The project: In the beginning (pt1)
The project: ... there was Silence. (pt2)
Pretty often I hear people complaining about how hard it is to generate revenue from low traffic websites. In this part of the case study I'm going trough some methods to increase AdSense revenue for low traffic sites (yes, I'm not going to talk on how to increase traffic, but how to utilize limited assets more efficiently).
The project site (Ringtone-Search) has been online about 2 months, and it is slowly beginning to accumulate visibility, traffic and online revenue. I'm still talking peanut figures here, as I have not found enough time to do anything large scale besides content writing. Below are some figures from last month:
- Visitors coming trough search engines: 150-200 unique visitors per month
- Visitors coming from other sources: 300-400 unique visitors per month
- Subscribers: some
Let's first issue how to improve the price per click factor.
- Target your content for high-paying keywords
In theory: This is simple maths. With 0.10 click payout, generating a 40 dollar income would require 400 clicks. With 0.50 click payout, generating a 40 dollar income would require only 80 clicks.
How this is done on project site: Most of the mobile related marketing is around paid premium content and cheap mobiles. I have nothing against these as they are a very good and profitable business as themselves. However, these have very limited qualifications on bringing up decent payouts for AdSense advertiser. Ringtones etc. are low priced (bulk) products, hence the low payouts... Instead I try to come up with topics from high paying services / industries and find out ways to embed these to site topic in an interesting and meaningful way. Sometimes it's hard work, sometimes it's easy... For example binding SEO and mobiles was easy catch with this article about Mobile Adsense.
- Write your content for high quality, niche markets
In theory: Niche markets are usually very mature and business oriented with selected interest of topics. And when I say business users, it means users with money and power to make decisions; target audience most serious advertisers dream and target for. Hence the payouts are good and it also shows in ad design (a relevant and good ad gets more clicks than a bad one)... As an added bonus, working with niche markets is easy and rewarding in SEO sense (so called long-tail keywords).
How this is done on project site: A good example is this post about mobile digital rights management. Topic is definitely niche (for the time being) and targeted for selected readers, but big business with some serious advertising.
Improving click count is a lot harder, as a lot relies on ad relevancy, ad design, season etc. outside factors. I think the average CTR for Adsense moves somewhere around 1% (meaning that in order to generate 40US$ a site should have 40,000 impressions with 0.10 payout per click or 8,000 impressions with 0.50 payout per click). By improving CTR to 2% or higher, site can generate the same income with half the traffic. So how to do this:
- Place focus on ad positioning
In theory: Track and follow until you find the most efficient ad positioning for your needs.
How this is done on project site: Instead of relying 3rd party tools (like AdLogger, see my previous entry) I used the channels option available on Adsense site. It's simple and provides necessary statistics to analyze situation for this kind of low traffic site.
So far I've tested 3 layouts and various ad sizes, and I think the current layout will stick for some time. It has CTR about 3x higher than the earlier attempts.
- Write content that attracts users in buyer mode
In theory: Users seeking information about a specific product are much more likely to click and buy something than those seeking for generic information.
How this is done on project site: Product reviews are a great example of this, for example take look at this Treo 650 review.
Hi,
Thanks for the useful information on adsense with low traffic.
Harris
I took at look at your ad placements at https://www.ringtone-search.net/mobile-future/...and your other pages. One quick think I would change is your light grey border. When using a border with your ads it screams.. "I'm an ad"... Just switch out your grey border with white so it matches the background of the page and I can almost gurantee it will boost your CTR. Another tip is to add an image next to one of the ads. It has been proven that our eyes look at pictures first on a page and then they look at the text on the page. I would suggest you try both and test and see if this helps boost the ammount of clicks you are getting.
Thanks for the comments WWIP,
Blending adsense (and other ads) is a double edged sword...Yes it can improve CTR, but it comes with a cost (somewhat spammy appearance, which can become expensive in future when in hunt of quality links). Also when considering the page target audience, I would be very cautious with this method; sometimes telling the audience "this is an ad" is more attractive than trying to blend it.
As for images, I agree with you. They are a good and very efficient method of catching attention with ad positioning (as long as you pay attention to Adsense TOS).
... as for methods not already mentioned on increasing CTR, I think better targeting is also worth mentioning. If ads are more related to site content and in interest of users, the more likely ctr will rise. One method for achieving this is defining content blocks for adsense in the code.
anyway, good night folks (it's past midnight in Finland)
PS. An interesting (but not Adsense related) story in series "blending gone bad" is Donna's experiment at Seo-Scoop ; I'm glad she got rid of the ads.
The other way to improve price per click is to identify the low payers and block them in your adsense account. ( -> "AdSense Setup" -> "Competitive Ad Filter" ) This can be risky, as it may leave you with no ads at times, and it isn't recommended but the technique exists.
Thanks for the comment leadeqroot,
I' well aware the technique but I left it out intentionally. It's simply too complex, time consuming and unsecure (to summarize: unefficient )to be of any real use in low traffic sites
Another very argued method I left out intentionally is becoming an AdWords publisher and creating pressure on specific keyword PPC prices. I know people who use this method with success, but IMO it's highly disaprovable and unfit for any SEO/M company (as there is a conflict of interests).
Leadegroot : I'm curious to know how you can identify low payers on your adsenses : by finding the words they bid on and check these words in Adwords ? or are there others ways ?
Hi Malaiac - you can add javascript to a page, within TOS, which catches most of the clicks and can write who they were to in a database. Then you can cross reference that with your Adsense data. Doesn't work with a high click site, as you end up knowing you had 10 click for $5, type-of-thing, which isn't useful for our purposes, but does give some information. Google is your friend :)