No, we are not turning into a money making blog, and neither are we publishing a e-Book, but having been into the blogging scene for 3 years now, I definitely have learnt quite a few tricks that have helped me grow my AdSense earnings from $100 a year, to few hundreds a month and finally to its current stage of 4 figure income that I earn currently and mind you all this income comes from just 1 website.

So how did I go about from making few cents a day to a 4 figure blogging stint? Here are few tips and tricks that I have been using to leverage more from AdSense. Though these tips may not increase your revenue for $0 to $100 a day, following it will definitely help you grow.

Related: Tools To Stay On Top Of Your AdSense Earnings

Use Channels To Track High Performing Ads and Ad Placements Positions

Analyzing AdSense performance is of utmost importance if you want to leverage more clicks from users. Why this helps?

1. You can understand user behavior and learn where to place the ads.
2. You can stop placing ads on lower performing places and increase your CTR and eCPM.

Google AdSense provides you with a very handy parameter called Channels, so leverage it and start channelizing your ads to learn more on which format of ads work better and more importantly in which position.

Google AdSense has a excellent resource where you can learn more and create channels for your ads.

Using Custom Targeting for Displaying Ads

Lets be frank, you cannot survive running a website day in and out, without generating income from it, after a certain period of time, but that does not mean that you overwhelm your readers with tons of ads.

Having done quite a lot of research I can tell you that search engine users are the most likely ones to click on ads and more of the ads should be targeted towards that traffic.

On the other hand, in my experience of tracking ad views and clicks, social networking users never click on ads, on top of that they despise sites with ads and tend to comment negatively about it.

So targeting your ads to only certain sections of your traffic helps immensely. On this blog I do not display ads to users who visit it from social networking and also delay showing ads to regular readers.

Why Targeting ads will benefit?

1. You do not piss off regular and social users who do not like to see ads.
2. You are targeting to people who are more likely to click on ads.
3. Your CTR and eCPM will increase, because you are less likely to display ads to people who are not bound to click on them.

How Do You Display Targeted Ads To Users?

If you are using WordPress as a blogging platform, the Who Sees Ads allows you to target ads to different sections of users, it is definitely a must have.

If you are more PHP savvy, here is a little routine I wrote, that can help you with ad targeting, it has conditions to sort out search engine users, social network users and tell you whether you should display ads or not. Feel free to modify and use it for your own purpose. Download Basic Ads Targeting Basic Logic.

As a footnote, I aggregated this data by channelizing the ads, the first step I told you about, so you can already see the importance of using channels for your ads.

Experiment With Layouts and Colors

There is no reason that you should use a single type of ad for your entire website, you can always experiment with different formats and colors, over a period of time to see which works out best.

Remember that blending your ads entirely with the theme will not give you higher clicks, so keep experimenting with the colors, keep it for a day or two and see how it performs, then over a week go over the data to see which format or color works better and stick with it for sometime.

That said, keep changing the formats every few months to try and see if anything else works better, in my experience I have lost earnings over my experiments a few times, but after a week I was able to start using a better performing format, which in the end made up for the loss, so don’t hesitate to experiment as its always going to be beneficial in the end.

Being stagnant is one reason why people earn less with AdSense, you don’t have any limits, so why not make full use of it.

On the other hand, if content ads are not working for you, try using link units, they tend to perform better in sidebars and under menus, so give it a shot.

I can’t say for sure which ad unit will perform better, or which type of ad will, but I can say that experimenting with ads will give you a better view of it, each website has different ads that perform differently and you can understand that by experimenting yourself, no so-called AdSense guide will help you determine that.

Don’t Overwhelm Your Readers With Ads

The above image is a pretty bad example of displaying ads to your readers, in the image I have blacked out the places where the content appear to conceal identity.

But as you can see the content is almost hidden between ads, from my research you are not only spoiling your CTR and eCPM, but are also driving away regular readers from your blog.

Based on the first and second points I listed, try and display targeted ads to your readers, rather than having a website full of ads and hard to spot content. Nevertheless it is up to you on how you display ads to readers.

Use Section Targeting for The AdSense Bots

Google AdSense bots are pretty smart and they can sniff out content pretty easily, but why not help it spot the content with ease?

Google AdSense allows for section targeting where you can specify where on the page the actual content exists. To use section targeting surround your content with the following code.

   1: <!-- google_ad_section_start-->

   2:  

   3: Place your content in the middle of the two comments for better section targeting

   4:  

   5: <!-- google_ad_section_end--> 

This will help AdSense to place more relevant ads on your website, which in-turn could turn to more clicks.

Don’t Abuse Google AdSense by Self Clicking or Asking Others To Click On It

The one rookie mistake while using AdSense is to click on your own ads or asking others to click on it. DONT DO IT. It’s pretty risky and while you may earn a few extra cents, you face the risk of getting yourself banned from Google AdSense, with the additional risk of losing everything you have earned till date.

In the past I have reported any accidental clicks on my own ads to Google, but they have relaxed the policy of reporting accidental AdSense clicks.

Google also has a pretty strong policy of banning websites that urge users to click on ads, so stop thinking about adding “Please click on this ads” “Help our server costs, click on ads” type of messages on your website.

Keep Yourself Updated With Google AdSense Policy Changes

The AdSense team keeps on updating their privacy policy regularly, based on measures they have to prevent, fraud clicks and accidental clicks, if you are AdSense user, follow the Google AdSense Blog on a regular basis, to keep abreast of the latest news (and tips and tricks they publish), so that you can make changes as and when required.

And Yes Never Lose Your Patience Or Get Frustrated If You Don’t Make Much From AdSense

Blog income does not grow overnight or for that matter it may take few weeks or few months or even a year, it takes a lot of patience to start getting a steady income from AdSense, and there is no real time limit when you should give up, always keep trying and you will definitely see greener pasture.

In my first year’s experience with AdSense I hardly earned a few cents a day and sometimes none at all, it was all getting so frustrating that I only wanted to get to $100 and bail out of it, since I thought I could not wait another year for getting to the second $100.

But I had a resolute and once I got my first AdSense check from Google, which was after 14 months of signing up, I got motivated to start working harder to earn more, the hard work did pay off and all that mattered was me having patience with it.

Your AdSense won’t grow just by changing the layouts or formats, you need to work harder to grow your traffic, and get more traffic from search engines, its all a matter of how much patience you have and how you work hard to grow. Once you learn that these tips won’t matter much since you would have already learnt a lot, but before you get there get a huge quota of patience while you can

Summarizing

These tips will NOT grow your AdSense income overnight, but they will help you grow it and increase it over a period of time. Patience is a virtue after all

Let me know if you have any questions, or want to add to this list.