How to Increase Google Adsense CTR and Earning

Google Adsense is no doubt a best way of blog monetization. Its hard to find a big and reputed website not using Google Adsense. Yeah, there are few which use direct advertising. But for most of website owners and bloggers, Google Adsense is the best and reliable way of earning. But there is an important question that hits my inbox daily. Many bloggers asked me that they have Google Adsense account but they can earn better with other CPM adnetworks. Google Adsense sucks for them. If you are also one of those bloggers who are facing problem with Google Adsense and thinks that Google Adsense is not working for them, this post is for you. In this post, we will see how Google Adsense works,why people fail to get good earning with Google Adsense, most popular ad network and how to Increase Google Adsense CTR.

What is Google Adsense and How it calculates earning

Google Adsense is the service by Google that serves ads on publisher websites. It pays publishes when a visitor on their website clicks on the ads served by Google Adsense. If you get more number of clicks, your earning will increase. But it pays for the clicks that are genuine, It never pays for fake clicks.Google does not have any fixed amount it pays per click and earning depends on too many factors. This is the reason you see difference in earning per click. Google Adsense earning depends on CPC (Cost per Click). Suppose you get $.50 for a click and $0.02 for another click. The average CPC for both clicks will be $0.26.

Note: Google pays for clicks only. But be sure not to do any kind of fraud. Google has more than 1000 factors to check whether the click was fake or actual made by a visitor who was interested in visiting the website of advertiser. You can never make Google fool. If it finds a fake click, it will not pay you a single cent for that click. So, do not try to waste your time and mind to think how to fool Google and click on your own ads.

Most of the people who fail with Adsense complaint that they are not getting good CTR (Click Through Rate) and CPC. CTR is the number of clicks out of 100 impression. If you ads are viewed 200 times and you got 3 clicks, CTR will be 1.5. And If the average CPC was $0.06, your earning will be $0.18.

How Google Calculates CPC and why CPC for your account is low

There are many factors that affects the CPC of an advertisement. CPC depends on the advertises. When they start campaign on adword, they select keywords and their budget that they want to spend. If the keyword is too competitive, it will have high CPC. And there are so many ads that has less competition and advertiser pay less for that. Advertisers also have many selection criteria by which they can select ad positions and geographical targeting.

How Ads are Targeted and Served on your website

Ads served by Google Adsense are automatic. Whenever you open your website, you see different kind of advertisements. These are the main two factors ways.

Contextual Ads: These ads are shown based on the content of your website. Adsense crawlers crawl your web pages and then decide which ads to serve. If your page has keywords that are less competitive and has less CPC, Adsense will server less CPC advertisements.

Placement targeting: As I described earlier, advertisers can decide the specific ad placement of a website, this also affects the advertisements being shown on your website.

Now you know how Google calculates the CPC. So you may now understand why CPC for you is low. It may be because of keyword you are targeting, or advertisers selection.

Read: 5 ways to increase Adsense CPC

Reasons for Low CTR

As we know that we cannot not earn by clicking on our own ads or by asking others to click on ads. But why my blog is not getting natural clicks? there are so many important reasons behind this.

1. Ad position is the most important thing. You should know the perfect ad position in your blog design. If you have added ads at the place where it is hard to find, it will not get clicks. It does not mean that you place all ads at the top of your website. Google hates this. I think one ad in side bar, one in top and one in bottom is fine. But you can check various ad positions to see which one works for you. If you have habit of writing a long post, you should use an ad-unit just after the post.
2. Bad blog design also affects adsense CTC. If your blog design is distracting, visitors will go back just after entering in your website.
3. Most of the bloggers have good traffic but the traffic is known. Known traffic means regular visitor who often check your blog to see new posts. These people know the difference of ads and actual content. They are not going to click on your adsense ads unless they find it useful.

How to Increase Google Adsense CTR

If you have read above paragraphs carefully, I am sure you already know what you should do now. If you still do not know what to do to increase your adsense CTR, your can read the points given below. Before reading further, you should also know that CTR more than 15 may be an alert that you are going to loose your Adsense. According to Google, High CTR is shows that people are more interested in ads than blog content. It may be because publisher is trying more people to click on ads unnaturally.

These are the points which you can follow to Increase Google Adsense CTR:

1. Experiment with ads positions in your blog and place ads on the places where visitors can see it. Be sure not to place ads with images. Google may ban you.
2. Try to customize ad-unit  according to your blog design. Change the background color of ad-unit to match the background of the section where is has been placed. These kinds of ads see better CTR.
3. Use text/images ad units for some places and text units for some. Try to see which one is working and then place accordingly.
4. Try to use link units properly. It also works good if you place them at better positions. It can be a good choice to Increase Google Adsense CTR for all units because link units will see higher clicks than other banner ads.
5. Try to increase organic traffic. Organic visitors are most likely to click on ads. Regular readers are good for your blog’s branding. But organic visitors are good for earning. Surely some will turn into your regular reader if they find your blog useful.

If you try to get better CTR and CPC, your overall earning will automatically increase.

Read: How to increase Google Adsense Earning

For better understanding, you can also see this nice presentation by Amit Agarwal.