My CPC has crashed, and I'm only getting a fraction of what I was earning a year ago. The site has good traffic and a pretty good number of clicks, but I can't seem to figure out what the magic combination is to get my CPC back up. The site is http://www.emptymirrorbooks.com - if you have any suggestions I'd love to hear them! Thank you for your thoughts.
You have way too many ads. CPC has been known to drop significantly when you have a large amount of ads on the page, even from third party networks. The first page I randomly click on leads me to this URL: http://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/beat/uk-jack-kerouac-convention.html I counted 5 total ads. For a decent CPC people usually go with 2 ads max. It also makes your site look a bit cleaner.
Thanks so much! I didn't realize that was too much...I'll see what I can do about that. Really appreciate your help!
Hey, If this is a wordpress blog you can utilize a large amount of plugins that can help with proper ad placement. Like what MrDoctorKovacic said you have 5 ads. Take the ones that gives you the most CTR and use those. Also on another note, it takes some time for the ads CPC to come back. So give it a week or so for the change to occur. Good Luck Man
Thanks MaxSerp! I don't have 5 ads anymore - I have two on the homepage (both Adsense). On feature posts the same two are in the right sidebar, plus one more much farther down the page below the author bio. (That third one has only been there for the last couple days as I experiment a little. It's benefit has been negligible so I'll likely take it down again.) Occasionally I've been getting a dollar or two a click but it's been running more like 50 cents most days. So it is up (from when it was like, 12 cents) but still not where I want it. I've been running lots of tests to see which numbers of ads and placements work best. thanks again!
Hey EmptyMirror, To add onto what I had before, there are also a lot of wordpress plugins that allow you to place different ads on different times. There is a thing known as ad blindness where returning visitors will start to ignore your ads. You can remove this by having a different kind of ad set up each time your page loads. You are giving up a few milliseconds of time for a much higher CPC. Ivan
One thing I did for one of my blogs is I logged into my adsense dashboard and went to the ads review center, after going through some ads I found out that unrelated ads were showing up. You can easily block them and ensure that you get only the most targeted ads. I tested this on one of my blogs and it worked well. Hope this helps
Thanks! I'll try that. I knew I could block whole categories but didn't know it was possible with individual ads. cheers - Denise