More than 70% of publishers agree that display advertising is their most important revenue stream in 2024. AdSense is a lucrative monetization medium, providing a 68% revenue share for publishers who display ads on their sites.
Despite multiple options to display ads and monetize traffic, publishers struggle to generate consistent revenue via AdSense while attracting traffic, maintaining a user-friendly website and complying with Google Adsense policies.
If you’ve ads up and running on your site but want to scale the revenue strategically and build a reliable monetization channel using AdSense, here are 12 foundational factors you should improve at the site level. We will explain each factor and list the best practices you can adapt to ensure your site is optimized to earn Adsense revenue.
11 Revenue-Influencing Factors of Google Adsense
While traffic, click-through rate (CTR) and the number of ads displayed are core revenue-estimating factors, foundational elements such as UX, content quality, site speed, UI, etc., influence the performance of these core revenue-defining factors.
Here’s how to ensure all those essential factors are in their best form to generate Google AdSense Revenue.
- Ad Placement & A/B testing to Find Better Combinations
If you’re currently struggling to generate ad impressions or clicks, it’s usually because of the ad location. Ad placements determine whether your readers pay attention and engage with your ads or barely notice them.
Ad placements are a group of ad units that define where ads are placed throughout your site. These can be leaderboards, collective ad units on the homepage or specific category pages such as sports, food, etc. Ad placements are not mandatory, but this ad unit grouping practice will help you attract ads tailored to be displayed in specific locations to generate optimum engagement.
Some advertisers have specific preferences on where their ads are displayed to gain maximum traction. For instance, some want to appear on your site’s leaderboard or sports pages. Hence, when you group ad units, including leaderboards or particular theme pages, you increase your chances of matching with advertisers with specific intent and personalised ad creatives. This ultimately increases ad engagement as it resonates and effectively captures your audience’s attention, thereby positively impacting your revenue.
You should strategically determine where ads should be placed by considering your blog theme, page format, user experience and behaviours. Generally, ads placed at the bottom of the fold, above the fold, on side rails, in-feed, and in articles easily capture readers’ attention.
- Bottom of the fold: Your readers have to scroll at least once to find an ad
- Above the fold: Your readers can see ads without scrolling, i.e., as soon as they land on your page
- In-feed: These ads are placed cohesively within the feed of your content
- In article: In the article ads appear in the middle of the articles
- Side rails: Ads are displayed either on the right or left side of the pages, usually sticky, meaning users can see the ads even if they keep scrolling.
- Near images and videos: Visuals like images or videos easily capture readers’ attention, so placing ads beside them increases visibility.
The best way to find ideal ad units to generate maximum engagement for your site is to run an AB test and use heatmaps that provide insights about user behaviours to help you make data-driven decisions while allocating ad units.
If conducting AB tests seems overwhelming, you can use Google Auto ads, which runs different experiments by configuring factors such as layout, formats, ad size, etc., on 50% of your traffic initially for 90 days to determine the effectiveness of the trial. You can interpret the results of each experiment and manually execute or undo changes based on gathered data to find the best place for your site to display ads to increase ad yield.
- Choose The Right Ad Format
While ad placements capture your audience’s initial attention, ad formats ensure your audience is hooked to the ads for more than a second. The ad format is the way an ad is displayed on your site. There are different types, such as banner ads, video ads, interactive ads, etc. If you’re using CPC or other engagement-centric ad types, ad formats play a significant role in determining your ad yield.
Ad formats and UX go hand in hand. Your ad format should support the page structure and provide a non-intrusive user experience. Compromising UX to drive focus on ads can negatively impact your brand impressions and audience retention, leading to a loss of potential revenue opportunities.
You should select ad units that are compatible with both display ads as well as video ads. Ad units such as the 300×250 (Medium Rectangle), 728×90 (Leaderboard) are compatible with display ads and video ads, whereas 320×50 (Mobile Leaderboard) is compatible for mobile display and video ads.
If you are focusing purely on display advertising, choosing ad units that are common for desktop and on mobile can help drive revenue. The following ad units are compatible for both desktop and mobile.
1) 300×250 (Medium Rectangle)
2) 320×50 (Mobile Leaderboard)
3) 320×100 (Large Mobile Banner)
Lastly, take a look at which ad units works best in your region. Here’s the tip, the 300×250 ad unit is a global favourite. It’s popular is all geographies and is use commonly by a lot of advertisers. The 728×90 (Leaderboard), and 320×50 (Mobile Leaderboard) are ad units that are popular in regions such as the US, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and MENA. If you are a publisher from the Asia-Pacific region, 336×280 (Large Rectangle) is an ad unit you should add to your mix.
Similar to experimenting with Ad placements, AB tests different ad formats to find which piques your audience’s response. For instance, banner ads and sidebars are highly popular among media publications. However, infeed or in-article ads are effective for publication with regular readers who keep tabs on new updates.
Your user behaviour primarily influences your ad yield. Hence, when choosing ad formats, consider ad units, user interface, responsiveness, etc., to ensure your blog theme and page format are supportive. Further, remember to analyse your CTR and visibility metrics to find the best ad format that aligns with your niche and readers.
- Use Multiple Ad Units
When optimizing your ad placements and units, you may wonder how many ads should be displayed on a page or if there is a limit. While you can add more than one ad on a page, Google Adsense sets the limit to 3 ad units with added regulations. In Google’s words, “Your search results pages can feature up to three ad units. You can also include one link unit and one AdSense for Content or one Ad Exchange unit, which must be set to an image and placement targeted ad only.”
Adding multiple ad units is common, and many publications use combinations of side rails, bottom fold ads, infeed ads, etc., on the same page. Multiple ad units increase your chance of scaling revenue as they translate to more visibility and engagement opportunities. However, 38% of users leave a page if the layout is unattractive, so ensure the ad formats and units do not interrupt your readers’ experience and the main content of the page.
- Focus on High-volume Keywords
Generally, news publications’ content isn’t SEO driven to its fullest, as most of it is sourced from current and trending events. However, covering topics that people are actively searching for and optimising SEO can help you pull eaders and drive bulk traffic to your site.
It also helps you achieve topical authority,i.e., your site will be known for one or two niche topics you want to specialise in. For example, NDTV covers content for multiple niches. However, they focus on SEO to improve their authority in specific categories like food, sports etc.
Even the keywords you use play a significant role in determining which ads are shown on your site, as Google uses it as a metric to match your site with related advertisers. Hence, start with basic tools such as Google Keyword Planner or get more advanced data from SEO tools such as Semrush and Ahrefs to find new content ideas that can help you drive active traffic to your site. Google Trends is another handy SEO tool that can help publishers find trending keywords to attract seasonal traffic.
Further, SEO tools let you keep tabs on the keywords your competitors are targeting. Tools like Semrush allow you to run a gap analysis that identifies which keywords your competitors are ranking, but you’re not. This data allows you to tap into the opportunities you might have missed while conducting keyword research.
Traffic is the fuel to generate revenue through ads, and SEO is one of the most popular ways to find bulk traffic-driving opportunities. Start incorporating SEO into your content strategy to add new traffic sources to your site, which can directly improve your AdSense revenue.
- Responsive Ad Units & Mobile-friendly Site
Responsive ad units dynamically change in size to suit the device used to access the page. Considering that 58.21% of traffic is sourced from mobile, and the rest is split between desktops and tablets, ads should appear seamlessly on your user’s device to attract visibility and engagement.
Google recommends using 320×100 ad units above the fold and 320×250 ad units below the fold to gain better engagement from mobile users. However, as mentioned earlier, run A/B tests and experiment to learn your audience’s behaviour and preferences.
Besides ensuring your site is optimised for various devices, you can update the site’s ad code with responsive ad units or simply enable an ad size optimization setting so the ads can automatically adapt to different screens.
- Optimise Your Site for Mobile
53% of mobile readers bounce off a site after 3 seconds if the page is not mobile-friendly. Even Google prioritises mobile-first indexing, meaning Google uses the mobile version of the site to crawl and rank a page. Hence, if the mobile version of your site is poorly optimized, it will cost you traffic and potential revenue opportunities.
Accessibility and UX are two significant factors influencing mobile readers’ decision to stay and engage with your page or bounce off. Maintain a clutter-free UX, use simple navigation bars, limit elements and use responsive ad units to provide a better experience. This can help you retain the audience, build trust, and increase your chance of gaining repeat traffic, positively impacting ad revenue in the long run.
Further, run your site through Google’s page speed test to find specific issues related to page speed. 47% of users only wait 2 seconds for a page to load before they bounce back. Hence, along with page load speed, banner ads or ATF ads should be at optimal rendering speed to capture the readers’ attention. If your site is too slow, use the AMP site, compress media files and decrease ads or rich media load time to retain readers and get them to engage with your ads.
- Create Quality content
Your content brings readers to your site, making them stay, engage and return. Without it, you cannot increase ad visibility and earn consistent revenue via AdSense. If your readers bounce off without reading your content or scrolling, it automatically decreases ad visibility and engagement, directly impacting revenue.
While it is essential to generate new traffic, the smart way to build monetizable traffic is to grow a loyal audience that comes back to your site more than once. Quality content precisely helps you achieve that by building strong readers’ impressions, which bring them back to your site the next time.
One way to ensure you create high-quality content is by using Google’s content evaluation framework, EEAT. E- Experience, E-Expertise, A-Authority, and T-Trustworthiness, which suggests the content is driven by the experience of experts and is reliable.
Quality content is about delivering insights that meet or exceed readers’ expectations. If your content is too long or does not meet the readers’ intent, it can potentially affect your brand’s impression and credibility.
- Improve User experience & User Interface
The user interface sets the course for user experience, acting as a foundational element determining your ad performance. Any publication meeting basic Google criteria can run ads; however, only those that effectively balance user experience and ads can scale and turn AdSense into a profitable monetization medium.
A cluttered, hard-to-access, unorganized UI can quickly push readers out of your page. Hence, start focusing on basic page-level best practices like whitespace, blog format and themes (especially if you’re using WordPress), designs, fonts, colors, navigation, etc., to ensure your site is in the best possible version to provide a seamless experience. You can even use Google’s website mobile adaptability tool to make data-driven changes that significantly improve your site appearance.
- Loop Your Readers to the Site
Your ads get more visibility and engagement if you hook your readers long enough to your site, given you also optimised other aspects. There are multiple ways to increase your reader’s time on site.
For example, if your readers stumble on your page via organic search, you can keep them in the content loop by recommending articles relevant to the ones they are reading. You can also drive abandoned traffic via strategic notifications and updates.
With interlinking and page structure optimizations, like accessible navigation bars and relevant resources or articles, you can increase your average readers’ session and the number of ads served to them.
- Increase Your Traffic
Traffic is directly tied to your revenue-generating capabilities. As a publisher, you should diversify your traffic source beyond Google search. You should leverage email, social media, communities, etc., to drive traffic to your site. An effective content distribution strategy and optimization practices will help you build an active presence in different channels to source traffic.
Beyond various platforms, you can increase traffic by optimising for Google featured snippets, Google Discover and other SERP features that have high click-through rates in SERP.
Additionally, keep your content direct and precise to get featured in SGE. While there are not many proven ways to optimize content for SGE yet, it evidently sources insights from sites with well-defined content structures and direct answers to common user queries. Hence, diversify and optimize your content for multiple channels and SERP factors to increase your chances of driving traffic to your site and directly increasing your ad yield.
- Use YieldMonk to Boost AdSense Revenue
Tried most of the things on this list and still struggling to scale your revenue? Try YieldMonk. YieldMonk helps publishers improve their ad fill rates, by offering ad spaces to premium advertisers they’ve partnered with. This improves ad fill rate and offers publishers a higher revenue per ad.
YieldMonk’s dynamic ad refresh feature, real-time header bidding and video ads, ensure ad slots are filled with engaging ads. An ad revenue expert tailors strategies to suit your niche ensuring you capitalise on the best opportunities available.
Register with YieldMonk to improve your website’s RPM and improve your AdSense revenue.
Conclusion:
Besides the above-mentioned tips, you can set up Google Analytics to customise your efforts, make data-driven decisions dictated by user behaviours, and track specific goals to see how your actions are paying off.
Google Adsense also helps publishers earn more revenue by providing personalised suggestions in a dedicated opportunities section, which you can evaluate and implement to boost your ad yields.
While following Google Adsense policies and regulations can be difficult, gaining extensive knowledge can help you navigate the intricacies.
