Soon this blog will mark its 4th birthday. The blog has gone a long way, it has increased its monthly audience from humble 30 users to over 100,000. There have been involved a lot of experiments to get here, including experiments with ad units placements - Google AdSense experiments.
Despite getting a decent website traffic, averaging at about 100,000 users in the past months, income from Google AdSense still has been pretty low here. Can't complain much, in the past 8 years have earned about $2,000 from Google AdSense. Now, I've always searched for ways to improve earnings here. It helps to be tech-savvy, and the sky is the limit when talking about technical implementation. Drupal here.
In the past, I've played a lot with plug&play AdSense ad units, trying to document most important changes, here is the list of useful reading (in no particular order):
- Google AdSense Experiments: Pink Vs Blue - Part 1 - Creating Ad Styles
- How To Display Google AdSense Ad Unit on Drupal Taxonomy Pages
- How To Hide Drupal Block For Nodes In Specific Taxonomy - Example With Google AdSense
- Removing Google AdSense Ads From Blog For Next 10 days
- Google AdSense Experiment - Change of Ad Unit Placement and Disabling Personalized Ads to Recover From Ridiculously Low CTR (0,20%)
- Change of AdSense placement for higher CTR - Experiment 2
- Switching back to Google AdSense default settings
- Change of Adsense ads for better layout - Experiment 1
There is no clear answer, do these experiments have helped actually. In theory - kind of yes. Practical - probably. One is for sure - I haven't observed sudden huge improvements. Something helps, something not. That' s why I call them - Google AdSense experiments.
Now, the latest idea I decided to test - huge leader-board ad unit on top of all articles:
Google AdSense Leaderboard ad unit
Idea about huge leaderboard ad unit on top of all pages come after I decided to decrease .container width for web page from 1170px to 980px (for screens over 1200px). As there were a lot of white space left over - a place for Google AdSense ad unit freed up.
Now it's just time to test how well or bad this ad placement will perform and decide - to keep it or remove it. That's why we perform experiments, right?