earnings and CPC and CTR in 2015 even if traffic is less than 1k per day

[Case-Study] How to Improve Adsense Earnings and CPC and CTR in 2015 even if traffic is less than 1k per day

Palla Sridhar

Google Adsense is a favorite ad-publishing program for bloggers and SMBs to earn money online. The concept is simple. If some user of the Internet visits your website and clicks the ads on that post, the publisher or blogger is paid on a CPC or CPM or CPE model.

For this, the blogger has to register for Adsense and insert the Ad code in the post. Then Google depending on the context and relevance will start displaying the ads.

In theory it looks good, but in practice to get a formidable revenue, you need good traffic. That too, you require Organic traffic.

Mostly users coming from Google, Bing, Yahoo or any other search engine are the real customers for generating Adsense revenue. People have tried different black-hat techniques like clicking their own ads and asking friends to click and got their account closed.

So unless you write very engaging and useful content in the view of the audience, your post is less likely to get good rankings in search engines.

Since rankings are directly proportional to the Adsense income, bloggers thrive different ways to get to the top spot of Google for a keyword.

Alternatively, there are different ways by which you can use your existing traffic to get more Adsense Income. You can research Google for some of these ways to increase your Adsense earnings.

ATF Ads, Size, Location Matter

If your traffic is less than 1k per day, you should put less Adsense Ads on your blog post. As a thumb rule, it’s convenient to say that your income will increase in the pyramid style.  For example, $1 per 1k visitors, $10 per 10k visitors, $100 per 100k visitors etc etc. This is only a general rule and most of it depends on niche, CTR, CPC of the ad and many more parameters.

It has become the norm for many big websites and bloggers to place important ads ATF. Its stands for Above The Fold. That is, place the ads, where the audience first see your page. This is generally above the site title, below the post title, after 1^st paragraph.

With my experience, I can say that these type of ads, produced best CTR and CPC.

Coming to the size of the ads, Adsense offers different sizes to fit your needs. There are different ad slot sizes like 728×90, 336×280, 320×100, 300×250, 160×600, 300×600 etc. There are also link units. The sizes mentioned above are recommended by Google itself. So better stick to these sizes as they generate more clicks and CPC.

In my experience, the 300×250 and 728×90 sized ads, produce the best of income, if your traffic is less than 1k.

Coming to location, it’s always better to blend your ads with the content. If you are placing your ads inside the content, better place them to the left. This will attract more audience and give more clicks. Also it’s preferable, that you don’t place all your ads in one place. Instead sprinkle them at the top, middle and bottom of your posts.

Get Organic Traffic from US, UK and European Countries

I can definitely say that if you get your blog ranked well enough in Google.com or Google.co.uk or any other European country, you can definitely get better CPC and CTR from your ads.

For example, one of my sites which is getting traffic from India has only an average CPC of $0.12 while another site getting traffic from US, UK, Canada etc has better CPC like $0.65. This shows the power of consumerism.

Since Western audience are more likely to buy products online and pay higher, advertisers are also inclined to pay higher for the ad bids.

One of my Tech niche sites, which was started in 2010, has organic traffic of less 1k per day. But most of this traffic is coming from US, India, UK, Canada like countries due to which the CPC is high.

As you can see above, if the organic search is higher, than only you can reap benefits from Adsense earnings. This is my view as a small-time and general part-time blogger. If you have more monetary resources, people may suggest other methods of increasing direct traffic and gain financial profits from such traffic.

But if you don’t want to invest much money initially, then organic customers are your ‘gods’ and their traffic is valuable to increase your adsense earnings almost instantly.

There is also a misconception that more social traffic can bring you more Adsense income. Though I still cannot be convinced by this myth, with my experience, I can say that social users don’t much contribute to your online income.

They are only for promotion of your affiliate products or for discussing your posts which will give better engagement. So better the organic traffic, better will be the Adsense income for sure.

Keyword Research as a Weapon

I have already tweeted and shared my different blogs posts which emphasizes the need of good keyword research. There are many tools in the market that does good keyword analysis. But my favorite is SEMrush, as it gives a clear picture of your competitors’ keywords, their CPC and competition.

SEMrush.com. The clue to secrets of all your competitors.

Once you know a keyword which has high CPC and high volume and less competition, you will rank well in search engines, once you write a good article.

On the contrary if you write a quality article for a high competition keyword, you also need to do better off-site SEO like link-building in-order to improve prospects for better Adsense income.

So if you can target the right keywords, your CPC and CTR will also be higher, provided the content is of quality and useful to the audience.

How I Improved Google Adsense Earnings [Case-Study]

Though I don’t want to reveal the two sites for which my case-study stands. I would tell you that one is in “Windows” or “Tech” niche, while the other is “Health” Niche. I would like to compare the statistics for Sept 2014 and Jan 2015 for both of these sites.

 If you observe the Adsense reports for September 2014 and January 2015, there is almost double the increase in earnings. If you keenly observe the difference, there is also a variation in the size of ads. In Sep-2014, the most revenue bringing ad-size was 336×280. But this changed in Jan-2015. Here the 200×90 ads were the most money making ad-units.

Also if you observe in both the months, the CPC of 200×90 units was the maximum. In Sep-2014, it was around $0.80 while in Jan-2015 it was around $0.25 far greater than the other ad-units. So we can conclude that the link-ad-units when properly placed can generate good income.

The following is the country-wise traffic for Jan 2015 for a Tech website in GA

Country-Wise- Location Traffic for a Health Site in Jan 2015 in GA

If you can observe the traffic trends of Jan-2015 for the Tech site and Health Site, there is considerable difference in the traffic and also the location from which the traffic is being generated.

The health site was generating more clicks but less CPC. On the contrary, the tech site was producing less clicks but better CPC. This is a good indication that traffic from Western countries will generate better CPC.

The following is the traffic for a Tech site from different countries in Sep 2014

Country wise traffic for a health site in Sep 2014 in GA.

As you can observe the traffic for Sep-2014, there is less traffic compared to Jan-2015. This also gives impetus to the point, that more the traffic more is the adsense income. This can be observed from the comparison of Adsense earnings in Jan-2015 and Sept-2014.

Conclusion

So as a general matter of fact we can conclude, that by following the above 3 good principles, you can improve Adsense earnings considerably, even if the traffic is less than 30k per month. You should target keywords that have high CPC and have good organic source from countries like US, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany and Japan.

In the next article, I’ll share a secret tip, by which I was able to optimize my Adsense earnings. So subscribe to this blog and keep your-self updated, so that you can learn more tricks and tips on Adsense earnings and SEO.

If this case-study helped you gain knowledge, better share it with your friends on social-circles, as that will give me more momentum to write such articles.