You’re the type of person who doesn’t settle for “good enough.” In fact, your ears quiver, just a little, if someone within a 10-mile radius mentions the word “optimized.” We know, it’s okay. You are in a safe place with like-minded people. Now if you are also familiar with Google AdSense control panel then this is the post for you.
1. Fix invalid traffic
Since 2015, Google began to include a line in its monthly income report. The line “Invalid traffic – AdSense for content” that reduces your income. Sometimes it is a negligible sum. And sometimes it can be a significant part of your income stream.
If you keep getting invalid traffic, you’ll keep losing money. And if there is too much, your account could be suspended. Even if you don’t know where the heck these invalid clicks are coming from.
So what can you do?
- Happier! Google will penalize you if your page has more ads than content. Be sure to balance the two, as this can also affect your audience of repeat users.
- Keep an eye on social media traffic – AdSense just doesn’t like it. Google prefers viewers who come from their search engine (oops, I wonder why) or from pages they landed on through it. They especially dislike paid traffic that is not paid through the platform it came from (such as paid posts in massive Facebook groups or paid retweets by bots).
- Last but not least, Google contact. What if you’re not doing anything wrong and the traffic you’re getting is real, legitimate, and actually clicks? You may be the victim of a barrage of clicks from your competitors.
2.Categories lock
Blocking or unblocking categories in AdSense can affect your earnings. How much effect and how? that’s a bit more complicated…
Some categories have higher CPCs, while others have higher CTRs. The main question is: how do you maximize RPM with category lock/unlock?
Look at the reports under “Allow and block ads” to check which categories are performing poorly. Categories with high impressions but low revenue are the ones you should try to block, at least temporarily.
Sure, it will reduce competition over your ad placements, but it will allow you to find the right ads and advertisers.
3. Hacking Smart Pricing for Higher CPCs
Many publishers seemed petrified by Google AdSense’s smart pricing algorithm. This algorithm tries to ensure that advertisers get their money’s worth when they advertise on the publisher network.
So make Google’s smart pricing work for you, not against you. Block unprofitable categories. Place ads in places where they won’t be accidentally clicked and do everything you can to drive traffic that leads to conversions. Not just cheap views that don’t convert into customers.
But how do I know what traffic will convert?
You need to “reverse engineer” the classic customer journey and provide content that can be used as part of that journey.
Think about how your websites can fit into the customer journey, and tailor your content to match.
4. Custom channels
To attract expert advertisers and granularly track ad unit performance, you’ll want to use custom channels, if you haven’t already.
Custom channels allow you to create unique ad groups or placements that advertisers can target directly. By giving advertisers this ability, you increase competition for your ad space.
If you’ve yet to set up custom channels in your AdSense account, we’ve got a guide to walk you through it. If you’re not sure it’s worth the investment of time, you still want to read this guide. It will probably convince you to create those custom channels in your AdSense account.
5. Sticky and Streaming Ads
Every newbie to website monetization knows: at the top of the fold is gold. But it’s fool’s gold. This is why.
The mid-page ad is usually one of the first things a visitor sees when they land on your page. Ads are made to be attractive. But the viewer didn’t visit your page to see the ads and can’t afford to forget about it.
How do you solve this?
Sticky Ads (also known as Floating, Sticky, and Floating) and Incoming Ads. The right mix of ads that follow users as they scroll, and inbound ads that give users “exit points” in content is the path to higher RPMs. You can learn more about that in our post on ways to apply that extra pressure to AdSense for more revenue.
6. Optimize for size
What if you got a dollar for every time someone told you that it’s crucial that you optimize for mobile? You probably don’t even need to monetize your content anymore. Or work. Ever. But that’s not exactly what we’re saying here.
Depending on your website theme or settings, you can create different layouts for different devices. Responsive pages will always place ads in the wrong places, so you want to be aware of that to maximize mobile revenue.
So what you can do instead is hide ads that perform less well on mobile when the device is a tablet or smartphone. Next, add a mobile-only ad unit that shows only on mobile devices and is optimized for mobile layout.
7. Advanced geographic targeting
Some countries and places have higher CPCs than others. For example, the UK, US, Canada, and Australia all get much higher CPCs than Africa or India.
If you have a blog in Italian or German, you can consider adding an English section for higher CPC views. And you will have to look for high-priced niches in your area.
Assuming your content site is in English, you want to do everything you can to attract traffic from higher paying countries. This means that your audience acquisition efforts need to be focused there and attract the interests of people in the region.
How do you check which countries pay the most? See countries in your AdSense performance reports. And drive more traffic from the highest CPC locations you can see.
8. Use AdSense asynchronous code
In 2015, Google introduced asynchronous ad code to help publishers reduce the load time of their pages with ad units on them.
9. Optimization
Our last piece of advice is to always be testing. According to our experience in the monetization of various niches, if there is an optimization to take, it is always testing. In fact, we took this one step further and created a test ecosystem to make the entire AdSense CTR optimization process easy and fast.
