10 Tips to Improve Your Stuck AdSense Revenues

Just as you begin to gloat about your blog profitability - it stops. Your traffic may be growing, but that lovely climb up in revenues month after months? Slows to a halt and you’re left confused in a revenue plateau of frustration. Or worse - your AdSense revenues are dropping.

First of all, don’t panic. We’ve seen this happen more than once. You are not alone. Also, we know why this happens. And what you can do to remedy the situation, pushing those growth numbers back into the green.

Why does AdSense revenue growth plateau?

1. Ad blockers - If you’ve been reading our blog, you should know just how big an impact ad blockers have on revenues.
2. Banner blindness - The human brain has been proven to be the best ad blocker in the world.
3. Low conversion rate - Clicks are nice, but most advertisers want to sell things and make money.
4. Drop in CPCs - Low conversion rates for advertisers are just one reason for lower CPCs for publishers. CPCs can be affected by the geographic location of the audience, seasonal fluctuations and a number of other factors.
5. Difficulty in mobile traffic monetization - mobile traffic is hard to monetize with those tiny screens and clumsy user fingers creating accidental clicks that don’t convert.
6. Technical bugs & issues - The cause can be technical. As simple as that. If you’re not the webmaster of your blog, this is a good time to poke your tech guy. If you are - we’ve got you covered too so keep reading.
7. You’re a “one trick pony” - You’ve found that one AdSense setup you think works and any attempt to change it seems to just hurt.

So what should I do?

1. Monetize ad blocking users - Now you’re thinking: “Hang on! Isn’t that a contradiction?”. Not really. You can still monetize these views with alternative ad networks like PageFair. You can find more useful strategies in a post I wrote about fighting ad blockers .
2. Find the sweet spots by testing - Every website, audience, content type and niche have their own sweet spots. And they’re fairly individual and hard to pin-point. These “sweet spots” I am talking about are a combination of ad types, placements, color schemes, ad sizes etc. on a page. That’s one of the many reasons we created the AdNgin platform to begin with. To make the process of A/B testing for maximal AdSense revenues as simple and effective as possible for publishers.
3. Optimize your traffic sources - Some traffic sources and types create more revenue than others. You can see which audiences click and convert, and most importantly where they come from. Check your Google Analytics under “Behavior” => “Publisher” => “Publisher Referrers”. There you can see which traffic source is giving you the best performance in AdSense (and other) revenue.
4. Cater to advertisers - Imagine if you could pick advertisers the way advertisers pick publishers in AdWords. That would be pretty sweet, wouldn’t it? Well, you sort-of can (and more on that later). You can attract more advertisers and create more demand and competition for your ad inventory. How? By managing your content like a stockbroker, you can create posts and pages advertisers will fight to appear on. You can also attract additional advertisers and increase RPMs is using AdSense custom channels.
5. Tweak your CPC - Every click counts, and you should make the most of it. There are many ways to nudge that average CPC up across your site, and we’ve listed a whooping 15 of them. One method, which is almost like picking advertisers, is using the AdSense review center to block badly performing ads.
6. Single out the mobile - From a revenue perspective, it’s not just about making the content fit on tiny screens. It’s about optimizing for revenue and user experience. One of the ways to improve mobile traffic value is pagination. And since we like to share what we know, we’ve written about how you can recover mobile revenues with pagination.
7. Diversify! - Mixing and matching revenue streams is important. If you’ve maxed out your potential revenue on AdSense or if your users are simply tired of the same old ads? It’s time to try something else! You can monetize your mailing list. Try affiliate marketing.
8. Technical Obstacles - Sometimes the only thing stopping you from making more money is a little checkbox somewhere, or a bad function in some code. We’ve compiled an exhaustive FAQ for AdSense issues and glitches (with solutions!).

The last two tips are for the “big boys”.

1. Check out AdX - There are quite a few differences between AdX and AdSense, but the main ones are the ability to block advertisers, have 5 ad units per page and have more granular analytics in AdX. In addition, you can literally pick your advertisers on AdX, which may in turn increase your overall revenues. If you have enough traffic, of course.
2. Build a private marketplace for your inventory and sell at a premium - If you want to get even more serious about making the most of your page views, you can build a private marketplace for your inventory (more on PMPs).

Slapping on some Google AdSense code on your website and sitting back to watch the profits stream is a glorious dream. In reality, you need to keep working and optimizing to stay ahead of the pack. Or the revenues with plateau then drop. With the tips above, you already have a head start.