5 Reasons For Low AdSense Earnings

Ad style and location on the page are crucial to improve click-through rates. Sometimes even a small change can boost earnings significantly. The key to success is make one change at a time, track the increase or decrease in revenue and then move on to the next tweak.

Here are 5 reasons your ads might not be making you the money they should – and what to do about it.

1. You Don’t Have Enough Visitors

Not having enough traffic to your site is guaranteed to keep your earnings hovering around the disappointing level. That means you need fairly large numbers of visitors to start making a meaningful amount of money.

Suppose the average click on your site gets you $0.10. That means you need ten clicks to make one dollar. If your average click through rate is 3% you can make $0.60 for every 100 visitors or $6 per 1000.

If your site is based around a topic where the ads pay more – and there are many topics where the payout is higher than ten cents – you can make more money with less visitors.

But the principal still applies. A good flow of traffic is a vital part of earning revenue – whether through advertising, affiliate marketing, or selling your own product.

Read: Ways To Increase Blog Traffic

2. You’re Accidentally Attracting Low-Paying Ads

Not all user clicks are created equal. Imagine two companies – one sells greenhouse seeds, the other patio covers. Seeds sell for very little. This means the seed advertiser will never pay much for an ad click because he makes very little back on a sale.

On the other hand, the patio cover advertiser makes a lot more profit per sale so it’s worthwhile spending more for ad clicks. Here are the actual figures for those keywords taken from the AdWords Keyword Tool (Adwords is the advertiser side of AdSense):

greenhouse seeds $0.51

patio covers $3.16

Most of the time AdSense displays ads based on the content around the ad unit. So if you have a gardening blog and you’ve been writing posts about greenhouse seeds you’ve accidentally been attracting low-paying ads. Writing posts about more expensive items every once in a while will boost your income as your blog starts displaying ads with higher paying clicks.

Use the AdWords tool or take a look on Amazon to see which are the more expensive products or services that relate to the topic of your website.

3. You’re in a Low-Paying Niche

An extension of the problem above is when the entire niche is full of low-paying ads. A good example of such a market is games. There’s no shortage of users wanting to play casual web-based games but the click payouts for AdSense are extremely low, making it hard to make a good income with a games site using AdSense alone.

If you’re in this situation, it might be worth look into an alternative to AdSense or making money with a completely different system like affiliate program.

4. Your Ad Units Have a Low Click Through Rate

High-paying ads won’t earn you cash if no one clicks on them. As a general rule, ads perform better when they’re above the fold – in the upper part of the page, so they’re visible without scrolling.

a) Best Ad Sizes

AdSense offers a large selection of ad sizes but you’ll find some are better earners than others. What will work best depends on your site design & layout but here are some examples of positions and sizes that have worked well for me and other publishers over the years.

Recommended: How Many AdSense Ads are Allowed per Page

336×280 – Large Rectangle

160×600 – Wide Skyscraper

My experience has been that the Large Rectangle works the best for most sites. It’s quite a large ad block so it’s not always easy to make it fit into a site design without it being overpowering. Good place to put this size ad is just below the post title of your blog.

Read: How to Put Adsense Ad Below Post Title

b) Experiment With The Ad Style

The default styles applied to new ad units generally work ok but you should definitely spend some time experimenting to find a look that brings in a little more money. Often a small change to the look can increase your CTR, and therefore your earnings, quite considerably.

Don’t use a border: You can remove the border by making the color the same as your page background.

Set the URL color to black: The default is green and changing it to black often improves the ad performance.

Make the Link Color Match Your In-Content Links: If you’re using a non-standard blue color for links within your content, set the ad units to use the same color. The idea is to make your AdSense units blend in more with the content and look less out of place.

Don’t be afraid to experiment with techniques to combat ad-blindness (users subconsciously expecting to see ads in a particular location and ignoring it).

5. You’re Not Making Your Ad Units “Targeted”

Make sure your best-performing ad units have ad channels associated with them. It’s a great way keep track of the styles and placements that work best on your site. You can also connect your AdSense account with your Google Analytics account to see exactly which pages generate the most of revenue.

When you create your channel, make sure you select the Targeting option. This allows advertisers to more easily find your site when they’re setting up their campaign in AdWords.

Also Read: 20 Ways to Boost Your Google Adsense Revenue