AdSense (Continued)

Longtime readers of this blog will know that Adsense was a bit of an obsession of mine about six months ago. I still run it on my site, but for the most part I have stopped paying attention to it.

But for some reason, I decided to go look at the stats today and to my surprise, I am starting to make some money on Adsense. It’s only $4, $5, $6 a day, but that’s a huge improvement to the $1/day or less I was making this summer.

So I drilled down a bit to figure out why the sudden increase. Some of it is traffic. My site regularly gets 1000 page views a day and some days it gets 2000 page views. Those are small numbers, but they start adding up.

But mostly the sudden increase is in the click-thru rate. It was stuck between 0% and 1% for most of the summer and averaged below 0.5%.

Adsense_click_through_rate_1

Something happened right around labor day. It’s been 1% and 2% for much of the last two months, with an average day being around 1.25%. That means the ads are more relevant or more eye catching or possibly both.

One possible explanation for the increased click-thru is the change to banner style ads and away from the classic Google text ads. I am getting a lot more banner style ads on my site these days.

Another possible explanation is the increased amount of political advertising on my blog. It seems that the political ads starting showing up in volume around early September, so that could also be the cause.

Whatever the cause of this increase, its good to see. I give all the money I get from Google to the Grameen Foundation and this will allow them to do some more microlending in Africa this fall. Good stuff!

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