Adsense is not a waste of time. It looks to me like you may have been concentrating your efforts in the wrong areas. If the sites in your signature are yours, I would try to simplify them a bit in order to increase your CTR (since it sounds like you have built up your traffic to an acceptable level). For example, your site about 'Image editing software reviews' has too much on each page to distract visitors. The adsense on there is competing with dozens of other links on the page, so the chances of visitors clicking on ads are somewhat limited. Simplify your navigation. Some of my sites have 200 pages or more, but visitors to any page will be unlikely to see any more than 5 or 6 links to other pages on the site. The result is that the number of individual ads outnumber the number of internal links and means that they get more attention and are more likely to get clicked. Single column layouts also work well for me as it means if I place a leaderboard above the fold that it can't fail to be seen when visitors visually scroll down the page. With two and three column layouts a visitor might read all the content from top to bottom in your first column and miss your ads in the second or third altogether. Would a 20% CTR make all your effort worthwhile? If yes, you should be able to get close to that by making some changes in line with what I have mentioned above. 30 - 40% CTR's might also be achieveable with further tweaking.
Lately, I've seen more advertisers opt out of the adwords extended advertiser network. Generally, it means less people who will show up on your site related to a specific KW, leaving them for the main google search. I stopped putting my ad out on the extended network after a ton of click fraud.
That makes a lot of sense to me. I have noticed that ads on display are not so relevant anymore, resulting in drops in CTR. Thanks for the info.
Meh ... there is 100s of different earning opportunities, if you listen to everyone and everyones experiences your head will explode - seriously you will face a brain fart. People tend to find what works for them - then other people try to copy their results and who akes the money ? The original person of course. Most people will find and experiment many, many times within their first year or two and finally they stumble across something that works for them ... just let this happen for and to you. Once you find that something you will think "God Damn that's easy" or "why didn't I do this before" .... I have been trying to sell my Grey Hat Method and funnily enough - no one wants it ....
This may sound silly but as I am too lazy to track my visitors, I use adsense for my stats, the 200$ a month roughly is a bonus. I also think anyone paying over 1 cent a click on content network and not for search on adwords PPC is wasting money. Putting your ads on a site is asking for click fraud / poorly targetted users. you should only use adwords on search pages.
People are earning thousands of dollars via adsense. So I think we cant blame adsense if we are not earning much
You can earn good from adsense if you keep getting fresh, less educated visitors. Repeated visitors just suck bandwidth and don click. Highly educated visitors have ad blockers you don get clicks.
try to let us help by giving us the site and let us review it. Make sure you read more threads about improve adsense income here in DP. it would help.
Thanks, friend I followed Bizart's suggestion on one of my sites yesterday. And the CTR improved. Will take a few more days to see if this is consistent.
Hi Bizmart, I tried your suggestions on one of my sites and tweaked the wordpress theme layout. The CTR increased today. I will monitor to see if the improvement is consistent. I just want to say thank you to you.
Adsense is one of the popular and many people are earning good bucks lol..I think one should learn observing successful publishers and i admit lot of effort should be there to become successful.
Adsense has performed well on other sites I have, but those other sites have a very unique niche. When placed with more general sites, earning pennies on the day is laughable and not worth copying/pasting code at that point. There's been alot of success stories though, and their hard work definately paid off for them so it's a matter of how hard you're willing to work and create the perfect target audience if you are to profit from Adsense.
Agree with this point. If you have good quality traffic, optimize your blog/website with other Ads. Do wisely.