Do lower AdSense revenues make you blue?

Small and not-so-small webmasters alike are currently feeling the financial crises pinch all the way down into their daily AdSense earnings with lower than average eCPM numbers making it next-to-impossible to bring in a decent monthly pay even when tens of thousands of (hopefully valid) clicks being registered.

In fact, some bloggers believe it’s Google’s fault and that they’re keeping a larger share of the money that, in their view, usually goes to publishers but that explanation doesn’t add up. It could be (nobody knows for sure) but it just doesn’t feel right.

The more logical explanation has to do with basic supply and demand.

The supply of advertising space, namely in blogs like this one, have been growing steadily over the last months. That means advertisers are presented with more choices than ever before, within AdWords. So the supply side, meaning the countless AdSense Publishers, is busting at the seams.

On the other hand, advertisers are likely to hold back on frivolous spending, such as AdSense, resorting to local TV and radio spots or going back to specialty publications… offline. Even if these advertisers stick with AdSense, they’re likely to ease on the PPC budget they allow Google to manage so that, in turn, makes for lower revenues downstream… towards publishers.

So what can publishers do to push up their AdSense revenues in these times of financial crisis?

A lot of things, surely but here are a few…

• Display your ads as close to the top of your page as possible — it appears Google, through some secret wizardry nobody can be quite sure about, awards more revenue to publishers putting their ads at the top, where all visitors can clearly see them;
• Have less ad zones — this will filter out the less lucrative ads and only display those that pay the most. It might be risky since less visitors might see the ads but perhaps it’s worth a shot;
• Go for colors that work for you — lots of AdSense ads still display using the “generic” Google-blue. Keep in mind that “ad blindness” is more likely to happen with this configuration even if you feel “visitors will be comfortable with colors they know”, you also risk that they won’t see them, at all;
• Redesign your page layout — how your site looks makes a significant difference in the number of clicks you’ll get so make sure to put a lot of time to make your AdSense-bearing site as appealing as possible;
• Link to other nice folks — especially if you operate a blog, linking with other blogger buddies will do wonders for your visitor count… and theirs.

Being blue because of lower AdSense revenues just doesn’t fix the basic problem: a much lower monthly check.

To cure these (probably temporary) blues, you must take action.

Google provides you with limited metrics about what’s really going on, clickwise but savvy publishers have a sixth sense to juice as many details as they can from those numbers by using channels and testing various advertising scenarios. This improves their knowledge of how AdSense rewards certain types of scenarios instead of others.

The financial crises Wall Street has basically engineered (from way back) and for which we feel a painful pinch now might take a few months (or even years) to wane away but as long as it hangs over our heads, publishers need to become even more creative in finding ways to stabilize and hopefully increase their revenues.

Good luck to all the good publishers out there who feel bad about getting less money for their hard work. Hang in there, there seems to be lots of light at the end of this tunnel.

Tags: adsense, google adsense, adwords, google adwords, publishers, advertisers, pay-per-click, ppc, daily adsense revenues, monthly adsense check, publishing content, adsense blues, revenue blues

2 Responses to “Do lower AdSense revenues make you blue?”

1. analogstuff says:

   March 10, 2009 at 2:15 am

   Thanks for your suggestions.

   I will try to implement some of them to see wether my AdSense-based revenues will improve.

   I have had my worst year with AdSense so far with a 75-80% reduction in the earnings, even though I have almost the same number of page views.
2. Economico says:

   April 30, 2009 at 2:35 pm

   Publishers can also look for selling directly ad space on their blogs/sites to advertisers. This way, you can get higher and constant CPM, and make this crisis and opportunity to build a long term trust relationship with one or two advertisers.

   You can also try different ad networks other than adsense, or affiliate programs. Months before, ecpm from those ad network were too low to compete with adsense, but now their cpm could be the same or higher. In my case, I use an ad manager to get impressions data, and an excel worksheet to calculate cpm from different ad networks.