Guru or Not?

I’m using Google’s AdSense for years, but only recently I’ve started receiving a notable income from it. The more money I get the more interesting working with it become.

I’ve collected some data about my AdSense experience that I want to share with you.

The data were collected during August 2010. I’m using “AdSense for Content”, “Ad unit”, “Text and Image ads (default)”, and the Format is 336×280 Large Rectangle.

1. I thought that if I change the option “Text and Image ads (default)” to “Image Ads only” AdSense will work more effectively. I was expecting that I’ll get less clicks on my Ad but clicks on the Image Ad will be more expensive and all together they will bring more income. I was wrong, with image Ads I was getting fewer clicks as expected but surprisingly, in my case, clicks on the image Ads were a few times cheaper than on “Text and Image ads (default)”. Probably there were much less Image Ads available for the keywords on my webpage so there is very little or not at all competition between Ads, and as a result less earnings. So choose “Text and Image ads (default)” option if you don’t have a specific reason to change it.
2. To improve the readability of one of my WebPages I removed some of the redundant information. I wasn’t thinking about AdSense at the time, however later when I analyzed the results I noticed about 50% decrease of the AdSense revenue. Why this happened?
   a) More keywords on the page give the AdSense a chance to find more relevant Ads which trigger more clicks
   b) If more competing Ads are available, the most expensive ones will be displayed on your website
3. If from AdSense home page you choose “AdSense Setup” then “Channels”, you can set up your channels “Targetable” or not. One must know the Google’s AdWords to understand “Targeting” option in AdSense.
   In AdWords you can choose to publish your Ad on Google’s or Google’s Partner’s Search results pages or on the Display Network pages or in both places at the same time. The Display Network itself has 2 options, Managed Placements and Automatic Placements. When you use the “Managed Placements” option you can chose web pages from the list of available websites who are willing to advertise. So whenever you make your channels “Targetable” you allow AdWords users to choose your website to advertise. Usually people bid much higher for Managed Placements compared to Automatic Placements. Why? Because in case of Managed Placement they choose the most relevant and most quality websites that they want. Now back to the AdSense. I was thinking that if I allow targeting my AdSense channels I will earn more. So I’ve targeted all my channels. However my income hasn’t increased, on some pages I even received less. What if nobody or a very few people want to advertise on your website? If there are no relevant Ads Google displays free Public Service Ads or leaves the place empty. The conclusion is, if your web page doesn’t have a significant traffic, or a noticeable content better do not target an AdSense channel.
4. It is obvious that AdSense drives way the visitors from your website. So before placing AdSense code on your web pages you need to carefully consider the benefits and the losses. Sometimes it is difficult to make such decision so you need to try and decide based on the statistical data. AdSense is perfect for blogs, for informative websites, but it is not a good idea to place AdSense on your sales pages.