Joel Comm
09-15-2005, 03:45 PM
One of the strategies that I always recommend is to follow your stats. When it comes to increasing AdSense earnings nothing is more important than keeping your eye on that Revenues box.
Your stats -- together with your server logs -- don’t just tell you how much you’re earning though. They can also tell you how many people clicked on your ads, which ads they clicked on and what sort of ads are getting the most clicks.
All of that information is vital to tweaking your website so that it brings you maximum profits. Without that knowledge, you’ll have no idea what’s working right now — and what isn’t.
One of the easiest mistakes that a publisher can make though is to become obsessed with watching stats. I’ve come across so many publishers who can barely last a minute before rushing back to AdSense to see how much they earned in the last sixty seconds.
Internet traffic flows in all sorts of strange ways. One day can bring a very low CPM, the next a very high one. And you’ll have done nothing to your site in between. That’s why you have to follow your stats from week to week not from hour to hour (or even day to day).
Sure, it’s tempting to keep logging in and watching those figures getting bigger. You’re doing nothing and you can see your money growing. What could be more fun than that?
But the danger comes when those figures don’t move... and panic sets in. If your numbers haven’t changed in the last few hours, it’s just too tempting to get onto your website and start shifting things around to get them rolling again. That can easily create more harm than good.
Soon your figures are rolling all over the place and you’ve got no idea why.
Whenever you make a change to your site — whether it’s switching the color of your ads, adding a new unit or changing the location of an ad unit on the page — give it a full week before you judge the effects. You can’t tell a thing in less time than that.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t log into your stats at all. You should. But only if you can think of a stat-watching as a spectator sport until it really is time to play.
Your stats -- together with your server logs -- don’t just tell you how much you’re earning though. They can also tell you how many people clicked on your ads, which ads they clicked on and what sort of ads are getting the most clicks.
All of that information is vital to tweaking your website so that it brings you maximum profits. Without that knowledge, you’ll have no idea what’s working right now — and what isn’t.
One of the easiest mistakes that a publisher can make though is to become obsessed with watching stats. I’ve come across so many publishers who can barely last a minute before rushing back to AdSense to see how much they earned in the last sixty seconds.
Internet traffic flows in all sorts of strange ways. One day can bring a very low CPM, the next a very high one. And you’ll have done nothing to your site in between. That’s why you have to follow your stats from week to week not from hour to hour (or even day to day).
Sure, it’s tempting to keep logging in and watching those figures getting bigger. You’re doing nothing and you can see your money growing. What could be more fun than that?
But the danger comes when those figures don’t move... and panic sets in. If your numbers haven’t changed in the last few hours, it’s just too tempting to get onto your website and start shifting things around to get them rolling again. That can easily create more harm than good.
Soon your figures are rolling all over the place and you’ve got no idea why.
Whenever you make a change to your site — whether it’s switching the color of your ads, adding a new unit or changing the location of an ad unit on the page — give it a full week before you judge the effects. You can’t tell a thing in less time than that.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t log into your stats at all. You should. But only if you can think of a stat-watching as a spectator sport until it really is time to play.