Making Sense of Google's Adsense Reports

I have been asked a few times about the meaning of some of the data in Google's Adsense reports, so here is a short list plus some strategies to increase earnings.

The basic reports page within Adsense gives numbers for Page Impressions, Clicks, Page CTR, Page eCPM and Earnings.

Page Impressions and Clicks should be fairly obvious. Note that Page Impressions shows the number of times your page or article has been viewed, not the number of ad impressions. So if you have three Adsense units on one page it will still count as one page impression, not three. The Adsense for Feeds data, however, gives the actual number of ad impressions.

Page CTR is the Click Through Rate and is simply the number of Clicks divided by the number of Page Impressions expressed as a percentage. Your Earnings are obviously the total value of all the Clicks and is the actual amount you will be paid once you have accumulated at least $100 in unpaid earnings by the end of a calendar month.

The value that seems to cause some confusion is the eCPM, which is the "effective cost-per-thousand impressions". I have no idea why they have called it this as a "cost" is to the advertisers whereas for publishers like us it is an "income". Anyway, to cut through the confusion, all this number really represents is the your Earnings divided by your Page Impressions - that's all! However, this raw number is likely to be in fractions of a cent so to make it look more meaningful it is scaled up by a factor of one thousand. So if you look at your Adsense earnings and have exactly 1,000 Page Impressions then your eCPM will be exactly the same as your Earnings. One direct comparison that can be made is with those revenue sharing websites that pay per page view. Associated Content pays $1.50 per 1,000 page views and Bukisa pays a variable amount but roughly $3.50 per unique page view. Your eCPM should be much higher than these.

One value that Google does not give in their reports but which I find useful is the average earnings per click. To keep track of this you'll need to download one of the csv files and calculate the figure within a spreadsheet: it is just the Earnings divided by Clicks. These earnings per click (EPC) can then be compared to the theoretical Cost per Click (CPC) published in Google's Keyword Tool, as well as to the Potential Earnings (PE) that I described in my article on finding the most profitable keywords.

So, what can we do with these numbers? The ultimate aim is obviously to increase our total Earnings but a quick look at some of these basic statistics can be a guide to what to do in order to drive up that income.

A high CTR but low eCPM shows that your articles are well-focussed with relevant adverts that people click but with low unit values: this would show up in your spreadsheet as a low EPC. Analyze your pages to see which keywords are being picked up then put these through the Keywords Tool to see whether there are higher paying keyword combinations within the same topic. It may just be a matter of adding more focus to the keywords or writing more articles about very specific areas within your broader topic.

A high eCPM but with low CTR shows that the articles are generating high-value adverts but few people are clicking them. Sadly, your article may be too good! Your article may be so good that readers don't need to look elsewhere, or you may have too many links within your text. Remember that people are more likely to click on a contextual link rather than an obvious advert. Try either taking out all the links or, alternatively, create quick bookmarks and link to those instead. Give people a good reason to want more and hopefully that extra is an advert.

A high eCPM with average CTR but low Page Impressions means having to focus on generating more traffic. Everything seems to be working well apart from the lack of readers. One thing is to link your articles together. This may be a link to your private blog, to an index page or contextual links to previous articles. The other thing is to start promoting your articles on social bookmarking websites. Sure, they don't in themselves earn money directly but they can be a good source of traffic. Don't spam them as they will ban you for it, but try to promote one of your articles plus one other site and you should be fine. One other trick is to do a search for your article's keywords and see which links come in the first two or three pages. Many will be blogs or forums or news sites; if there is an opportunity to comment then do so with a link back to a relevant article. Yet again, spamming can be counter-productive as your comment may be deleted and you will be banned from commenting again.

A very low eCPM is a sign that your articles are just not generating very much income. Writing about philosophy, life, the universe and everything may be personally enriching but it won't fill your wallet. If you're happy doing so then fine. If income is of secondary importance but you'd quite like to dine out at Google's expense every so often then think about mixing a few quick and tightly focused bookmarks to complement your longer articles.

The ultimate aim is to increase one's total Earnings. Hopefully I have shown that even with the basic report data it is possible to see which areas need some work to improve that all-important monthly income. Any other advice you feel I've left out then please leave a comment.

Writing for Adsense Revenue: Miracles do Happen!

There has been a lot of recent chat on Xomba about writing online and how to earn a decent amount from Adsense advertising. This shows, firstly, that there are a lot of new members, and secondly, that the advice from older members should be more accurate as they themselves gain in experience. There are, however, a few points that I don't feel have been aired enough.

Do you feel lucky?

There are times when one article will earn hundreds of dollars in just one day. There have even been articles that have made thousands! These are rare, but they do happen. Luck plays a big role in this. But like many other things in life, you need to work at being lucky. I wrote a similar thing about getting a book in print - luck plays a huge part but so does working to generate your own luck. Some things you cannot control and some things you can - concentrate your efforts on those things you can control and prepare to be lucky. This isn't to denigrate those writers who've earned big, but I'm sure they were both very happy and very surprised when an article went viral. They couldn't predict what would happen but they saw the opportunity and worked towards being successful.

Most lotteries like to advertise the obvious fact that if you don't play you can't win. the other obvious fact that they don't advertise is that most people lose. Writing online is similar in that if you don't write you won't earn, that your jackpot is also largely out of your hands, but the difference is that you can actually win something every day.

One of the things that attracted me to Xomba was that I made some money on the very first day - if memory doesn't delude me was 27 cents! - but was more than I was seeing on some other sites. I also found Xomba by accident as a link from a Google search. So, I figured, these people have done their SEO and they know how to place adverts, and they have a layout that encourages interaction and further reading. Not many other writing websites have all of those elements together.

Mix and Max

I must say, I haven't hit a jackpot as yet, however, I have recently had some success with one article generating a few hundred dollars over a couple of week. Firstly, to show what I mean about luck, the same piece was posted in three places - only one of them grew, the other two went to sleep. Why? I think because the audiences are different. We can't control what happens to our writing - who posts a link where - but we can work at analysing what works where. The other thing is that this article isn't even an article: it's a simple bookmark! Again, work at what works and prune the rest.

Writing original content takes time and skill. Whatever you're interested in, try to mix your output in order to maximize it. I've written in my On Writing Online blog that the joys of revenue sharing bookmarking sites is that you can be making money before you've even finished writing your article, just by bookmarking your sources. Don't worry, the chances of anybody following the same trail and duplicating your original article are minuscule. If you can write one or two good articles a day and bookmark maybe half a dozen sites then that's probably a decent day's work.

Drop those dead donkeys

Use your Adsense account data and Google Analytics to see what is working and what isn't. Different writing websites will develop their own communities and styles and what is popular on one site may not be on another. There are only about a dozen revenue sharing writing websites at the moment so worth trying 2 or 3 at the start and maybe drop one that isn't working and try one new one on the list. Use the revenue sharing bookmarking sites to promote your own articles as well as your other bookmarks. Use some of the popular social bookmarking websites to promote your own writing - mix in some of your other bookmarks so you don't get flagged for spamming (you often won't know it, but you will be!).

On the subject of pruning what doesn't work, if you decide to stop writing for a website don't delete your account. Those articles will still be listed and could still be earning. There is one website where I stopped submitting work as it didn't seem worth the time. I'd login once a month just to see if anything was moving and to my surprise found that my earnings were slowly increasing to the point where it was worth putting some effort into it again. Some long tails are longer than others.

Waiting for Lady Luck may not seem much of a strategy but as you can see, I'm not advocating sitting back and waiting for the finger of fate to stab you in the ribs! All your work is slowly but surely loading the dice in your favour. The point I'm trying to make is that the social web is a complex system and that trying to push it doesn't always work - sure, if you already have an army of followers it's easier but if you're reading this then I'd guess you're not at that stage. A better analogy is to scatter your seeds across the social web and, miraculously, some of them will grow and you will reap the harvest. I don't think there are any magic beans waiting to be found.

Wag that long tail

Most sites will also tell you that this is a long-tailed game: the more you write the greater the probability of having some articles do very well while others provide a steady income. What nobody tells you is how long the tail is! I suspect some people just get tired of seeing a few cents here and there and get disheartened. I had to stop writing last December because of travel and having to sort out certain things. I was expecting income from articles already published to trail off, and it did. But what was more worrying was that as I started writing again it just wasn't picking up. Was I doing something wrong?

Well, looking back and looking at the trend the income was actually growing again and steadily. (There was also the issue of advertising revenues across the net falling so this didn't help.) I was just looking at it too closely and on a daily basis there can be huge variations. Download your Adsense data into a spreadsheet and calculate something like a 50-day average; that will give you a good idea of progress. Going from an average of $2 a day to $3 a day doesn't sound like a recipe for giving up the day job as yet, but that's a 50% increase. Another 50% increase did actually take it to $4.50 per day, on average, for the following month, and that means getting paid every month.

So how long has that taken? Well, I'd say if you can hit that within 6 months then you're doing well - perhaps other writers have done better, only they can say. It also depends how much time you're willing to spend not just on the writing but also marketing and analysis. If you hit on a jackpot then these numbers will get blown away and you can start thinking about how to turn this into a decent income - or splashing it all on some object of desire!

Being lucky takes work. Be prepared for it.



Key points

Success = Work + Luck

Write about what you enjoy

Mix your output - articles plus bookmarks

Analyse what works where

Prune what isn't working

Spread yourself on the social web

Look at your long-term income growth

Enjoy the challenge!

How to Find Which of Your Articles Are the Most Profitable

The question of which articles are the most profitable is one that crops up over and over again. It is wrong to assume it is always the most popular articles. There is also a balancing act between low traffic high cost per click (CTC) and high traffic low CTC keywords.

If you have your own website or blog you can easily use Google Analytics to get a wealth of data about which articles are doing best, how users come to your articles, which search terms your blog ranks highly on, and so forth. But writing for a third party website such as Xomba or Hubpages means it is not possible to use Google Analytics. The problem is that to enable Analytics you need to insert a special code into your page header, and this is only possible to do if you have admin access.

There is, however, a slightly time-consuming but nevertheless feasible way to get this precious data of which articles are winners and which are sleeping. The only way I can see how to do this is to create a custom URL channel in your Adsense account for each article.

Once your article is published immediately copy the article URL and create a URL channel in your Adsense account. You should already have a general URL channel for your writing site, such as xomba.com. Now you will have a channel for each article, such as:
xomba.com/my_first_article
xomba.com/my_second_article
and so on. Note that Adsense channels leave out the http:// and you can also leave out the www.

There is, however, one problem here, which is that you have a limited number of channels available in your Adsense account. Last I looked there was a limit of 200 channels available. If you are writing maybe just one article a week this is not a great problem, but if you are writing numerous articles across multiple websites that 200 is going to shrink very rapidly.

As the aim is to find the most profitable articles the only solution to this limited number of channels is to slowly delete those articles that just haven't been earning. You will then be able to see your best articles and be able to decide what to write next. Unfortunately this also means that if a "dead" article springs to life in the future you won't know about it.

It isn't a perfect system but seems to me the only way to get article-specific data on revenue sharing writing websites.

Let me know if it works or if you have any problems setting up Adsense channels.