You can learn a bit more about the SEO topic from my online course.
1. Decrease your ad units count
Second and third ad spot clicks are not so-profitable as the first ones. Also when having 15 ad links on a page and the user clicks on only 1 then your eCPM will start to get low, because this way the advert impressions are growing but the clicks are staying the same.
2. Rearrange ad spots
Look at your AdSense performance tab: and if you have higher CPC on your middle positioned ad(ie it is getting more clicks) then place it to appear first in your HTML code, then re-position it with CSS to the place where it's getting those clicks.
3. Add more useful content to the page
You can use Google Analytics or other web statistics software to see the average time of stay on your pages. This way you might find the pages that need to be enriched or rewritten. And if you manage to increase visitors' stay time then your eCPM will surely grow!
Next, let's discuss how to increase your Adsense earnings by improving the eCPM ( RPM ) parameter.
4. Direct hits and RPM
By definition, RPM is ' the amount of revenue you can expect to earn from AdSense for every 1000 impressions shown on your site ' which is something totally different from how much 1000 impressions on your site actually cost!
And as you can see from this video:
in order to have high eCPM you'll have to ensure unique visitors are clicking on your ads.
But first, let's see how to recognize some of the actions that "repeated" users (or our direct traffic hits) perform. They usually:
- type the URL in the browser / open a new tab or access the URL from bookmarks.
- come from links found in email/newsletter, Word or PDF files.
- come from redirects (301 header redirect, javascript or meta refresh tags)
As you might have seen in the video above there's an inverse connection between your eCPM value and the traffic you have. In other words: receiving more mixed(not unique) traffic in effect will only lower your eCPM.
Filtering direct hits
So as you can see our first priority becomes not the obvious one to get more traffic in order to display more ads, but to display relevant ads to our organic public segment only ( i.e. users coming from search engine queries). This way we'll be displaying fewer ads, but the eventual incoming clicks are going be much more valuable.
Here is a simple PHP script that will filter out most of the direct hits and display advertisement only to users coming from google:
Assuming that your AdSense code is placed in the variable $ads;
<?if (strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], "google")) { echo $ads; }
?>
or the more generic one: displaying ads on the referral only traffic by filtering out hits generated from your own domain:
<?
$referer = parse_url($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']);
$my_domain = parse_url($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']);
if (!strstr($referer['host'], $my_domain['host'])) {echo $ads; }
?>
5. Increasing bounce rate
I know that this may sound very frustrating like everyone out there is suggesting just the opposite, but after watching the video you may start thinking about it.
6. Update your ads with the asynchronous version of the code
This will improve your page loading times as well as display the ads faster to the end-user. Just go to My ads, click on the preferred ad -> get code and from the select box choose the Beta async version.
7. Don't mix ad channels
If you are using 1 ad code in different websites placed at different positions this will interfere and alter the ad basic parameters, and with time will limit your overall cost per click value. This is especially true if you are using targeting options.
That's it, don't forget to write unique content and I hope this post helps you actually increase your AdSense earnings!
