Many people think there is no way to control CPC because it depends on the traffic quality as well as the niche. Every time an adsense ad-unit loads on your website, an auction takes place on adsense's site. The auction's winner gets to have their ad displayed on your site, giving you the highest CPC possible. You have no control over that auction obviously but there are certain things you can do on your site to guarantee the best possible result. The way the auction works, the first unit on the page will have the highest CPC in the auction, the second unit (if it's of the same size) will likely have the second highest bid. Which means, the first ad unit (first in the HTML code) on the page MUST be in the best possible spot "Search for Adsense heatmap images), otherwise both your CTR & your CPC will suffer. So never place a weak ad unit in a corner above your strongest ad unit that gets the most clicks & you will start finding better CPCs! Another thing to make sure you do is to enable BOTH image & text on your ad unit. This will get you access to the top bidder in both categories! Trust me. I make a living on Adsense
another thing that plays a pivotal role is the template/theme used. not only does the layout of the website affect your adsense income, but to my surprise the coding too, css, javascript, images etc, will all affect the CPC, CTR and RPM. I'm yet you find out how exactly, but when i upgraded my joomla website to 2.5 my income went up by over 40%. However, J2.5 was too heavy for my site and the server would go down like 15 times a day, so i had to downgrade. I searched for the same template that i had used on my J2.5 version, but surprisingly my income went down, much lower than what i was getting before upgrading to 2.5. I then activated the very first template that I was using before upgrading and my income immediately went up. By the way, all my templates are 3 column templates and they all have blue and white, so i never changed colours or ad units, but switching templates would always affect my income immediately.
Wow, I never knew about this, might be because no one really gives this kind of information out. Thanks for the information. The thing that I know how to do is ad rotation where my ads will always rotate to a different theme each time a new visitor comes onto the website. This eliminates ad blindness. Thanks, Ivan
thanks for your suggestion.. this is first time I have seen info regarding adsense bidding... can you provide a reference or link where I can get a detailed report on this
This info can actually be found in Adwords not adsense, as that's where the auction (I'd not personally call it that, but I suppose bidding for keywords is an ongoing form of auction - and that's what he means) as such takes place. I am however STUNNED that you've never heard of this before, as where the hell do you think the money for your adsense payments comes from? The moon????