Adsense results and website performance
Please note: This post was written some time ago (17 years ago). My perspectives, knowledge, and opinions may have evolved significantly since then. While the content might still offer valuable insights, I encourage readers to consider it in the context of its publication date.
Whenever you read about tips to increase your Adsense earnings, you always get the same five or six tips about placement, color, and defeating ad blindness. Here are three that I remember:
- Make sure that your ads blend into your site
- Place ads in a prominent place
- Make sure they are visible to all visitors (regardless of screen size)
These have helped me quite a bit to bring my ad revenue up. However I just discovered one that has helped more than anything else.
- Make sure your website is fast
Making my website faster has doubled and almost tripled my ad revenue. It is insane. So here is some history:
A couple months ago I wrote a rewrote one of my sites to take more advantage of the Internet community. Yea know - that web 2.0 crap. It basically allows people to integrate my content with the likes of facebook and myspace and all that. Nothing big. My ad revenue took a hit - then it got back up to where it was - however it didn't grow. I was kinda bummed. I was getting more and more traffic but not more and more ad revenue. So I start to evaluate why this was happening. While thinking about it, I noticed that my site was slow as shit. It was killing me. But it had been slow from the beginning - it had never been fast. So I was blind to it from the beginning. Then a couple days ago I installed eaccelerator as a test of its power. It sped up my site. Noticeably. It really made things better.
Then I logged into adsense. I hadn't expected a side effect of performance be that my users hung out more and that my clicks would go up. In fact - I never really thought about performance and adsense going hand in hand - but I was blind to it.
Website performance has effected my ad revenue more than anything else I have done.
Now keep in mind that my site was still usable. It was not so slow people were not going to it - but it was slow enough for people to eventually leave. And it stopped people from clicking around. So now - my visits are steady and my pageviews are up. people are sticking around more. They are happier - and my ad revenue is up.
w00t.
So make sure that your web applications are snappy - and you will surely get a better response in your ad revenue.