At first, I clicked through each and every page on my site and looked at the Ads that were being shown on every page. I found all the pages of my site to be displaying Adsense Ads. Every page was showing text ads and even the ones which were supposed to display only image Ads were doing so. The first task was completed in only few hours and there was no conclusion to be made as per the plan. Next, I selected random pages to check if the Ads shown were relevant. I did not require lot of thinking on this one. Most of the pages were not showing relevant Ads. The Ads were related to computer industry but not any closer to the content than that. I concluded that Ads were not relevant to the content on most of the pages. Third step was to make a note of all the Ads which were common to other pages. This one, by far, proved to be most productive step than the first two. I could see that there were 7 different Ads which literally dominated most of the pages on the site. It was as if those 7 Ads have been assigned to my site for ever. It was day one and I did wanted to arrive at a conclusion that sooner. I decided to keep an eye on this and check back the next day. Last step was the most time consuming task. Since I use both Google Analytics and Mint on my site for tracking visitors, finding out the most viewed pages for last 30 days was not at all difficult. The pages which were most viewed were rich with keywords but most of the Ads were still the same ones which were shown on other pages. Conclusion - The pages were optimized as per Google guidelines, SEO tips that I had seen on many other sites and were all keyword rich. Day Two - I repeated what I had done in step 3, and to my surprise, the same Ads which were shows the last day were still appearing on most of the pages. I concluded that my site was taken over by a group of Ads and they are not going to go away that sooner. Somehow, I felt that I should give it at least one more day and then arrive at a final conclusion. Day Three - Step 3 again, and this time data points were so strong that I could conclude that it was that one group of Ads which was showing up on almost every page of my site, thus lowering the CPC value for the entire site. So, if someone were to click on any Ad on any page, chances were there that over 80% of the time the visitor would end up clicking on an Ad from the common group of Ads which had took over my site. [Final Conclusion] - Irrespective of the CTR %, it was a bunch of common Ads which were producing very lorevenue. Look at the image below, all the three Ads shown are from the same site and [I guess] have very low click value. [No, I did not click on them to find where they lead me to, instead I checked the source of the page in some cases, and in other cases I typed the URL shown in the Ad, manually in a new window.] [The solution] - I quickly sat down to fix this problem to free my site from the clutches of those annoying group of Ads that were all over my site. I randomly visited most of my pages and made a note of the URL. I could come up with 60+ such URLs which were either for a single page site, dedicated to AdSense or Adwords [also known as Made for AdSense] or an Ad for a personal home page of someone. I put them in ‘Competitive Ad Filtering’ under my AdSense account. I checked my site and revenue after 48 hours and I could see an improvement in the revenue. Since then, I have not seen those $0.01 clicks from this site’s AdSense Ads anymore and the minimum amount that now shows for any click is as low as $0.85 Going forward, I plan to repeat the whole exercise at least once every month to ensure that this does not happen again. And, I am sure if you check your site, you will find something similar going on too! Do let readers of this site and myself know if you find something similar. It will be of a great help. Labels: Adsense, Adsense CTR, AdWords, Google, Google Adsense, Google Adwords, Make Money Online, PPC Posted by Muhammad Kamran Khan Deewan at Wednesday, June 25, 2008 1 comments Links to this post 3 Simple Steps to Start Earning from Google Adsense Google Adsense is a FREE advertising program from Google. Adsense enable bloggers/webmaster to earn revenue by placing Ads on their blog/site. May be most of you have already know about this but just don't know how to apply for it.IT IS SIMPLE! AdSense SignUp 1. Click the Adsense link up, spend a little time for the SIGN UP. 2. Copy the Ads code into your blog template. 3. DONE! You can now earn revenue/money through your blog. You may be asking:Is it safe? Is it really that GOOD and SIMPLE? The answer is : Yes... Safe, good and simple. I'm not the only person who join Adsense, a lot of bloggers/webmasters, may be millions or even billions are using it.What I can say is, Adsense can really earn money. For myself, it is a very good idea from Google.