How to Increase Your Adsense CPC?

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If you are here is because you already know what is Adsense and how to start with it. Below you will find some tips and with some easy tweaks, you can improve its performance.

What do we want?

A big amount of traffic doesn’t guarantee to get good income with Google Adsense. Many bloggers are stuck with low incomes for their personal blogs or websites. Adsense optimisation is very important if we want an increase in our income through the increase of the Cost-per-Click (CPC). Here are some useful ideas to improve your income.

What is CPC?

Before you continue, let’s understand what is CPC. Cost-per-click (CPC) is the earnings that you earn when a click is generated in an advertisement displayed on our blog/website. Recently is having a major role in increasing our net earnings, even more than the CTR (Click-through-rate). Having thousand of impressions don’t increase noticeably earnings, they are important only when we get clicks.

CPC in a model of PPC (Pay-per-click) is what we are getting paid for each click in the showed ads. Any blog/website with an average CTR but with very good CPC will generate high revenue.

Some methods/tips/tricks to increase CPC are:

#1 Choosing the right “Niche”

If you are a still deciding the Niche of your website, you will like to know that there are Niches with better CPC than others. In fact there is a huge difference. I generally use Google Adwords and Long Tail Pro to do the keyword research and find the most profitable Niches.

Logically if you already have your site created and your Niche selected, very little needs to be done here. However, if the Niche is having different categories, it’s possible to do an evaluation of each ad performance, so depending on which category you are targeting the CPC will vary.

#2 Content

Content, content, content. Always it’s important to write amazing content to attract visitors and increase potential clicks in ads. We shouldn’t write for the ads, but for the visitors and then use the content to generate income.

Content is the message we want to tell, the length of the posts is important, relevance, having original content, good formatting, etc.

#3 Page Rank

Always a better-positioned website will get higher earnings than a less known site. It’s logical, but it needs to be mentioned.

This is achieved with a good SEO positioning strategy. There are many SEO agencies out there selling false expectations, that’s is why I recommend to do it yourself because in fact is not very difficult, it just requires learning the theory and put it into practice. Chris Lee has developed a very useful course, RankXL which will help you to apply the right SEO strategy and increase the CPC.

#4 Ad Review Center

This Adsense option is a functionality that helps to know how much are you earning for each ad category. It displays different ad categories which are being published. It helps to find which categories are paying low so you can block them. From personal experience, the best is to block categories which are irrelevant for the content of your niche.

Again we are focusing content and relevance. If our website is about Technology, probably if we advertise women cosmetic products they will not have a good conversion rate and we will waste impressions which don’t generate clicks.

#5 Allow & Block Ads

This functionality helps block those specific or general ads which are published on your website. You have the option of blocking ads for the whole website or just only for specific pages. One strategy is to block ads from your competitors, to avoid unwanted conversions.

#6 Targeted Country

Another factor affecting the CPC is the targeted country. The CPC is very different compared between, for example, US or any other country in South America. If your content is targeted to countries with high CPCs, your clicks will give more money.

The good thing about this is that you can always change your strategy and start targeting different countries depending on your own interests.

#7 Text & Display Ads

Choosing the right ad type is very important in order to increase the CPC. Text ads have a better CTR. Sometimes is better not using image ads because in many situations are having lower CTR and CPC. However, I always let them both (text and display) combined because it increases the number of bids and therefore the CPC can be higher.

Also, the size of the ad blocks is important. There is not a perfect size to get the highest CPC, you will need to experiment with them to see what is the best size for your site.

#8 Ads Location

Ads location is directly proportional to Adsense earnings. A good location can increase the CTR. A maximum of 3 ads per page can be used as following Adsense rules. As a rule of thumb, I normally use 2 in the post section and the other in the sidebar and it works really well.

But, how ads location influence the CPC? Each single ad has its own CPC. In the moment a visitor enters in one of your pages an automatic bid starts to choose the advertisers, the winner will get the ad block. What happen is that the first ad in your website is the one with highest CPC, therefore is convenient that this ad is located in the position with highest CTR.

#9 Google Rank

The highest your Google Rank is the highest the CPC. One thing I noticed with my websites is that during the first months the CPC is very low and then gradually is increasing with time. This happens because they are ranking higher and higher in Google with time.

Advertisers will prefer to be advertised on a well-known website with reputation than in a really new (not ranked) one. They are willing to pay more for the first one and this is translated in an increase of the CPC and therefore your Adsense earnings.

#10 Keep experimenting

Always keep experimenting. Change ad positions and modify sizes, write your results and keep trying. The idea is for you to find the optimal ad locations and sizes.

One good practice is to use “Custom Channels” to monitor your experiments. With Custom Channels you can make groups of ads and see their performance.

This is all folks, now if you want how I apply these strategies to increase the CPC in my websites you can also visit my Monthly Passive Income Reports section.