My Experiences with Testing and Tweaking Google Adsense

When Google first came out with the Adsense affiliate program I turned my nose up at the idea of placing their ad units on my websites.  I suspected this would be just another affiliate program taking up space on the pages of my site but delivering very little in the way of commissions.

I'd experimented with several affiliate products over a period of six months or so and found I simply didn't have the level of traffic required to leverage most of the programs that were available to me.

Friends with websites of similar popularity who spoke about their Adsense earnings made giving the program another look very tempting.   Finally I signed up and added ad units to a couple of my websites.

Initial results were anything but exciting.  I earned pennies per day and figured at that rate I would earn my first Google commission check in a few years.

Then I had the opportunity to interview Joel Comm.  This was right after he released his first information product about Adsense – when most people hadn't heard of him.  Taking a few nuggets of information from that conversation, I changed up how I displayed the ad units on my site and saw immediate improvements in income.

After that the challenge became deciding which pages to emphasize Adsense units on and which pages would be better served without them.  For example, when I place prominent ad units on the Work at Home Moms Talk Radio website I earn very good Adsense income, but I believe I would rather have visitors paying closer attention to my show notes and other more profitable affiliate recommendations so I tend to keep ad units to a minimum there.

I have other websites that do very well with Adsense while still performing their primary purpose so I keep ad units up front and obvious on their pages.

I have one website of a personal nature that I added Adsense to three years ago.  Not expecting much, I was pleasantly surprised to see it earning over a hundred dollars a month right away.  When cold weather arrived that number doubled, tripled and then quadrupled!  I couldn't understand why this would happen as rge content was not seasonal in nature.

I purchased and installed Adspy and discovered that the content making all the money for me was actually one single page on the website.  Just one of hundreds!  The mystery was solved.  The content earning all the clicks was a how to article for a popular winter craft, the only one like it on site.

I quickly optimized that page for Adsense and saw even better profits the following winter.  Knowing the other pages earn very little, I dropped most of those ad units. Lastly, I began to create more pages like the one that earns so well, knowing that they will help me to generate even more income in the future.

This taught me how important it is to test and track, using tools like Adspy to keep a close eye out for little profit power houses on my websites.  Doing so has revealed other surprisingly profitable pages and helped me to gain the highest value from this affiliate program.