Rickey’s $100-a-day Adsense Challenge

For a couple of days now, I’ve been chatting with Rickey and helping him optimize his Adsense ads on his main blog. With over 100,000 page views on a hot day, he reckons he could have lost thousands of problogging dollars last year for an under-optimized ad layout.

My approach is simple. Set a target based on your existing stats and plug in your ideal figures to see how much you ought to be earning from your blog.

Total Monthly Revenue = total daily page views x CTR x CPC x 30 days

* CTR - click through rate
* CPC - cost per click

So, in his case, our target is a CTR of 1% and a CPC of $0.10 (all figures here are hypothetical and does not reflect any of Rickey’s actual Adsense stats). That gives us 100,000 x 1% x $0.10 or $100/day which gives us $3,000 a month. (Note to Rickey: Sorry my original computation was wrong when I said it was $900/day. My math failed me there.)

How to increase CTR?

1) Ad-blending
2) Increase ad relevance by using section targeting
3) Changing ad layouts or positioning
4) Using ad channels for tracking

These are very basic methods but if you use them very well and by tracking your ad performance, you could hit that good mix which will yield you the highest possible CTR. After just a day of tweaking (if you have 100k page views, a 24-hour experiment is enough), we increased his eCPM by 50% and his CTR by close to 90%.

How to increase CPC?

1) Reducing total number of ads
2) Positioning the first ad to get the highest CTR
3) Targeting higher paying but relevant keywords

This is a bit tricky and more risky to experiment with but once you hit the sweet spot, the returns could be two or three-folds.

So, when Rickey mentioned that we probloggers don’t share the secret sauce like them SEO guys (put name here), I’d like to prove him wrong by inviting bloggers to send in their blog for an AdSense Makeover. Of course, I will not guarantee that I could increase your earnings but I will try my best. Again, I think it’s easier to do this if you have a sizable traffic already (say 1,000 pageviews or higher). And yes, we will also discuss here how we did it and what changes we’ve made and how much we gained from the make-over. Anybody up for it?