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5 steps to a high Adsense eCPM

eCPM, or effective cost per thousand impressions, is a figure used to represent how well monetized your websites is. If your eCPM is $1 that means that your revenue is $1 per 1000 impressions – $1 is a low eCPM. If your eCPM is $60 that means that your revenue is $60 per 1000 impressions – $60 is a high eCPM. For Adsense, eCPM depends on two factors; the CTR (Click Through Rate) and the CPC (Cost Per Click). In this article I will discuss my 5 step process to achieving a high eCPM.
Adsense eCPM
  1. Write about high paying topics

    The CPC your ad clicks provide depends mainly on the topic you write about. For example, ads about finance pay far higher than ads about MySpace so if you can achieve equal traffic to a finance and a MySpace website the finance site will be more profitable, although MySpace websites may be easier to build traffic to.

    If you have already created a website on a specific topic you can still write about high paying topics within your niche. For example, if you were writing an article on web hosting using the keywords ‘paid web hosting’ will display higher paying ads than the keywords ‘free web hosting’. Small changes like this in your content can create big changes to your CPC and in turn, your eCPM.
  2. Improve ad placement (CTR)

    The easiest way to increase CTR is to improve your ad placement to make your ads more visible. According to the Google Heatmap fr maximum visibility your ads should be placed front and center, at the top of your main content. Here is the Google Heatmap –

    Google Heatmap


    Placing your ads according to the Google Heatmap does have great effect, in my experience the CTR is generally between 10% and 40%. One page where I place my ads like in the method above is Free Letterhead Templates which you can see in the following screenshot or by following the link. As you can see, the ad block is in the middle of the content near to the top and it does convert well.

    Ad Placement
  3. Decrease bounce rates

    Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave without visiting more than one page of your site, so they reach a single page then bounce away from your site without reading more. If your bounce rate is high then your visitors are likely closing the browser window or tab holding your website, if this is the case they aren’t clicking ads! Decreasing your website’s bounce rate will increase your CTR and eCPM. The bounce rate does get skewed depending on your traffic sources though, for example, search engine visitors bounce less than StumbleUpon visitors. Here is some bounce rates to target –

    • Sales page: 75%
    • Article website: 50%
    • Wallpaper website: 25%
  4. Focus on targeted traffic

    I just mentioned that search engine visitors bounce less than StumbleUpon visitors, well they also click more ads! A huge spike of traffic from social bookmarking websites can be nice but if you want to achieve a high eCPM you should focus on building search engine traffic or traffic from related websites. The reason StumbleUpon visitors bounce a lot and don’t click ads is because they are not very interested in your content, whereas a visitor coming from Google searched for exactly what you are offering them so they are less likely to immediately leave and more likely to click ads (or make a purchase).
  5. Avoid being smart priced

    If you send mostly rubbish traffic who don’t convert to sales for the Adwords advertisers your Adsense account can be smart priced, which means that your CPC drops dramatically to increase the advertisers’ ROI. Luckily, avoiding smart pricing is not difficult, just make sure not to trick your visitors into clicking and stay within the Google terms of service, such as not asking people to click your ads.
If you complete the 5 steps I listed above you should now be looking at a CTR between 10% and 50% and an eCPM above $10. Now all you need is traffic and you will be earning a nice income.

18 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Gadget Review // Nov 22, 2007 at 9:15 am

    Nice info.. neat and well explained.

  • 2 tharshan // Nov 22, 2007 at 10:23 pm

    thanks..nice article.. will try them.

  • 3 Tech Narf // Nov 23, 2007 at 4:22 am

    You consider the ad block from the top isn’t tricking visitors to click? hmm

  • 4 admin // Nov 23, 2007 at 4:24 am

    The top ad block is placed where it is highly visible, if they are interested in the content of the ad they can choose to click. What I mean by tricking them to click is if you blend it so much that for example, you can’t tell the difference between the navigation and Adsense link units.

    There is a difference between high visibility and tricking visitors.

  • 5 Chad // Dec 12, 2007 at 8:02 am

    how do I find a list of what keywords are the highest paying for some of my different blogs that I have already started?

  • 6 admin // Dec 12, 2007 at 9:35 pm

    This is Keyword Elite comes in handy, in Keyword Elite you would enter your keywords and it returns the CPC along with some SEO info.

  • 7 zaidimai // Jan 11, 2008 at 12:05 pm

    Thanks for sharing this info. My ECPM has incresed by 32% very nice :)

  • 8 wedding invitation wording // Jan 21, 2008 at 7:59 pm

    I’ll definitely try these tips. very neat and well written, straight to the point. thank you for sharing.

    My current CTR is in the 4-6% range and all the while, I thought having 10-20% will already ring a bell with Google. Reading your article made me realize that it’s completely legal so long that you don’t trick your visitors into clicking your ads.

    And oh, I’ll also buy your script later when I receive my adsense payout this month. :)

  • 9 admin // Jan 23, 2008 at 3:38 pm

    4-6% is good, but 10-20% is better. ;) Once you do reach ~10% CTR Google will check your website against the ToS but if you’re not breaking them you will be fine.

  • 10 Travel Tips & Culture // Feb 12, 2008 at 11:48 am

    What about the number of ad units. If I have less ad units, the beter CPC and better earnings. What do you think?

  • 11 admin // Feb 12, 2008 at 5:09 pm

    Generally more ad units means a higher CTR, I’m not sure about the CPC though.

    I guess if you leave only your highest converting ad blocks then the highest paying ads would be forced into them instead of sometimes being displayed in the worse converting blocks if you have too many ad blocks.

  • 12 poonam // Mar 23, 2008 at 1:07 am

    Nice article.
    But nice placement of ads is very necessary.
    There are many websites in which you cannot guess whether its an ad or simple link.
    smartness is necessary if you want your ads to be clicked.
    Thanks again.

  • 13 Rahul Bansal // Apr 1, 2008 at 7:38 am

    First thanks 4 the really great article…
    Now I am disappointed so see that I have already done everything mentioned here, but my CTR is less than 1% and eCPM is < $1.
    I have only one ad-unit in most prominent area as per heat map.
    With on ad unit my CTR could be less but I guess eCPM must improve.

    By the way you haven’t mentioned anything about adsense section targeting here. What do you think about its effect on eCPM?

    Thanks again n sorry for long comment.
    -Rahul :-)

  • 14 Acronyms // Apr 9, 2008 at 5:38 am

    Implemented few tips. Already see the difference. Thanks.

  • 15 Rajesh Soni // Apr 28, 2008 at 7:40 am

    Wonderful article!
    I’ll try your tricks right away.

    Keep up the good work.

    Cheers!

  • 16 iGuide // Oct 19, 2008 at 5:54 pm

    I don’t think the article writer’s 25% CTR is possible; there’s no way to really target your traffic so that 25% of your visitors are that stupid. He must place his ads right under the the article title and have no other content showing above the fold — total crap pages, but even ask.com does this, believe it or not. I’d recommend putting two 300px by 250px ads side by side right at the fold for anyone who wants a 2 to 5 percent CTR.

  • 17 admin // Oct 19, 2008 at 10:31 pm

    It is certainly possible. That is a screenshot of one of my better performing channels. The CTR is because of: good placement, targeted traffic, and targeted ads. Nothing more. The page quality is also good, so it’s not that I’m providing bad content.

    Also, about your recommendation of two ad units next to each other, I think a single one on the left will get a higher CTR, since two side-by-side is obviously an ad….

  • 18 Cibertrix // Nov 3, 2008 at 4:05 pm

    Curiously enough, and just to show that there really is no hard and sure way to know what works and what doesnt work apart from experimenting for yourself, I have personally found that a leader board at the bottom of my web pages does quite well often achieving respectable ecpm with decent click throughs… introducing the famous “rectangle” like just about every other website is now using, justs kills my web site and click through drops completely…

    Personally I would say do what works for you and your website (bearing in mind TOS) and avoid doing what everyone else is doing… with everyone placing that “rectangle” in exactly the same place over 10,000’s of web site it is becoming dreadfully boring…

    Dare to be different…

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