The other day I was looking through my AdSense account, and found a nifty little trick for boosting earnings.
By default, whenever you install AdSense on a site the ads shown are typically based on the content of your post as well as the browsing history of the person visiting your site.
Google does it’s best to match the best performing ads to your site since Google, just like you as a publisher, only makes money when people click on the ads.
So it is always in Google’s best interest to show only the best performing ads on your site.
However, as good as Google’s algorithms are, they are not perfect and there is a way to squeeze some more value out of your AdSense earnings.
Here’s what you need to do:
(1) Login to your AdSense account.
(2) Click on the “Allow & Block Ads” tab.
(3) Under “Blocking Options” you’ll see a section called “General Categories”. Click the edit button to the right of that.
(4) You will then see a screen like this:
What this screen will show you is the category of ads that Google AdSense displays on your site, and the earnings that each category has earned you in the last 30 days.
For example, in my account I can see that “Arts & Entertainment” ads were displayed 3.6% of the time on my site, but they only contributed to 0.5% of my earnings.
If I look at the “Beauty & Personal Care” category of ads, I can see that it was only shown 2% of the time, but earned 7% of my total earnings in the last 30 days.
If we look at “Home & Garden” we can see that those types of ads were shown 4.9% of the time on my site, but they earned 0% of my 30 day income.
When you study your categories and the earnings they create for you, you can then get a better picture as to what type of ads your specific audience responds to most. Your category stats are going to be different from mine, so you need to make sure you study your own numbers and don’t just guess.
In my case, since I saw that the “Home & Garden” category took up 5% of my impressions, but generated 0% revenue for me, I decided to block those types of ads on my site. Obviously my audience doesn’t respond to “Home & Garden” type ads.
By disabling that category, it frees up 4.9% more page impressions for the other categories that are actually making me money. If for example those 4.9% of impressions were applied to the “Beauty & Personal Care” category, that could result in about 15% increase in earnings for me.
Of course Google will distribute the extra impressions amongst all of the categories that are not blocked, but it can still be a pretty decent sized boost to your earnings for just a few minutes of work.