150k Monthly Pageviews, 78% Search Generated, But Only $100-$200 in Adsense Revenue?

Hey guys,
I run a pop culture site (nerdmuch.com), and we're at ~150k monthly pageviews from ~110k users. The majority of users are generated through Google/search engines.

We are making a high of $180 (in December) through Adsense, and last month was just $100.

Does anyone else feel like this is incredibly wrong? Shouldn't I be making much more on Adsense with such high traffic?

 

Adsense earning depends on the Bid that Advertisers had made for a particular keyword. So, According to me focus on high paying keywords. you can also block low paying ad networks from your adsense account.

 

Just block low advertise like facebook, gmail, hostgator or something like that... They offer low price.

 

I see where to allow & Block ads, and that I can do it by Advertiser URLs. Am I just entering facebook.com, hostgator.com, etc? Or is this not the right way to block them?

 

Yup. High traffic does not equal more money. It depends on the niche you are in which is the content of your website.

I also have a high traffic site in the 100k pageviews and adsense is not that great either.

I would suggest placing affiliate ads or use buysellads.com for getting higher paying direct sponsors.

 

Adsense is basically revolved into website structure and even which niche you covered
High volume keyword is basically high paying revenue from google ads

 

what is your click % and CPM?

 

How much your cpc bro ?

 

It's time you considered other advertising revenues. On my small personal finance blog I made over 2,000 bucks last year and it has maybe 40-50/visitors per day. All this because it's a good niche and I got sponsored posts for it. Adsense would pay me maybe 2-3 bucks/month

 

CTR is .18%, CPC is $0.54

 

If only i had a cpc of 0.2 and above i'd be very happy.
Presently my CPC is 0.06-0.08
My Blog gets 1.2Million pageviews a month and i earn just $30 per day

 

Not a bad site at all.

I run a few tech websites and the CTR and CPC seem to be on par with what I was doing.

Blocking advertisers is a waste of time. You will be fighting an endless battle. Adsense will in 99% of all cases show the ads that will make them and you the most money. If that low CPC advertiser is being shown it's because you make more with them based on CTR vs another higher paying advertiser.

What you can do is split test Adsense layouts or work with an Adsense partner to help increase earnings.

 

Really? I'm surprised they're that low. I was thinking about testing Ezoic or another similar service.

 

I completely agree with jerdei about not blocking advertisers. Don't bother, it will only hurt you.

The CTR seems pretty low. Most of my sites I see at least 0.50%.

Are you segmenting ads for mobile vs desktop? That's an easy way to increase your CTR.

 

From my personal experience, I think you can earn at least from $500 to $1,000 or even more from that site.

I am almost sure the problem is your website theme / design. The ads are not getting enough focus. Your site is very colorful and the ads get very little attention. So, your CTR is low.

I had the same problem. So, I developed / coded my own theme and went through a lot of experiments. Then I found the best combination. The CTR of my site is never less than 1% and sometimes up to 5%.

So, change your site's design and make the ads more focused. Try to increase CTR by giving more focus on ads. And oh! Show more ads. The more ads you put, the more you will earn. I am saying this from my personal experience.

Hope this helps. All the best!

 

Thanks. I can see how my site's design could be affected CTR. Good tip.

 

Not sure what exactly you mean by segmenting? I have both desktop ads and separate mobile ads. I assume that's what you're saying?

 

Yes, exactly - treat your mobile users as one segment of traffic and show them mobile-sized ads, vs your desktop traffic will get larger ads.

Robert Fisk brings up great points. Lots of themes are created by designers that just want their templates to look good, not necessarily give you the most ad revenue. You can try switching themes, although that's not a valid test (traffic could be different between last week vs this week). Another option is using split testing plugins.

If you're on wordpress, something like these can help you optimize your ads: https://wordpress.org/plugins/search.php?type=term&q=adsense+test

 

Is there any reliable code (php?) that can detect mobile vs desktop...?

 

PHP (server-side) detection of mobile vs desktop is not trivial. You have to look at the user-agent string and compare it to a list of known devices and make a best guess. While it's difficult, it can have a success rate of >95%. AmpedSense uses this library, which is pretty effective: https://github.com/serbanghita/Mobile-Detect

If you're able to detect in client side by looking at the screen width or window width, it's a bit easier.