How To Optimize & Increase Google Adsense Earnings In 2024

Adsense is the most popular and widely used ad network in the world, and knowing how to optimize and increase your Adsense earnings is essential.

In this article, we will share some of the best tips on how you can optimize your AdSense earnings without impacting your website’s speed performance.

Highlights

In this article, we will cover the following topics:

• Avoiding common mistakes that prevent you from maximizing your revenue potential

• New AdSense features to help you earn more

• Getting the most out of AdSense experiments

Understanding AdSense Metrics

Before we get into the details, we’ll be breaking down these abbreviations, showing you what they mean when you see them used further in the article.

Metric	Meaning
CPC	CPC, or Cost Per Click, is a metric that represents the cost an advertiser pays for each click on their ad. It is calculated by dividing the total cost of clicks by the total number of clicks. Advertisers typically set a maximum CPC bid, indicating the highest amount they are willing to pay for a single click on their ad.
CTR	CTR, or Click-Through Rate, is the percentage of ad impressions that resulted in clicks. It is a measure of how often users click on an ad after seeing it. A higher CTR indicates that the ad is relevant and appealing to the audience.
RPM	RPM, or Revenue Per Mille, is a metric that represents the estimated revenue earned by a publisher for every thousand ad impressions served on their website. It is a common way for publishers to assess their overall ad revenue performance.

Generally with AdSense, the metrics you have direct influence over are CPC and CTR. All the changes you make are to increase both of these metrics, which will then result in a higher RPM. When your RPM goes up, you earn more.

Avoiding Common AdSense Mistakes

To start, let’s run through several common mistakes that many AdSense users tend to make. With so many different options available, many site owners often fall back on solutions that aren’t optimal.

When this happens, your site’s monetization can struggle. By avoiding these common mistakes, you can further optimize your AdSense earnings and give your site a boost!

1. Avoiding Auto Ads

AdSense Auto Ads are, as the name implies, automatic ads. With auto ads, site owners do not need to manually place individual ad units on their web pages. Instead, the algorithm automatically scans the website’s content, layout, user behaviour and webpage structure to determine the most effective ad formats and placements.

Despite the great improvements and solid performance of modern auto ads, some users still haven’t adopted them. They’re easy to integrate with your site, being activated with the flick of a single slider. Once they’re active, tune the ads according to what you need, and they’re ready to serve relevant Ads to your viewers.

2. Placing Too Many Ad Units on a Page

Placing too many ad units on a page can severely affect the user experience on your site. A web page with too many ads can overwhelm readers, getting in the way of the content they’re trying to read. When this happens, browsing your site can quickly get frustrating for users. The last thing you want as a site owner is to drive away visitors.

Advertisers are far less likely to advertise on pages with a lot of clutter. It’s not in their best interest, seeing how the CTR is also going to be reasonably lower. So, keep your ads in order, and be thoughtful with your placement of them throughout your site. Keep these ideas in mind, and things will work out nicely.

3. Relying on a Single Ad Unit, Size, or Type

Many AdSense users stick to a single ad unit, size or type, which is a common mistake and it will limit ad inventory available for advertisers to bid on. This scarcity may result in lower demand and lower ad revenue for your site since advertisers have fewer opportunities to display their ads.

Websites that offer a variety of ad types and sizes tend to attract more advertisers. Being able to diversify the types of ads visible on your site allows you to feature more advertisers on your site. Different ad formats and sizes can cater to different types of content and user behaviour. By using only one ad unit, your ads may fail to be relevant to readers, harming your CTR.

4. Forgetting About Multiscreen Best Practices

Readers expect websites to be responsive and adapt to their device’s screen size. If your site is not optimized for different screens, visitors may encounter layout issues, poor text formatting, or elements that are difficult to interact with. A poor user experience can lead to higher bounce rates and decreased engagement.

This goes both ways, for both desktop and mobile. Google prioritizes mobile-friendly websites in its search results, and neglecting these users can negatively impact your site ranking. That doesn’t mean you can ignore desktop users either, as having a consistent experience on both mobile and PC keeps users coming back to your website.

5. Ignoring Viewability

Advertisers pay for ad impressions, but if their ads are not viewable, they are essentially wasting their advertising budget on impressions that users don’t see. This can lead to low advertiser satisfaction and reduced willingness to bid on your ad space in the future.

Poorly placed ads can obstruct content, discouraging users from engaging with the site. Because of this, it’s important to place ads in locations where they are likely to be seen without being overly intrusive. Monitor and optimize your metrics to improve viewability rates at all times.

New AdSense Features to Help You Earn More

AdSense is constantly evolving, and with this evolution comes new features that benefit users. If you’re looking to optimize your website’s earnings with AdSense, making use of these features is key. While adopting new tools into your workflow can be daunting, it’s well worth the time and effort.

Below, you’ll find a bunch of new features on Google AdSense that can help you earn more. Consider taking these features and integrating them into your site for greater success in the future.

1. Side Rails

Side Rails are ads that stick to the side of your screen, staying with you as you scroll through a web page. They’re prominent, making them more noticeable to website visitors. Their size and behaviour allow them to stand out from other ad formats. The way they stick around as you continue to scroll also makes users more likely to interact with them during their visit.

Due to their eye-catching nature, Side Rails tend to attract more clicks compared to smaller, less visible ad formats. On top of that, because of the way they stay as users scroll, you don’t need to think too hard about their placement on your site. Side Rails especially excel when your website features long-form content, allowing the ads to linger on-screen without causing ad blindness.

2. Enhanced Auto Ad Exclusions

One of the biggest issues with auto ads is they can sometimes display Ads in areas that might affect user experience. Back when the algorithm wasn’t great, this would happen often.

Nowadays it doesn’t happen as much, but auto ad exclusions allow you to put a stop to it completely. As the name implies, this feature allows you to exclude Ads from appearing in certain parts of your site.

3. Search for Auto Ads & Related Searches

Search for auto ads and related searches are a few other auto ads adjacent features that help out a lot with site optimization. While both features are similar, there are some key differences between the two. Search for auto ads is an icon that allows readers to search up terms straight from your website, with ads alongside it. Related searches meanwhile offer search results you may find interesting.

Both of these features benefit your site in different ways. Search for auto ads makes readers spend more time on your site. Erasing the need to go back to the search engine to search for something is incredibly convenient. The ads shown to readers use the auto ads algorithm, meaning they’ll be things that readers show interest in.

Related searches are a little bit different but effectively provide the same benefits. Instead of users needing to key in details, however, this allows users to simply click things on a whim. It’s more likely to entice casual browsers who don’t want to put too much time into something like an ad. Regardless, making use of either one of these features is a net positive for your site.

4. Shopping Links & Anchors

websites where they can purchase products online. These links are commonly used in ads, especially on sites that feature product reviews and the like. When users click on a shopping link, they are taken to the product’s page, where they can view more details and purchase the product.

Anchors meanwhile are similar, in that they allow serve as a link to a specific web page. Anchors are also commonly found within ads, advertising services or places pertinent to the content on the site. Both of these features are a no-brainer for most sites, considering how well they work at generating clicks.

As far as ads go, shopping links and anchors are by and far some of the least egregious. Not only do they directly relate to what your site does, but they’re also reader-friendly and promote relevant content. Again, making use of shopping links and anchors is a must for any site owner looking to maximize earnings.

5. Reader Revenue Manager

The Google AdSense Reader Revenue Manager is a brand-new feature that offers publishers and site owners the ability to offer subscriptions and accept contributions from readers. This feature is extremely helpful for smaller site publishers, especially with the content traffic reports that the feature gives to you.

Another advantage of the Reader Revenue Manager is how it prioritizes content over ads. While AdSense typically wants users to balance their content with ad distribution, the Reader Revenue Manager instead focuses on earning revenue from returning readers. It’s a great option if you aren’t too keen on ads, but still want to retain some form of monetization for your content.

If you aren’t already using this feature, then you’ll want to start as soon as possible. Not monitoring your reader metrics and revenue statistics is one of the worst things you can do while managing your site, and it’s practically easy monetization. It’s one of the best features available in Google AdSense, and making good use of it is a no-brainer for any publisher.

Getting the Most Out of AdSense Experiments

Google AdSense experiments, also known as AdSense A/B tests, are a feature that allows website owners to run controlled experiments to test different ad settings and configurations.

AdSense experiments centre around taking experimental ideas that you want to implement and testing them out to see what the result will potentially be. These controlled experiments test different ad settings and configurations. By running experiments, publishers can gather data and insights to understand how specific changes to their ads affect ad performance, user experience, and revenue.

1. Be Mindful of What You Can Test

While AdSense experiments are certainly useful, they don’t allow you to test everything available. You need to be mindful of what you can test, and what will need to be done manually. As of right now, AdSense supports auto ads experiments, blocking controls experiments and search style experiments. These are all quite useful to have and should benefit users.

Setting up and running these experiments will allow you to test different ad formats, ad colours, ad placements, or ad types. Over a specified period, AdSense collects data on the performance of the ads in each group, tracking metrics like click-through rates, viewability, and revenue.

After the experiment concludes, publishers can view the results and insights through the AdSense dashboard. This information helps them understand the impact of the changes and make informed decisions about their ad strategy.

2. Wait Until Your Experiment is Marked as “Result Ready”

We can understand having the drive to improve your website as soon as possible. But, when it comes to experiments, you need to wait until the experiment is complete before doing anything. If you try to collect data from an incomplete experiment, the results are not going to accurately reflect any kind of scenario, especially long-term ones.

To avoid this, wait until the experiment is marked as “Result ready” before attempting to collect any data. Even if it’s taking a while, have patience and wait for the results. Rushing to conclusions won’t benefit anyone, and will only serve to waste your time.

3. Consider Benefiting from “Auto Optimize”

Auto Optimize is, as the name implies, a function that allows Google AdSense to automatically optimize AdSense for you. This option comes up after running an experiment and is pretty handy when you’re low on time. Here, the algorithm takes the results of your experiments, calculates what the best possible action to take is, and then offers it to you.

As a site owner, being efficient with your time is an important part of managing a website, and thus automating processes like this which are just tedious otherwise is a great way to make time for other things on your site.

Optimizing Ad Placement

Ad placement is a common question among many different site owners, seeing as how there’s no specific science behind it. Everything works around the context of your website, though there are several rules of thumb to stick to. Here, we’ll dig into the advice given, summarizing it into simpler passages.

1. What is Viewability?

Viewability is a crucial metric for advertisers and publishers because it helps determine the effectiveness of ad placements and campaigns. It refers to the measurement of how visible a digital ad is to users when they visit a web page.

If ads are not viewable, it means that users did not have an opportunity to see or interact with them, and advertisers may not receive the expected return on their ad investment. Low viewability can also indicate issues with ad placement or website design that need to be addressed to improve user experience and ad performance.

2. How Can We Increase Active Viewable?

Increasing your active viewability is simply a matter of improving your site and ad layout. Optimizing your ad placement helps immensely, as well as using ad formats that are engaging. Viewers receive responsive ads better than normal ads, so try to make your ads responsive. But, don’t go overboard with it and clutter your site with ads, as that’ll keep users away from your site.

For your site, making sure you provide quality content will help with retaining reader loyalty. Keep your site running smoothly, and most importantly, always keep an eye on your analytics for any shifts after changes.

3. How to Optimize Auto Ads?

Auto ads are great because they serve ads that fit your content, all without the need for much user input. But, that doesn’t mean you can just leave them be. There are, in fact, plenty of ways you can optimize auto ads, all of which are quite simple to implement.

You always want to make sure you’re enabling a sufficient amount of ad formats. Diversifying ad formats increases the chances of auto ads displaying relevant ads to your users. You’ll also want to customize your ad categories to align with your website’s content and audience. This step is important to make sure the ads shown are of interest to your viewers.

4. How to Increase My Revenue Without AdSense Limiting the Ads?

AdSense only limits your ads if you’re cluttering your site up with them. So, to increase your revenue without getting limited, all you need to do is take viewability and ad placement into account. Place your ads strategically in places where viewers might look, and don’t go overboard with them.

Responsive ads are the best Ad format, especially when they’re pertinent to your content. In general, the best way to accomplish this is to think smarter and utilize most of the good viewability practices we’ve listed above. Other than that, focus on putting out good content, as higher viewer retention means you’ll naturally see a revenue increase, even with fewer ads.

How to Respond to a Drop in Earnings?

Sometimes you will inevitably see a drop in your site’s earnings. Don’t panic, however, as seeing a drop in revenue is an organic part of owning and running a site. AdSense is working as always, and this downward trend is just that, a trend. There are many different reasons why this can happen, and we’ll break down each one of them below, as well as how to respond to them.

1. Seasonality

Seasonality in dropping views refers to a pattern of fluctuations or variations in website traffic, viewership, or ad impressions that occur during specific periods of the year. These fluctuations are often influenced by seasonal trends, events or holidays, or other factors that impact user behaviour. It’s common during months like December, with extended holiday periods and cultural events.

Our advice regarding seasonality drops is to simply accept it.

2. Page Views

Page views are remarkably similar to seasonality in how they work. Like seasonality, page views refer to a specific period where you’ll find an organic decline in views. Where page views differ is in their cause. Page views are a rise or reduction in interest in the content you serve, in conjunction with organic timing.

This can apply to things like product demand, or academic schedules. For example, sites that offer products or services tied to specific seasons, like winter sports gear or gardening tools, may experience drops in views during off-peak months.

One suggestion is to diversify your content so that you can attract different types of readers. Thus, when one type of content starts getting affected, you can rely on the other topics to attract readers. That way, you’ll be able to keep your ads garnering revenue even during lulls.

3. Ads.txt & Robots.txt

‘Ads.txt’ and ‘robots.txt’ are a fair bit more technical than other things on this list. First off, ‘ads.txt’ stands for “Authorized Digital Sellers” and is an initiative by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). It is a plain text file that website owners place on their domain to publicly declare the authorized sellers of their digital ad inventory.

‘Robots.txt’ on the other hand is a text file that website owners place on their server to provide instructions to web robots or search engine crawlers. It tells search engine bots which parts of the website they are allowed to crawl and index.

If the ads.txt file is not properly configured or contains errors, it can lead to reduced demand for ad space, lower ad revenue, and a risk of ad fraud. Meanwhile, issues with ‘robots.txt’ can heavily impact SEO performance, leading to huge readership loss.

To avoid problems with ‘ads.txt’ and ‘robots.txt’, you must keep both files correctly configured and regularly updated. Monitor your AdSense account, you will get a notification regarding this if anything goes wrong, and there will be a noticeable drop in your ad viewability. Addressing any issues promptly to maintain a healthy ad ecosystem.

4. Policy Violations & Invalid Actions

Policy violations refer to instances where a publisher or advertiser breaches the terms of service or policies set by an ad network or advertising platform. Invalid actions, also known as invalid clicks or invalid traffic, refer to any clicks or impressions on ads that are not considered legitimate or valid by the ad network’s algorithms. This includes accidental clicks, malicious activities, or automated bots.

Like with ‘ads.txt’ and ‘robots.txt’, the way to fix a policy violation or invalid action is to constantly monitor your AdSense account. Take measures to prevent accidental clicks and incentivized traffic. Maintain a transparent and legitimate advertising environment on your site, and in the case you are flagged, take immediate action to remedy it.

Earning More Money from AdSense

Last but not least, we break down how you can effectively earn more money from AdSense. While there aren’t any concrete, one size fits all answer for this, there are some good notes here.

1. How to Increase CPC on an Existing Website?

Increasing your CPC generally requires good site practices, like the ones we mentioned above. Experiment with different ad placements on your website to find the most effective positions. Enable as many ad formats as you’re comfortable with.

With this in mind, the end goal is still to improve the user experience. Creating high-quality content improves user engagement, and encourages users to spend more time on your website. Keep your website responsive, and your CPC will naturally increase with time. You can also enable ad balance to control the number of ads shown, reducing the number of low-paying ads.

2. How to Increase CTR on an Existing Website?

Increasing the CTR on your site usually involves optimizing various aspects to encourage more visitors to click on your ads or call-to-action buttons. Keyword choices and Ads placement are essential to have a higher CTR.

You should optimize your ad formats, testing out different types to see which resonates best with your audience. We can’t stress enough how much the reader experience matters to improving these metrics. Always make sure your content is high-quality, and keep your page load speed brisk.

3. How to Maximize Your AdSense Earnings When Using it on a Cryptocurrency Website?

We think that cryptocurrency, as with any niche, can create unique opportunities. For cryptocurrency, narrow down your focus within the cryptocurrency niche. Specializing in a particular aspect, such as crypto trading, blockchain technology, or cryptocurrency news, can help attract advertisers looking for specific audiences.

4. How to Maximize My Earnings?

Keep your site page loading quickly, and keep your site navigation as simple and user-friendly as possible. Even the best ad setup will fail if nobody wants to visit your site in the first place.

In summary, below are the biggest factors that can lead to Increase in Google Adsense Earnings.

1. Website Speed
2. Website Niche
3. Ad Viewability
4. Ad Placement

If you can improve the above, you will see Increase in your Google Adsense Earnings.

Conclusion

You will need to do a lot of testing to find the best settings for your website and most importantly, be patient. What may work for Website A, may not work for Website B.

If you make changes to the placement of your ads or AdSense account, let it run for at least a week and compare the results.

Ideally, you want to place 2 in-page Ads and 1 Ad outside. Below is what we find the perfect balance for one of our websites for revenue and speed.

One Ad above the fold (ATF) – Responsive Ad setup manually with a fixed height of 280px to avoid Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) issue and pass Core Web Vital.

One Ad below the fold (BTF) – Responsive Ad setup manually

Auto Ads – Anchor Ads and Vignette Ads Only. Everything else is disabled.

Note: Adsense reset your RPM and CPC data daily at 12 AM (local time). It reaches its peak within 12 hours and you may notice the RPM and CPC rate starts to decline after 2 PM (local time). I am not sure why this is happening but I guess it is just how AdSense works.

On another note, you will realize that your daily income will decrease in the last week of the month. This usually happens when advertisers run low on their monthly budget and therefore, you don’t need to worry about this data.

Remember, user experience is very important and you don’t want to have many ads running on your website.