Welcome back to the second part of our series designed to help you better understand revenue fluctuations. If you’re just joining us now, or if you’d just like to brush up on those reporting terms before we dive in again, feel free to visit our previous post from earlier in the week.Choose the right treatmentYou’re finished investigating the cause of the revenue fluctuations, and it’s time to take action. Find the symptom you identified below for suggested treatments.Page impression changesCheck for AdSense technical issues or public service ads (PSAs). If ads aren’t being served on your site, we aren’t registering page impressions.Don’t miss out on search traffic. Use Webmaster Tools to make sure that Google is properly crawling and indexing your site.Consider the promotions you have running for your site. Did an ad campaign end, causing a drop in traffic? Has a popular site linked to you, causing a spike in page impressions?CTR changesA drop in CTR can be caused by a user interface (UI) that’s not optimized or by poor targeting. Readers won’t click on ads they don’t see or find irrelevant. To improve the relevance of your ads, you might want to try section targeting.Check for crawl problems. If our system can’t crawl your page, we can’t serve relevant ads. If you’ve implemented or changed your ad server, check that there are no new targeting problems.Have you changed the look and feel of your site? Follow our optimization best practices whenever launching a site redesign. An easy way to start is to match the ad colors to the design of your site and choose a top performing unit such as the 300×250 medium rectangle.If your CTR has been in a slow decline, your readers may be experiencing ad blindness. Try testing new ad formats, placements, or colors.CPC changesCPCs are determined by advertiser bids and are not directly under publisher control. Most large CPC changes are seasonal. For example, certain ad verticals attract more spending during the holiday or back-to-school seasons.CPCs can also fluctuate as advertisers begin and end their advertising campaigns.You can always improve your CPCs by choosing ad formats that support all ad types: text, image, video, flash, and gadget ads. More competition means higher advertiser bids.Placement targeting revenue changesIf overall targeted revenue is changing, determine what your average placement-targeted revenue has been for the past few months. Your goal is to determine if the changes in your recent earnings are part of a trend or a short-term earnings fluctuation.
Publishers can experience spikes in placement-targeted revenue when advertisers run limited-time campaigns. For example, an advertiser may run a large placement-targeted campaign only during the opening week of a summer blockbuster movie.If you want to increase placement targeting over the long term, set up ad placements. This will make it easier for advertisers to find and target your site.Finally, two more things…Where are the changes happening?Many AdSense publishers run multiple websites or have site sections that perform very differently. For example, the article section of a cell phone review site may have a higher eCPM than the forums. Whenever you notice revenue changes at the account level, always determine which of your sites or sections is causing the change. You can set up URL and custom channels to track all the important parts of your account separately. Knowing exactly what is changing and where will allow you to make the smartest decisions about what to do.Taking seasonal fluctuation into accountTake a broader view and look for historical fluctuations in the metrics described above. Over the same time period last month or last year, you may find similar volatility in your eCPM, revenue, or page impressions. For example, you can compare the Mother’s Day performance of a flowers and gifts site for 2006 and 2007. Is your current account performance consistent with the previous time range? If so, the revenue change you’re investigating might reflect a recurring pattern.I hope this series will help you get the most out of AdSense, and the next time your revenue changes, I hope it’s for the positive.Posted by Christian Ashlock - AdSense Optimization Team
Which AdSense Rectangle Ad Performs Best?
Here’s a quick AdSense tip that could make you some good money.
AdSense offers two rectangle ad unit sizes - 300×250 pixels and 336×280 pixels.
These are both great ad units to use on your blog because they are not only available as text based ads but also image and video ones. Setting your ad units to show all formats of ads increases the potential number of advertisers that will ‘bid’ for your ad unit which drives up the potential CPM of the unit.
So which is best - 300×250 or 336×280?
One might think that the larger the ad the better it’s earnings will be - I mean having more of your screen real-estate dedicated to an ad increases the chances of it being clicked doesn’t it?As a result many bloggers go for the 336×280 ad.
However it can be well worth your while to test both ad unit sizes because there’s a good reason why the smaller ad unit can perform better for you - it’s more popular with advertisers.
336×280 might be bigger and increase the chances of being noticed - but 300×250 pixel ad units are more popular with advertisers wanting to run image/banner ads. It’s a standard size that many of them (particularly larger advertisers) produce (along with 728×90 sized ads) for online advertising. I spoke to one advertising agency representative recently who says that they’ve never made a 336×280 ad for any of their mainstream advertisers.
Split Test Your Ad Units
Of course it’s worth keeping in mind my regular advice of ‘ever blog is different’. I do have one blog where the larger rectangle ad unit out performs the smaller one. This blog doesn’t attract many image ads for some reason (I think it’s because it has a more local market with less advertisers) and the larger format works better for it with text ads. The moral to the story is to test both ad units and go with the best performing one.
Make Money Giving Away Free Resources
You may have noticed that there is a bit of a backlash in the blogosphere over Adsense and many people are looking for alternative methods to monetize their sites. The idea behind RevResponse is that you can profit from offering your visitors access to free business and tech resources. Your visitors get quality resources for free, you get paid, and the advertiser gains a contact. Sounds like everyone wins, right? Read the rest of this review to see if RevResponse is a viable Adsense alternative.
Make Money Online with RevResponse
Instead of pointing visitors toward potential competitors and unrelated websites, RevResponse is designed to provide visitors to your site with an opportunity to enjoy free resources. These include free magazine subscriptions, white papers, software trials, and podcasts. When they complete the provided registration form for any of these free resources, you get paid.
This may prove to be a particularly effective model for make money online blogs, because you can point visitors toward magazines and other resources that they may be interested in anyways. From their point of view, you’re offering additional value. It may or may not be perceived as an advertisement in the traditional sense, and as such, you could potentially enjoy a much better conversion rate.
The three steps to making money sound pretty straightforward, right? But how much money can you really make with RevResponse?
Profitability and Payment
With so many other advertising networks out there, why should you even consider signing up with RevResponse? Well, they guarantee a $1.50 minimum on every qualified subscription or request your audience generates. That’s guaranteed, but the FAQ says “it’s uncommon for a publisher to earn the bare minimum and you should expect to earn substantially more.” In fact, according to the email sent to John, the payout can be over $20 for each sign-up. That sounds reasonably lucrative, considering that most upstart CPC networks generate only pennies per click. You might find more lucrative affiliate marketing deals elsewhere though.
The default payment method is via check, but PayPal is offered as an alternative for any international “partners” or those who prefer instant payment. The minimum payout level is $25 and payments are sent approximately 45 days after the end of the month in which revenue is generated. I would have liked a faster turnaround.
Setting Up Your Ads
There are a variety of ad formats for you to choose from and these can be implemented on just about any website or blog. There are also creatives that are easily integrated into email campaigns and other advertising methods.
Using the Ad Wizard, you are able to choose from the usual smattering of ad space formats, including popular sizes like the 120×600 skyscraper, 300×250 box, and 468×60 banner. Alternatively, you can get the Ad Wizard to generate a custom paragraph, text link, or — perhaps the most dynamic — the flash widget.
That’s a live flash widget on the right. Visitors are able to select a category of interest and then immediately browse through the available resources in that category. As mentioned earlier, these resources range from free magazine subscriptions to eye-opening research reports. The flash widget is available in nine color schemes — blue, black, red, etc. — and three sizes: 120×240, 210×240, and 300×250.
You can further customize the widget by selecting whether visitors have access to a category chooser. In either case, you must select an “industry” to display initially. These range from agriculture to information technology.
Co-Branding For Non-Advertising
To further the “we’re not an ad” mentality at RevResponse, they are able to provide you with a co-branded website. They take the existing template for your site and then transform it into a portal for all these free resources. Here’s what Beyond the Rhetoric looks like as a RevResponse-ized site.
They say that this site is powered by TradePub and this is evidenced in the URI: btr-michaelkwan.tradepub.com. It’s actually reasonable effective, I think, because there is full navigation on the left and thumbnail images and descriptions for all the content. In fact, the click-throughs on your ad spots and flash widgets may link to your co-branded site instead of directly to a third-party.
Free Stuff Makes Money For You
The concept of RevResponse appears to be quite strong, especially since they guarantee a minimum payout of $1.50 per referred subscription or registration. The variety of ad types is quite useful and the co-branded site definitely adds some “non-ad” value.
One major aspect missing from the FAQ and other supplemental information is a preview of these ad spots. Potential “partners” want to see what they’re getting when they sign up, after all. Other than that, go ahead and give away free magazine subscriptions… and profit from doing so.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR REVRESPONSE