If you’re an AdSense publisher, you have already felt the pinch this year with lower overall performance in AdSense. For example, in looking at my stats from last month and from January 2008, my eCPM dropped from $12.63 to $7.97. Clicks are down and revenue per click is down too.

It is just painful.

A conversation over at Webmaster World started over what is having the most success with AdSense these days: Older “abandoned sites” or newer, fresher sites?

I thought I would take the comments made in the post and run them through my test domains to see if any of the “theories” stuck:

Theory #1: Don’t change your content. If the content doesn’t change AdSense has time to learn what ads work really well.
Reality: False. Changing your content on a single page results in the ads changing, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. The AdSense Media spider from Google is extremely fast, and for the most part, intelligent. Leaving “stale” content has no bearing on earning more or getting better ads over time.

Theory #2: Updated sites result in poorly converting traffic.
Reality: False. If you have a news site with fresh content each day vs. a site based on a hobby which ads very little new content, it is not going to hurt your AdSense revenues.

Theory #3: An unchanged site is deemed better/more trustworthy.
Reality: Um, no. Enough said.

After reviewing over 120 of my test domains with AdSense, I found no correlation between new sites, old sites, updated sites, stale sites, etc.

The bottom line with AdSense is as follows:

1) AdSense is one of the worst performing “affiliate programs” out there.
2) AdSense should be used to “supplement” your business, not be the main component. In other words, use AdSense as an option instead of buying your product or clicking on your affiliate link.
3) Use your AdSense check to fund your PPC campaigns.
4) Use the Firefox Plugin to view potential AdSense ads on your pages before injecting the code to ensure the ads are going to be relevant.
5) Block known competitors you don’t want listed on your pages in the Control Panel.
6) If your CTR is lower than 3% that means your “ad placement” is getting “stale” on your site and you need to shake things up a bit.
7) The more ad blocks you serve the more diluted your earnings will be. Consider serving AdSense and banners from other networks to boost revenues. You can also serve banners from your own affiliate programs to further boost revenues.
Targeting local searches will increase revenue per click.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 1st, 2009 at 11:53 am and is filed under AdSense, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.