Aug 27
AdSense Tracking : More is Better
A little while ago, I seemed to recall Everton saying something to the effect of, “If the CTR on your AdSense ads is less than 1%, you’re doing something wrong”. Well, it’s been about a month since I’ve implemented my ads and obviously, I want to know if I’m doing something wrong.
I figured that with the tracking I setup through AdSense this would be an easy task. I was in for a surprise.
Taking Care of Business
I needed to figure out where the leaks in my CTR were and needed to address those leaks by pulling those ads. You can guess where I went next. Right to my AdSense page!
Now what I’m personally shooting for is an overall CTR of > 1%. Clearly I’m right under that goal so I want to see if there are any places where I’m obviously bringing down my CTR. Well just looking under my “Clicks” column, I see that there’s a big disconnect between my single entry clicks and my main page clicks. Doing some quick calculations, if I removed my ads from the first page, my CTR does in fact change…
32 total clicks – 4 front page clicks = 28 clicks
28 clicks / 2,599 impressions = 1% CTR
I wish that it was as simple as just removing my ads from the front page but truth be told, I can’t trust my results 100%. Why? Because I don’t have all my ads tagged with the FrontPage or SingleEntry channel. I don’t know WHY I did this, but after inspecting my code, I realized that my sidebar ad does not have that tracking on it! So I don’t have any idea if it’s getting clicked on the front page or the back. HOWEVER, It looks like the Sidebar ad isn’t really getting clicks ANYWAY, so it probably wouldn’t hurt to remove it. But I really wish I had tagged this one to see exactly how removing it would impact my bottom line. On that note I wish I had tracked the other ads better too to see how individual ones are performing on the front page vs the single page. I mean, I only have 6 ads (3 on front and 3 on back) so how much work would it have been to get the right tracking on these bad boys? (AD#1, AD#2, AD#3, AD#4, AD#5, AD#6)
Conclusion
I wanted to go ahead and test a new design next month to see if would help out my ads, but I feel like if I do some better targeting, I can get some really good and clean data going forward. So, time to retag, sit back for another month and hope for the best.
Have any of you had similar experiences or can you recommend some analytics software to help me out?
August 27th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
Have you checked out SEO Book even ProBlogger recommends it. It’s $79 but you get updated copy for life. Aaron Wall is pretty darn good. I think he recently got his account pulled at Google Adsense.
I did the same thing in the beginning I did not break down my channels correctly. I did and saw where I was really bombing. I use SEOBooks adsense tools and focus on those keywords. Today I used another PPC service, Mira, I want to see how that does. I have that on my weight loss site. I don’t get a lot of clicks since the site is less than two weeks old but the clicks I do receive are over $2. I want to see how Mira performs.
August 27th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
i don’t think being below 1% means you doing something wrong. It might depend on where your traffic is coming from. I have just above 1% ctr it seems your doing a good job to!
August 27th, 2007 at 7:40 pm
The only way to make money with Adsense is through search engine traffic. Plain and simple. I’ve learned the hard way. I’ve given up on Adsense.
August 27th, 2007 at 7:43 pm
@Opal T – I have not, and might check it out soon. But I think for the most part I have a pretty good handle on SEO techniques, it’s just a matter of actually using them. *nod*
August 27th, 2007 at 7:46 pm
@Angela – You’ve given up on AdSense!? I too have come to believe that search engine traffic is the key, but I think I make it work. What makes you think you can’t?!
August 27th, 2007 at 7:48 pm
@Shaun – Hey thanks. You know, taking a step back for a second I should be content with my CTR. But considering the little amount of testing and experimenting I’ve done, I just feel like I can push it so much further. I hopefully will be able to see with some experiments coming up in the future.
August 27th, 2007 at 7:51 pm
For the month of August, so far, I’m 10,170 102 1.00%
And July was 11,752 136 1.16%
So it looks like I am doing pretty good.
August 27th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
Quite simply, I’m lazy. ha ha ha
I do make some off Adsense on my work’s website. It’s my only form of compensation for maintaining it which makes it all the more frustrating when I can’t get clicks on there.
August 27th, 2007 at 8:47 pm
@Apexad – Man. You’re blowin’ ME out of the water! Maybe I need to get more good lookin’ womens’ pics on here. (#);)
@Angela – Maybe you should take sometime to fine tune your AdSense ads to make’em work for ya! I mean, you can certainly do it if you want to. Do you know what your search engine numbers are looking like etc?
August 27th, 2007 at 10:47 pm
Thanks for the insight Bush! All these little steps you are taking is really a big help in understanding and using adsense on blogs. Going to need to make sure I track each unit. I think I was gonna do it a little to broad too, making just on channel for main and sub pages.
August 27th, 2007 at 11:04 pm
@G-Newt – No problem! It’s very good to hear that this is helping SOMEBODY out there! (#);) But yeah, I at least know enough to know that you gotta track positions. Take me for instance.
I knew going into this that my sidebar ad was probably going to be holding me back and not getting many clicks but if I had just tagged my ads with MainPage and SingleEntry. I never would’ve known just how much the sidebar ad is dragging things down. *nod*
August 28th, 2007 at 5:18 am
August has been a little lower than July’s performance for me. I’m hoping to do much better in September (hey that rhymes). Now I should finish my redesign in time for Sept.
August 28th, 2007 at 7:27 am
Bush, you inspired me to post about your blog, can you give me some feedback ??
What is your email, I don’t find it anywhere this blog . . .
http://thedragonproject.blogspot.com/2007/08/its-not-you-its-me-why-i-unsubscribe.html
August 28th, 2007 at 8:32 am
@Brown – Care to clue anybody in as to what you’ve been doing as far as the redesign goes?
@icedragon – bush@bushmackel.com Yeah, this is what contact pages are for right. (#);)
August 28th, 2007 at 9:46 am
I have seen that my CTR has incresed after the installtion of a new theme so sometimes that can also be a factor .
August 28th, 2007 at 10:11 am
@Madhur – Definitely. New themes often mean different ad placements, different colors, changing seo quality etc. That’s why you see so many with Typo XP. It’s money for CPC (Adsense).
August 29th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
That is an excellent idea! Get some good looking woman on your blog and talk about it. It brings in Google Search Engine Traffic.
August 29th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
@Apexad – Ha ha ha! Maybe I can get Tish or Angela to do some PR work for me.
August 30th, 2007 at 6:56 pm
I’m still going to be using the Typo XP theme, but I’m changing the header to give it a unique feel. Some other little changes too. I’ll be going full throttle once I take my 13 yr old back from the hospital. I’ve only been missing 2 days and I miss you guys haha.
September 1st, 2007 at 11:55 am
@Brown – Yeah man, good luck with the kid. Definitely glad to hear things are lookin’ up on that front. And it goes w/o saying that we miss you too! *e-tear*
September 5th, 2007 at 12:55 am
Search engine traffic and brand new readers is really what converts best with AdSense, yielding the highest CTR. In general, regular readers won’t click nearly as often…ad blindness, etc.
But the main thing is to keep testing and tweaking. AdSense can work well; it does for me. You just have to find the best placements, etc. And aim to get as much SE traffic as possible.
Shine on,
Aaron
September 5th, 2007 at 10:00 am
@Aaron – Definitely. I’m trying to focus on all those things right now, but obviously easier said than done.