1. Responsiveness of audience to the ads = A travel website that provides information on travel to Spain will attract visitors looking for ways to arrange their travel and spend money on their vacation to Spain. Your site provides the info, but the ads will provide hotels, travel agencies, tourist destinations, car rentals — ads that are likely to get the attention of the users of your site. This is a site that will most likely do well with Adsense. However, if you are a gaming website where the main purpose of the user is to play games on your site, then Adsense will not perform as well.

2. Ad format = some types of ads do better than others depending on your content and layout. In our case, large rectangles in the middle of the content is the best, while leaderboards do not generate as much as income. Skys are the worst for us. Experiment and measure the results via channels and see which formats work best for you.

3. Ad placement – check Google’s heat map as they have tested where the best placements are

4. Ad colors – sometimes ads blended into the content works wonders, but sometimes ads that contrast your site colors work best

5. Number of ad units on a page = we are allowed maximum of 3 ads + 1 ad links + 1 search box on a page. Maximize the allowed number based on the resulting look of your page (you don’t want an overkill of ads). Users going to your page and reading your content may ignore the banner or rectangle at the top of the page, but may click on the ad at the bottom of the article

6. Smartpricing – the big unknown in Adsense. No one knows how this actually works. But it can affect the pricing of the ads on your site. If the advertiser paid for $0.50/click – but your site is smartpriced – then the cost may be discounted lower (e.g. $0.25). So you may try to develop a site based on high paying keywords but if smartpricing gets to you, then you may not get as much per click as what you are expecting from your keywords.

Here is Google’s explanation of smart pricing

Google’s smart pricing feature automatically adjusts the cost of a keyword-targeted content click based on its effectiveness compared to a search click. So if our data shows that a click from a content page is less likely to turn into actionable business results — such as online sales, registrations, phone calls, or newsletter signups — we reduce the price you pay for that click.

Remember though that not all sites do well with Adsense – even if you get gazillions of traffic but your visitors are not interested in looking for ways to spend their money, they won’t be interested in your ads and won’t click.

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Crikey, I actually get quite exhausted answering this kind of question. Cash cow is one of hundreds of sites cashing in on the Adsense revolution. The bottom line is this and my advice is free! Adsense only works on web sites with massive traffic. I’m talking 1000 plus visitors a day. One in every 100-200 visitors may click an ad and the value to you will vary depending on how much the advertisers are willing to pay. This could be a few cents or less. Some ads don’t pay at all! It’s all about traffic, although Cash Cow and others will try to tell you it’s all about key words as well as traffic. Before you waste any money, get your web site set up, put some ads on it and work on getting traffic. You won’t do this through Google. They no longer rank new sites because too many people are trying to make money from Adsense. Google now wants content and that’s what my sites offer. Despite this, none of my sites are ranked in the top 10,000. Getting traffic is not easy. You have to promote your site daily, build up a mailing list, encourage people to come back daily or weekly and hope they click ads. When you start getting visitors and when you start getting clicks, consider purchasing Cash Cow or any one of the thousand “How too” courses to improve your chances. Until then, hang on to your money.

Good luck.

Good luck.

Every time someone clicks on your ad you earn money. And in the end, if you have a really good looking ad then people will click on it more often.