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.

Google posted a notice on their AdSense Blog today regarding “Payment Holds” on accounts. Basically, the new threshold of $10, as opposed to the old one of $100, is not automatically releasing the funds to the publisher and there have ben some complaints.

Seriously, if you are doing AdSense and you’re complaining that your $10 check hasn’t been sent yet – you’ve got more problems on your hands. $10 isn’t what you should be making a quarter or a month, you should be doing that a MINIMUM per day in AdSense. Otherwise, why are you wasting your time reading this?!?!

This is a summary of what Google posted on their AdSense Blog.

First things first: eCPM is the metric of the expected revenue from every 1,000 page impressions. Of course, the higher the number, the better. If you run AdSense across multiple sites and industries, you will see this number vary widely. I always recommend spending your time doing SEO on the pages with strong eCPM.

Okay, now let’s get into the fluctuating revenue numbers …

1) Look at the page impressions. Simple enough, but sometimes overlooked. Your revenue could be bouncing because your traffic levels are bouncing. Check your analytics for clues as to why your traffic is bouncing.

2) Check your pages for “unpaid” ads (PSAs). If these are showing up, that could be the reason for your page view decline. If you have quite a few PSAs showing, one of the best ways to fix it is with a statement in your robots.txt file. Simply add this to the top:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:

By giving the media bot full access to your site, the PSAs often disappear within the hour. This tip doesn’t come from Google, but from our testing labs.

3) You should be using Google Webmaster Central in order to diagnose potential issues with how your site is being crawled.

4) Check the cache of the home page to ensure your site is being crawled regularly.

5) A CTR drop could indicate an issue with site structure, or with repeat visitors who are “tuning out” the ads. You may wish to use Google’s Website Optimizer to shift the AdSense block to test for staleness of your page design. You can check out Google’s Best Practices Tips.

6) Setup Custom Channels so you know exactly where the drop off is occurring so it can be addressed properly.