Best Performing Adsense Format

One of my sites is making decent money from Google Adsense, and it's receiving around 60,000 unique visitors per month. The CTR on the Adsense ads there is pitifully low, though (below 2%).

Obviously, I want this site to make more money. Let's look at the 3 main ways to increase Adsense revenue:

1. Get more visitors. If 1.5% of my visitors click on the ads, increasing the number of visitors will increase the number of clickers. This site is experiencing traffic growth anyway, simply because I keep adding good content to an already authoritative site. For this reason, we won't consider increasing traffic here. That's part of my content creation strategy.
2. Get higher paying advertisers to advertise on those Adsense blocks. The only way to do that is to write about more lucrative subjects to attract those high paying contextual ads or to exclude certain low paying advertisers from displaying on my site. Neither are feasible here.
3. Improve the Adsense CTR. This is the one. The site is already receiving substantial traffic, so tweaking the CTR could lead to a nice little increase in earnings. Let's test some numbers.

How Much Effect Will An Increase In CTR Have?

Suppose the site is making $500 / month and the average CTR is 1.5%.If we can double the CTR to 3%, that will double the number of clicking visitors and will roughly double the Adsense revenue. Testing different Adsense formats is much easier than trying to increase traffic, too. It might take a few different ad format changes to double the CTR, but compare the time and effort that goes into creating those new ad formats (not much) with taking on the challenge of doubling the traffic and you'll see what the preferred option is. And I'm already striving to increase traffic anyway, by cramming more content into the site.

Crappy Conclusions

Well, the conclusion might be valid, but how I draw it certainly isn't. Based on a few hours of collecting clicks using my new Adsense format, I can report an increase in CTR from 1.9% (last month) to 4.2% (last 3 hours). If last month's revenue was $500 (it wasn't), then this month's will be around $1105. That 5 minute change is potentially worth $7,260 / year!

The old Adsense block size was 300 x 250, and it took me 5 minutes to replicate the colour scheme and select a new block size to test.

And the magic ad format I'm now using?

336 x 280 showing text and images. Behold - the ad size of the century! I'll be using this one everywhere now! And testing as we go, of course.

This just in: 24 hourse later and the CTR was 4.62% for the previous day. Result!

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