I was expetimenting a bit and found out that having 2 ad blocks instead of 3 increases my earnings for as much as 50%!! This is for sure now, I have put the ad on and off for 3 times and always get the same result. What is your experience?
That's useful to know, I've never had very inconclusive results (but I usually only have 2 ads - one at the top and one at the bottom). Can you explain a bit about the layout before and after - eg was the third unit a footer ad or a banner ad etc, was it getting a very low CTR? Also did the change in earnings happen immediately you made the change or a week or two later - I'm wondering if it was smartpricing related. Cheers
If it was the top add with low CTR, you may have been wasting your highest paying ads on an ad block with few clicks. By getting rid of the unit, it may have increased the value of the ads in your other two units. I went from 3 units to 2 as well, and my earnings went up (although other variables changed, too, so it's difficult to isolate the reason for the increase).
People thought I was crazy when I posted about this before. But my results were the same as yours. Less ad units generates a higher RPC. I went down to one ad unit and it was even higher. Here's another experiment as well... G is a master at statistics and tracking. My thoughts were that G would discount RPC if they knew the clicking visitor originally came from a G search result. So I took adsense off my homepage where most of the traffic from G arrives. When these visitors went deeper into the site only my url was the referrer. Guess what? Revenue Per Click went up again. I think G discounts RPC if they sent you the visitor in the first place. I also believe that having many ad units on a page may trigger a MFA filter that reduces RPC.
snowbird: very interesting post, I agree with your theory DoughRoller: that is also very possible forgotten: it was 468x60, tried both text ads, text and image and image only, always had same result
I thought everyone knew this already, the less ad you have the more pay per click you get but CTR is lower because obviously there are less ads showing.
Bear in mind, that this particular discussion was in terms of eCPM, which takes into account the lower clicks derived from eliminating any given unit. The calculation merely informs you as to how much is generated per thousand impressions, so the effects of fewer clicks (or a lower CTR) has already been factored into the given equation.
My experience, less ads + filter ads = more earning Less ads means only ads with highest bid will show. Filter ads means no more mfa ads and low bid ads.
First off you get more money because highest paying ads are displayed first. If you have less ad space then the lowest paying ones aren't showing. Second you probably get more money on deeper pages because the content has higher paying keywords than your main page. Your theories are quite nuts and there are tons of reasons why your money could have gone up.