Jason Calacanis is talking Adsense earnigns again. I’m a bit surprised that a publisher like Jason is revealing his Adsense CTR and CPM figures so explicitly post. Not because I’m offended by it or anything (I actually find its pretty interesting) but because its against Google’s rules. (‘m not going to refer to his actual figures here in case he decides to remove them later.)
A few people have asked me to comment on his CTR levels which I always hesitate to do mainly because comparing CTR from page to page or even blog to blog is so difficult to do.
Whilst I can look at the CTR he’s mentioned and see its at the lower end of what the range of my blogs do there are so many factors that can contribute to it ranging from positioning on the page, to design of ads, to the amount of other outbound links you have on your page (both within your blog or to other sites), to the topic of the blog that it is almost useless to compare one blog’s performance to another one.
What I’m more interested in with my CTR is comparing one blog’s figures over time – this (in my opinion) is the main usefulness of the statistic and I track my CTR in this way on all my blogs.
Jason talks about how they’ve optimized their Adsense ads the past few days which has seen a good rise in their earnings – up from $600 per day (just a week or so ago) to $1000 per day. Its amazing what a tweak or two can do for people. Yesterday I helped one person with their ads and they increased their CTR from less than 1% to over 5% with one small adjustment – quite amazing what a change of colors or position can do! I’m not going to go into what the strategy for doing this is because its all in my Adsense category already and I’d just be going over the same old stuff.
Update – Of course within minutes of posting this Jason has removed his CTR and CPM figures as I went over to leave a comment suggesting he did.
What still concerns me however is that in his comments others have followed his example and are revealing their own figures which could get them in trouble with Adsense.
Wow nice article wish we all could do that.I make about 50 cents a day.lol