For those of us using Google AdSense, there's little doubt that our blogs are designed to generate revenue from advertising but part of the difficulty of generating money from ads is that Google decides how much money to pay for the ad placement based on a number of criteria including both what type of content our blog displays and our Click Thru Rate of the ads.
We can only control the type of content we write to a limited degree, after all my blog here is about online marketing and it would seem out-of-place for me to write about mortgages or medical insurance, regardless of the value of those keywords but what I can control is my Click Thru Rate (CTR) or at least I can influence it.
Why Getting a Better Click Thru Rate for Google AdSense Matters
Getting a better CTR for Google AdSense is critical if you want each click on your website to have a high value this is because Google uses a technology on their website to adjust the price of your ads if they feel your site is under performing. They call it SmartPricing but what it really does is lower your ad revenue based on their formulas.
Google's smart pricing feature automatically reduces greatest cost-per-click (CPC) bids for certain pages in the Google Network across both desktop and mobile devices with full internet browsers.
Google is constantly analyzing data across the Google Network. If our data shows that a click from a Google Network page is less likely to turn into an actionable business result – such as an online sale, registration, phone call, or newsletter signup – we may reduce the bid for that site. – Google AdWords Support
The result for your blog is dramatic, two similar blogs that are running similar content can receive revenues 10 times less from being placed in SmartPricing. That means that your site could be losing 90% of its revenues, simply because your CTR is too low.
With that in mind, what we know about online advertising is that new visitors are more likely to buy from advertisers than established, loyal visitors and that Google uses not only CTR but also business results (such as an online sale, registration, phone call, or newsletter sign-up) to measure your cost-per-click value. So, what we need to do is remove Google AdSense ads from two categories of people:
- Our Loyal Readers – these are readers who have us bookmarked and come to the site repeatedly, since they don't click ads anyway they're lowering your CTR
- Readers of High Volume Articles – these are readers who come in on a DIGG or StumbleUpon article, they're not likely to click ads and are also lowering your CTR
In fact, the only place we really want to show Google AdSense articles are on pages that are read less often but by new readers, such as those who find older content via search engines and that's exactly who we're going to target as our market.
The Code to Increasing Our Click Thru Rate and Ad Value on Google AdSense
What this code is going to do is place our Google AdSense ads on older articles (anything over 15 days), where users are coming from a search engine. At first it may seem counter intuitive to limit to such a small window of users but remember, that's exactly what we're trying to do. We're using this code to exclude anybody who is unlikely to click our ads (loyal readers and readers of fresh content).
Now the piece of code that I'm about to post here isn't mine, it's from Cats Who Blog's article 10 Tips To Finally Make Money With Google Adsense, all I've done here is combine two of their code samples into one and add an alternative to make sure that it works properly. To use the code below you'll need to copy the two functions form Cats Who Blog into your functions.php file (Place Adsense ads on old posts only & Display Adsense to search engine visitors only) and add the code snippet below to your website (mine is in the sidebar) and you'll automatically display Adsense ads only to people coming from search engines on posts older than 15 days.
phpif (scratch99_fromasearchengine() && is_old_post()) {?>// your adsense code herephp } else { ?>// your non adsense code here
<?php } ?>
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It s look like good.
It's usefull cause It ‘s boring to see the same ads when you are surfing on your favorite websites.
I don't use to clic to googles ads, but I use to say that some website abuse of it;
Thanks for the tip, I will transmit it in french.