World Wide Creations

OK, you now have been using AdSense for a while but find that many of the clicks you are getting are only paying you pennies. Does it seem that you should be getting more for these clicks?

When an advertiser creates an ad and puts it on the AdSense network, they bid on how much they want to pay for a click. If they have the highest bid, their ads are generally placed first in the ad blocks when their ads match and are displayed. This makes perfect sense if you think about it, they are paying the most, they should get top billing. Google of course wants the highest paying advertisers to get the best exposure so they can make their money. There is more to this when it comes to ‘Smart pricing’ but we will not get into that here. It is sufficient that you know the top paying ads are usually first in an ad block.

This may make you ask “But I have three ad blocks on each page, how does this affect the pay out of a click?”. AdSense will rarely display the same advertisement twice on the same page, in fact, I have never seen them do it. What this boils down to is, not only are the best paying links at the top of an ad block, they are also contained in the FIRST ad block you display. Display is actually not the proper way to say it, what I mean is, the first one the browser reads in your HTML source code for the page. The browser will generally execute javascript and anything else in the source code in a sequential order. So if you have three ad blocks on a page, the browser executes the javascript in the same order as you have it listed in the HTML source code.

Now we have established that the highest paying clicks come from the first ad block. How can you use this to earn more?

If you use channels (which everyone should), you should be able to tell which of your ad blocks have the highest Click Through Rating (CTR). If you log into your AdSense account, view the basic report for the last month and see how it broke down with your channels. Find the channel with the highest CTR for the month. This channel should always load first in the browser. If it loads second or third, then the lower paying clicks are in these blocks. The ad block with the highest CTR is your premium advertising space and you should get a premium price for it.

Redesign your code so the highest CTR block gets loaded first. There are many ways you can do this, but I would suggest doing it with CSS so if the CTR’s should change in the future, it will not take much work to adjust which block loads first.

In conclusion, make sure the area that gets the highest Click Through Rating loads the AdSense javascript first. Adjust your other areas so they also load in the order of which has the better CTR.