Sometimes less is more

Do you already have a blog or some other type of website? As you probably know, I have lots of sites on the web. Next question, do you have your sites monetized? In other words, do you make money from the sites? I guess, after thinking, that I have every one of my 200+ websites monetized in one way or another.

For today, let’s talk about Google AdSense. AdSense is probably the number one means of blog monetization around. There must be literally millions of people using Google to make money from their sites. I know that I do, and I bet you do too if you have a site earning money for you already.

Google has rules for just about every aspect of using them to monetize your site. For example, there is a limit as to how many ad units you can put on any given page on your site. You can’t have a few sentences of content and 40 ads on the page! Google limits you to putting 3 ad units on a single page. Yes, they have other products that you can also include in the page, but for actual ad units, you are limited to 3 such units on a single page. If you put 4, you are in violation of Google’s terms, and you risk losing your AdSense Account.

So, since you are allowed 3 ad units, you should make sure that you put 3 on each page, right?

NO.

Not Necessarily.

Sometimes, putting fewer ad units will earn you more money! Of course, a lot of people are reading this and thinking that I must be crazy. The more ads you put, the better chance somebody will click on one, right? That part may be true, but you should also consider that you can get MORE clicks, and still earn LESS. How can that be? Let’s have a look.

How does the whole advertising game work on AdSense? Well, if a company wants to advertise on the Web through Google, they open an AdWords account with Google. They sign up and they bid for keywords. For instance, they might choose the word “flowers” as the Keyword that they are targeting. And, they might say that they are willing to pay 50 Cents (US currency) for every time that somebody clicks on their ad. Another company may also choose the keyword “Flowers” and they might bid $1 for that Keyword. Other companies may also bid on that same word, and bid as little as 1 cent. So, for instance, let’s say that a total of 20 companies have bid on the Keyword “Flowers” and the bids range from $1.00 per click all the way down to 1 Cent per click.

OK, next, on your blog, you write a post about Flowers. Ding Ding Ding! Google sees that this post is about Flowers, and suddenly the whole process kicks in, and those people who bid for the keyword “Flowers” have their ads placed on your site. The person who bid the highest amount gets his ad placed first. The second place bidder gets his ad listed second, and so on. Now, if somebody clicks on those ads on your site, you get a share of that money that was bid for the click.

So, let’s say that you put the maximum of 3 ad units on your site. Each one of those ad units can have multiple ads, as many as 5 ads on each ad unit. So, if you put 3 ad units on the page, you may have as many as 15 different ads from Google. This would mean that you have the top 15 bidders advertising on your post about flowers. Advertiser #1 bid $1 per click. Advertiser #2 bid less, and Advertiser #3 bid even less than that. So, in having put 15 different advertisers on that one post, you may have a bunch of guys bidding 5 cents or even 1 cent per click! Those clicks are not worth very much. It takes a lot of 1 cent clicks to make up for just one click from the guy who bid $1.

Let’s say that you put just one ad unit on that post. Suddenly, you have only the top 5 bidders advertising, and the lowest click might be worth 50 cents or so still. So, in this case, you could get 10 clicks on that page that has 3 ad units, and make less than if you got just one click on that page with only 1 ad unit. It sounds kind of complicated, but if you think it through, you’ll find that it is actually quite simple!

So, if you are blogging in a niche that has few advertisers, you might explore the possibility of cutting back on the number of ads that you place on your site! You might make MORE money that way! One thing to keep in mind – it doesn’t hurt much to experiment and see what pays off best in your case. You can always switch back after a few days of testing!