Google AdSense: How did I increase my AdSense Revenue with SAME CTR?

Sometime ago I was looking at my AdSense report and was disappointed looking at my CTR and the CPC values. I was totally clueless as to why would Ad clicks generate as low as $0.01 most of the time for weeks altogether. Searching on Google did not produce any definitive answer to my growing cause of concern. Some articles suggested that it happens most often during this time of the year while other suggested that it was due to lack of keyword rich content on the pages that was serving Ads. To me, lack of keyword rich content felt to be a little closer reason and worth taking a look at. I decided to dedicate a full 3 day work out, not writing any new article, and analyze the entire site [every single page]. The task seemed to be a pain but I wanted to get to the bottom of it. There was no other way anyway!

How and what did I analyze?

After doing some initial planning on drawing board, I came up with a simple 4 pointer for my site’s analysis.

1. Open every page on the site and check if it was displaying AdSense. [Or at least as many as pages I could]
2. Select random pages and check the type of Ads being displayed and if they were relevant to the content on the page.
3. Make a note of the Ads, type of Ads and their URLs which were common on different pages.
4. Check the log files and determine the top 20% pages with hightest page views for last 30 days and check those pages for the Ads being displayed and keywords in it.

At first, I clicked through each and every page on my site and looked at the Ads that were being shown on every page. I found all the pages of my site to be displaying AdSense Ads. Every page was showing text Ads and even the ones which were supposed to display only image Ads were doing so. The first task was completed in only few hours and there was no conclusion to be made as per the plan.

Next, I selected random pages to check if the Ads shown were relevant. I did not require lot of thinking on this one. Most of the pages were not showing relevant Ads. The Ads were related to computer industry but not any closer to the content than that. I concluded that Ads were not relevant to the content on most of the pages.

Third step was to make a note of all the Ads which were common to other pages. This one, by far, proved to be most productive step than the first two. I could see that there were 7 different Ads which literally dominated most of the pages on the site. It was as if those 7 Ads have been assigned to my site for ever. It was day one and I did wanted to arrive at a conclusion that sooner. I decided to keep an eye on this and check back the next day.

Last step was the most time consuming task. Since I use both Google Analytics and Mint on my site for tracking visitors, finding out the most viewed pages for last 30 days was not at all difficult. The pages which were most viewed were rich with keywords but most of the Ads were still the same ones which were shown on other pages. Conclusion - The pages were optimized as per Google guidelines, SEO tips that I had seen on many other sites and were all keyword rich.

Day Two - I repeated what I had done in step 3, and to my surprise, the same Ads which were shows the last day were still appearing on most of the pages. I concluded that my site was taken over by a group of Ads and they are not going to go away that sooner. Somehow, I felt that I should give it at least one more day and then arrive at a final conclusion.

Day Three - Step 3 again, and this time data points were so strong that I could conclude that it was that one group of Ads which was showing up on almost every page of my site, thus lowering the CPC value for the entire site. So, if someone were to click on any Ad on any page, chances were there that over 80% of the time the visitor would end up clicking on an Ad from the common group of Ads which had took over my site.

[Final Conclusion] - Irrespective of the CTR %, it was a bunch of common Ads which were producing very low cost per click revenue.

Look at the image below, all the three Ads shown are from the same site and [I guess] have very low click value. [No, I did not click on them to find where they lead me to, instead I checked the source of the page in some cases, and in other cases I typed the URL shown in the Ad, manually in a new window.]
AdSense Example Ad
Snapshot of AdSense Ad from this site.

[The solution] - I quickly sat down to fix this problem to free my site from the clutches of those annoying group of Ads that were all over my site. I randomly visited most of my pages and made a note of the URL. I could come up with 60+ such URLs which were either for a single page site, dedicated to AdSense or AdWords [also known as Made for AdSense] or an Ad for a personal home page of someone. I put them in ‘Competitive Ad Filtering’ under my AdSense account. I checked my site and revenue after 48 hours and I could see an improvement in the revenue. Since then, I have not seen those $0.01 clicks from this site’s AdSense Ads anymore and the minimum amount that now shows for any click is as low as $0.85

Going forward, I plan to repeat the whole exercise at least once every month to ensure that this does not happen again. And, I am sure if you check your site, you will find something similar going on too! Do let readers of this site and myself know if you find something similar. It will be of a great help.