This month I did one simple change that increased my Adsense revenue by over 50%. The increase happened despite a fairly decent drop in my site traffic.
Adsense was the very first way I monetized this blog, and to this day it is still my number 1 source of income from it. I have partnered with some sponsored content and made some affiliate sales, but by and large Google Adsense ads bring me the most money consistently.
Despite the fact that I had quit blogging here for around a year in 2015/16, my adsense revenue had remained steady thanks to Pinterest and search engines continuing to bring visitors to the site.
But it kind of topped out and averaged just under $20 a week. I had accepted this as the amount I would continue to get unless I could write more and garner even more traffic.
Then in late September of this year, my traffic took a significant hit when I removed one of my most popular posts from the site. (Long story short, a blog didn’t like the way I was referring to their content so out of respect for them I took it down)
I became worried that my loss of traffic would significantly impact my single most lucrative and reliable source of revenue on this blog: Adsense.
So I read about ad optimization with renewed vigor, determined to garner every extra cent I could despite my traffic decline.
In my reading I came across one idea that, once implemented here, instantly boosted my adsense revenue by well over 50%. In fact, if you compare it solely to the week before I tried this method, it increased my revenue by 300%!
This graph below is my all time weekly adsense income. As you can see, the highest I ever earned was about $24/week. But 2 weeks ago, I made one simple change and the results are circled in red below.
Quite a leap right? Especially considering my traffic has nearly halved in the last month or so…
So, I get that I’m totally dragging this out…
The one simple change I made to increase my adsense revenue dramatically despite a huge downturn in traffic was to:
Add in-post ads.
Specifically: one at the beginning of every post. One in the middle and one at the end.
Previously I had been relying on side-bar ads as well as the occasional header ad, depending on what theme I was using at the time. When I first implemented these ads. Google still had their ‘no more than 3 ads’ rule in place. And I hadn’t revisited them much since.
Now, Google has ended this restriction to the number of ads you can have on your site. And I could add these in post ads without getting rid of my other adsense ads.
The reason these new in post ads created such a significant increase for my revenue is not simply because of more ad quantity. Studies have shown that in-post ads perform significantly better than sidebar ads.
And, the single most lucrative position for your Adsense ad is directly above your post content.
So there you have it, exactly how I increased my Adsense revenue with one simple change. To get my ads into my posts I used the plugin: Wp Insert. There are several great WordPress plugins out there that also do the same thing. Check them out!
Well, did you already know this simple trick? Or if not, are you going to go put some in-post ads in now?