Tips to Increase Adsense CPC and increase your earnings

Adsense is one of the most widely employed methods for bloggers to add glory to their income report. There are also people who solely depend on Adsense for their bread and butter and some even left their 9 to 5 Jobs for that. I too have been with adsense for about a year now and I have observed the ups and downs in my earning graph. I could understand that though I get good traffic and good number of clicks I would be earning amount to buy peanuts if I don’t understand on how Adsense works. Where as on the other hand few bloggers have earned quite good amount and few have also established startups with just their income from Adsense. So after few successful experiments, reading books on how Adsense works and referring many blog posts I understood that it is CPC which plays a major role in determining a blog or sites earnings. If at all I need to increase my adsense earnings I need to focus on CPC. If we can increase adsense CPC then we have chances of earning more.

Disclaimer: The methods mentioned below are not meant to harm Adsense program or violate any of its programs Policies. These are ethical methods and it is user’s choice on how they would use the following tips to enhance their CPC (Cost per Click) and earn more from their adsense account. I personally don’t guarantee any high earnings or I am not responsible if there is drop in your earnings. You are free to experiment as I did to increase my Adsense revenue.

What is CPC?

CPC refers to cost per click and adsense does an average and gives out an overall cost per click for an ad unit. If you get 0.1$ for one click and 1$ for another click then average CPC would be (0.1$+ 1$ )/2 =  0.55$. So on an average your CPC rate for that particular ad unit will be 0.55 for two clicks and this rate varies every day and every month. So in order to get high CPC there are few tweaks to be applied so as to earn good income from adsense.

1. Focused Niche:

First and foremost factor that plays a major role in determining adsense CPC is a good focused niche. If you have a good niche site like site purely based on hosting you are likely to get a click worth 3 to 4$ and if you have an entertainment related site then your CPC would be 0.01 to 0.20$ which is very low. Surprise findings show that a tech related blog has greater CPC compared to entertainment, fashion or any other niches. This fact could be a probable reason why we see many tech blogs growing out every day. People these days are creating micro niche sites by focusing on a single keyword which has high CPC value. They write 5 to 10 articles on that focused keyword and also choosing a domain containing the same keyword. They make it to top of the search results and earn nearly 1 to 30$ per click. Adsense will show only related ads to that particular niche or the focused keywords used. I haven’t personally experimented with micro niche sites but I have seen the results. Multi niche sites do have a less CPC compared to a single niche site.

2. Using a Single Ad Unit:

I too never believed in this experiment and I used all the 3 ad units for my blog and I also had good news that we can use text links along with three ad units. Voila I am going to earn more as I thought I am using 3 ad units along with text links but that was a pit-fall. Once I read in a blog that a single Ad unit increases the CPC of Adsense Ads. For the sake of experiment purpose I dropped 2 units and text unit as well and left a single unit for which I used to get maximum number of clicks and that day there was no change but next day I have seen a sudden increase in my earnings. Probable reason all ads which had good CPC rate where focused in that single unit as my blog had no other ad units placed.

Note: My friend and blogger Radha Krishna who blogs for 9to5Blogger has shared a nice tip to increase CTR(Click Through Rate) which in turn can increase your adsense earnings. He has done an experiment with A/B testing with Text-only and Image/Text ad units in one of his content-rich blogs and has found that by using Text-only option to the first ad unit has increased his earnings, though there was not much change in CPC. So experiment this tip if you have content-rich site and boost your earnings.

3. Dropping the text link ad units:

As I said earlier in spite of using three ad units you still have the facility to use text links ad unit from adsense. May be any one can think it adds more bucks to the revenue. But fact is if you drop that ad unit you can see a gradual increase in CPC. You can use these text link ad units in news related niche as it performs well with that niche but not with tech related blogs. May be some exception cases would be there where these ad units perform well compared to other ad units. Then I understood why Amit Agarwal has dropped text link ad units in his Labnol. Few years back Amit used to have text link ad units just below his navbar but now he doesn’t use it any more. He uses one ad unit in sidebar and when it comes to a post page he has a 468×60 ad unit at the top and 336×280 ad unit at the bottom of the post.

5. Assigning HTML code for better performing AD Unit:

I have read about this in Google support page on how to lift CPC. If you are not happy with the second point mentioned above on using a single ad unit as even your second ad too performs well. So If you want to retain good CPC for the Ad unit which performs well in other terms you want high paying ads to be shown on a particular ad unit which get maximum number of clicks and also keep the second ad unit which gets few clicks which do add some amount to your revenue then you have an option to add div tags. I have read about this tweak in Google support articles called First ad unit counts. They say ad which is on the top counts first or in other terms all high paying ads are assigned to the first ad unit of your page. If header ad is on the top then that ad unit has high number of advertiser requests. So if you want the preference to be given to an ad unit which is lower to header ad and which is performing good in terms of clicks than ad that particular ad units adsense code in between div tags as follows

<div id=”ad1″>
Insert your ad code here
</div>

Read: First ad unit counts

6. Dropping other network ads:

Are you using infolinks or clicksor ads along with adsense ads then you have dropped your Adsense CPC all by yourself. Try to remove other ad units especially those which link to text of your page and notice the change, there will be a slight increase in the CPC of your Adsense ads. My suggestion is if you want to use infolink ads use it on education related niche, entertainment and daily news related niche which performs well for infolinks. If you are using both adsense and infolinks then test once by dropping infolinks and see the change in the CPC all for yourself.

7. Enabling text and image options:

Once I got a mail from adsense itself to enable both text and image option for better performance. I did not find any difference but yet I did it as suggested in case I would earn more.
Read: Choose to display both text and image ads

8. Country Specific traffic:

Personally I have seen lot of difference in the CPC rates from various countries. CPC for countries like US, UK, South Africa, Australia are more compared to CPC from Indian users though I receive maximum number of clicks from Indian. Now I don’t say hunt for US or UK traffic but if you are adwords user then target traffic from these countries but don’t use any unfair means of buying traffic it may get your account disabled.

9. Subscribe to Adsense Newsletter:

Last but not least all you need to do is simply subscribe to Adsense Newsletter and also add them in your G+ as any modification or tweaks to increase your income would be shared very clearly in their newsletter and blogs. I got to know about the change in privacy policy through their post in Adsense official blog which was shared in their G+ account. So I was able to inform that Modifying Adsense Code for Responsive Design is no longer a Violation in one of my previous posts. So now if you want to increase your earnings you can use a modified code for responsive design. See what Servando Silva had said in a comment on how his income increased by 30% after implementing the responsive adsense ad code.

Now that you have understood on how to increase adsense CPC by following some simple tips just follow them and experiment. Be careful that you won’t violate any of Google adsense policies and harm your account. Still if you know any other tips that work then simply share your tip or experience in the comments below. Want to get more insight about how adsense works then you can also buy Google AdSense Secrets by Joel Conn. This book has some outdated stuff but still it gives good knowledge on custom channels, ad placement etc related information.