Adsense question/s

[iTopz]

Hi, I'm not after large explanations as this is for a hobby site which gets barely 50 viewers a day (perhaps this low number is the problem?)
As I understand it, with adsense, volume is king. You want as many visitors, which means they're more likely to click, meaning you're more likely to get paid.

So, I'm about 1000 page views in without a single click, £0.
This isn't completely rare for me, in the past I had about 2 sites with adsense and they averaged a click about once every 100 or so, which I believed is the average, so what is going wrong here?

Is there anything I can do to get people clicking which I am missing here?

Thanks!

 

[webgeek]

CTR is influenced by which size/type of ads you're displaying and where they're positioned, as well as color of links/background/border, etc. Varying these will make huge differences in your CTR.

Varying those will not turn a site with 1000 page views into a gold mine

 

[Chrisbridgett]

You want as many visitors, which means they're more likely to click, meaning you're more likely to get paid.

No, having more visitors doesn't make a visitor more likely to click. Having more visitors makes it more likely that you will get a click.

I wouldn't set your heart on making any kind of considerable income from Adsense. 90% of the sites that boast about having huge adsense income are just lying to get their adverts in front of you. It's best to create a website that offers some kind of service or other source of income which you can then supplement with ads.

Once you have such a site, take care in the design and layout of the site to have visitor's eyes drawn towards your ads and try to stave off 'ad blindness' by mixing things up every so often.

 

[Websitehandyman]

Well the last 12 month my adsense income has gone right down the drain. On even sites where the traffic is up. I've changed it so many times selecting and deselecting categories to try and spark it back to life in that time now I've just given up and started removing it and any google code from my own sites.

I now prefer to setting for either monthly banners or just let some select people on Fiverr have the space. That might work for you as I suspect $5 a month would be better then what you get from Google and you don't have Google tramping all over your site all day.

 

[Dan_HiHosting]

Hi iTopz

As you're providing a service and you might have some regular visitors you could have a line asking people to click your ads cover the costs.

Something along the lines of "Please click the ads to help cover ours costs, thanks very much".

It also helps if the ads are relevant, and appealing. I believe you can have some cntrol over that, otherwise you can always make sure that your content brings appropriate ads.

I hope that helps

Good luck!

Dan

 

[webgeek]

The fastest way to get your account banned is to click your own links.
The second fastest is to ask people to click your links.

I'd recommend against both.

 

[DesignerNick]

It is all about split testing with colours, positioning and sizes. I have found that a horizontal banner with colours that stand out mean more clicks.

If they blend in too much people wont notice them. Ugly but it works!

 

[Websitehandyman]

The fastest way to get your account banned is to click your own links.
The second fastest is to ask people to click your links.

I'd recommend against both.

The 3rd as I found out was to let an adult product sneak into your content

 

[webgeek]

LOL @Websitehandyman - oh I bet that would do it!!!

 

[Websitehandyman]

LOL @Websitehandyman - oh I bet that would do it!!!

It did, AF feed I didn't get but Google found a "lady pleasurer" and ban put in place never to be lifted it seems.

 

[UKSBD]

From my experience you get a 3 day warning
(if you do a lot with them anyway)

I used to get the odd escort agency sneaking in to the dating categories, the odd adult toys supplier slipping in to the party plans category, etc. etc. of my directory and if I didn't notice I could expect a 3 day warning some time in the future.

I even had one because someone listed in the massage category was providing tantric massage services.

I've probably had half a dozen 3 day warnings over the years.

 

[10032012]

Hate to state it... Google pays out per traffic.

Forget CPC and CPM, text, image and rick media adverts and contextual or interest based... or even if using an external ad network... your earnings are directly comparable to the quality of your traffic.

If you have a really niche website getting only 100 visitors a day, and big businesses targeting your website... whereas its likely the majority of visitors would click on an advert... you will make little to any earnings. (think about it niche targeting would normally command a higher CPC and therefore your base of visitors more interested in such topic, would have a much relatively higher than normal revenue per number of clicks)

The number of pages you have in Google, your SEO, your uniques, your website loading speed and even if you have disabled Google Cache... are all factors... its not as simple as how many people click on an advert and how much each click is worth...

I am expecting 98%+ of people to call me crazy... but its from 6 years experience in Adsense with just over a hundred websites in that period... my main website at the moment gets 3-4 million hits per month with 90-100,000 uniques (viewed traffic)

I made the mistakes a few times - let me explain:-

1) I tried to ban Google from keeping a copy of my website (aka Google Cache) with "nocache" meta tag on pages ... Google still visited but the number of pages in index fell to a third and revenue slumped to 1/6th although the hits didn't drop significantly (only 8-9%)

2) When Google started implementing speed factors in their index... my website (was around the 3m hits mark) lost revenue quick... lets get it into perspective... its the adverts which typically slow page loading down... my revenue dropped to around a third... after a couple of months I invested in a dedicated server... site loads slightly quicker and I am getting more revenue on average than before the speed factors taken into consideration. We are talking several milliseconds to maybe as much as 1.5 secs (at off peak times) speed increase. Many users wouldnt notice the speeds on their internet connection.

3) Building a niche website with revenue in mind doesn't work out. Its the unique visitors that Google looks for. A mass-market website will gross - like for like on visitor numbers - more than the niche websites although CPC bids are likely to be lower.

4) I have even closed two large revenue earning websites making 1/3rd of daily revenue... a big dent in lost revenue as you would expect. A few weeks later the revenue levelled out... seems the ad impressions increased back to around how they were. Strange, as the websites aren't related nor linked to each other, and totally different original content, so its not people choosing the other website.

My advice?

* Allow Google to keep copies of your pages.
* Do a good level of SEO.
* Get as many uniques as you can (don't buy "hits" or even uniques through automated scripts... totally worthless)
* Invest in your infrastructure - insignificant speed increases and dedicated IP for your website will boost your revenue (keeping on say a shared host which is adequate to save costs and profit more doesn't work out)
* Work hard on Google +1 (shows google you are a good website)
* Share tools are great (facebook, twitter, digg etc.)
* backlinks are important

Google seems to have some internal algorithm to decide how much % to pay websites on their worth to Google as a whole and to its advertisers. This could be fraud by not realising the true number of clicks etc. but is more likely that better websites command a higher cost to advertisers... i.e. Google passes on savings to advertisers when the companies are advertising on poorer websites, only utilizing the maximum bid for top rate websites (fair enough!)

(Talking averages, established websites usually make a financial return for Adsense adverts directly linked to their uniques etc)

 

[10032012]

From my experience you get a 3 day warning
(if you do a lot with them anyway)

I used to get the odd escort agency sneaking in to the dating categories, the odd adult toys supplier slipping in to the party plans category, etc. etc. of my directory and if I didn't notice I could expect a 3 day warning some time in the future.

I even had one because someone listed in the massage category was providing tantric massage services.

I've probably had half a dozen 3 day warnings over the years.

lucky, Google threatened to shut my account down about 4 years ago because someone added my website to a traffic exchange script and that "I" was in violation of the terms. perhaps someone can tell Google that webmasters have no control of what people do with web addresses!! Lucky enough, the long shot of contacting the website in question... paid off and they agreed to remove the link from their database. Otherwise, they would have terminated my account with a few hundred quid balance..

 

[UKSBD]

lucky... Otherwise, they would have terminated my account with a few hundred quid balance..

I had about £15,000 balance when I got my first 3 day warning so you can imagine how quick I checked the site over and deleted the offending pages.

 

[WilliamsData]

For adsense if you dont have traffic volumes then you must go niche. Your site needs to be about a specific topic that people are actually searching for.

Also how many ads you have on your site will impact the type of ads you get in my experience. Having 1 or 2 ad blocks seems to give you higher value clicks than having the maximum which is 3. Having lots of ads displayed that dont get clicked seems to drive down your value to advertisers.

Also you need to test out thoroughly the best position for your ads. Its not always where you think.

And content is king these days. Lots of relevant content that is going to make users and google visit your site and recommend you on twitter and facebook.

The average CTR for adsense sites varies from 1% to 3%. So if your getting 50 visitors a day you could expect 1 click a day maybe. So then it comes down to the average CPC of your niche. If its a pound then expect to get about 25p - 50p a click, but of course this varies with advertisers etc. So really you should be making about £5 to £10 a month from your site if its at that level.

So you need to tweak the layout of your site and improve the content to get it into the 1% to 3% range and improve the traffic.

 

[10032012]

Talking of adsense... what are people's actual hits to ad impressions ratio?

 

[WilliamsData]

I find they pretty much match up. Where you might see a difference is automated access to your sites and stuff, which probably wouldnt invoke adsense.

Have you every run Bad Behavior and noticed how often robots try and login in as admin. Much more than you think!

No one here is using admin as there username are they. if so change it now!!!