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(Any figures – such as CPC, eCPM, EPC, CTR, monthly earnings – are imaginary in this article! They have been proportionally calculated to reflect my own situation, but one should not consider them real!) – Google AdSense doesn’t allow publishers to share details about their revenue

I have decided to share the latest things I learned quite by accident about Google AdSense. A few weeks ago my AdSense revenue fell for some unknown reason. The decrease was a massive 10.83%, which means if you earn (on average) £3,300 per month, you suddenly earn only £2,950 after such a negative shift. In fact, £350 here or there doesn’t hurt, but any loss should be considered as a deficit. No matter if you’re doing nothing but enjoying the life, or if you’re hardly investing money into new features or content, a 10% decrease in revenue is disappointing. Moreover, my problem wasn’t caused by negative trends in traffic.

So, I had to end all investments and say “stop” to people who worked for me. After days of analysing the problem I decided to make the following changes:

1) All CSS links became blue and underlined,
2) I stopped using 3 AdSense ads, and instead I started using only 2 ads per page,
3) Colours of AdSense links and URLs became blue too.

After these modifications, the trend of falling revenue ended. Everything became normal again, but why?

Firstly, using the same colours and underlining for ordinary links and Google AdSense ads (as far as I know AdSense links come underlined automatically) tells a visitor that both links are links. Imagine an extreme case, if you use black underlined text on your website: ordinary text is underlined, as are links. People struggle to distinguish what is a link and what is not. So, the best thing is to use the same colours for every link. Links must be uniform, and must look clickable. This didn’t cause any serious CTR increase (because before, links still looked like links; I simply made them consistent).

The biggest change came with removing a single ad unit. Basically, I removed the best earning ad unit. This doesn’t seem to make sense, but I had to do this, since that ad unit wasn’t a part of the content. I should tell you that average per-click earning was less than 6p before that change. After the change, the average increased to about 9p. I was surprised to find that removing the best-earning ad not only increased the average EPC (earning per click), but also didn’t negatively affect CTR! The second best-earning ad became the best-earning one, and the average CTR value fell by just 1-1.5%.

Why did the removal of the ad lead to higher revenue?
Advertisers in Google AdWords bid on each keyword/phrase and Google determines how much a click is worth. Of course, if advertisers specified a maximum CPC in their campaigns, then clicks cannot cost more than this value. On the other hand, since it’s a bidding system, the usual CPC is lower than the maximum offered amount. Imagine this situation: on your web pages you show one ad unit, say 160×600. Also say that there are four links in that ad. Thanks to the fact that only 4 links can be shown per page, only the highest bids are shown. I’m not an AdWords engineer, but the final value of click can be calculated this way: if the lowest bid out of these 4 links is £1.30, then the third link will be worth £1.30 + something(1). And the second link will be worth £1.30 + something(1) + something(2). And logically, the first link will be worth £1.30 + something(1) + something(2) + something(3). It’s just a simple example. All something(x) values are in dollars and are under the control of Google AdWords’ algorithms.

So, the publisher will likely earn more, and advertisers will pay more. Now imagine a different situation: you show 3 ads per page (for simplicity’s sake say that each is a 160×600 ad, and that each ad contains 4 links). So, it’s 12 links in total. Now, that £1.30 value is automatically lower due to the higher number of links shown. This is why showing 1 or 2 ad units generates more money than placing 3 ad units per page. On pages with small content I recommend you use only 1 ad unit.

Always remember that the best way to increase your AdSense revenue is, was, and always will be by increasing organic traffic!

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