It seems that publishers complain more and more lately about their overall Adsense eCPM and while the eCPM itself won’t be stable no matter what, there are some things you need to know to optimize your ads and your overall eCPM.

Some people will tell you to focus on specific keywords to gain maximum Adsense results and while this isn’t 100% false, it isn’t a good factor. You can’t do a blog or any website, with some original content for let’s say finance related stories, you just can’t. Your niche is getting paid, no matter what, you just need to focus on optimizing your earnings a little.

1) Meddle around with your ad units and try to improve your CTR (clickthrough rate). While this won’t affect the eCPM much, you need to convert some visits into cash.

2) Don’t stuff your pages with Adsense units, usually Adsense tries to deliver the high keyword bidders to your units and by using multiple ad units, you can suffer an ad split between your Adsense units. Shortly this means that your highest CTR ad units may show up good ads AND low-paying ads or MFA’s. My advice to you, try to keep your pages clean, with 1-2 ad units the most. This will surely increase your eCPM and also your visitors won’t be bothered much. I have tested this on multiple websites and overall, with 1-2 ad units per page, my eCPM went up 30-50%

3) Try to remove ads from low-performing pages. This means that a page may gain high amounts of traffic but just a few clicks. SmartPricing may be triggered on your website and your eCPM can suffer alot.

4) Don’t force your users to click on your ads and stick to the policy. Again, SmartPricing can be triggered if your visitors have a low conversion rate to your advertisers.

5) Block MFA sites or low paying ads. You can block any URL using the “Competitive Ad filter”, you just need to see which MFA’s are showing up in your ads. This can be a hassle sometimes but fortunately, there is a website that can help you. AdsBlacklist.com is a website designed to enable you to dramatically reduce the amount of MFA (made for ads) and LCPC (low cost per click) sites, as they say in their motto. Shortly, using this site, you can set up your domain and the main keywords associated with your site. AdsBlacklist will then show you the most common MFA’s and, at your choice, low cost per click websites for your associated keywords. You can paste this list in your “Competitive Ad filter” and the changes will take effect usually within 12 hours. This method can prove successful for every niche but in my tests over several websites, I can’t say I was very happy. For some websites performed very well while on others, I’ve noticed slight eCPM changes or lower values. You might consider that if Adsense is showing alot of MFA’s for your website, those site can be the higher bidders for your page keywords.

6) Use the “Section Targeting” feature within your pages. For those who don’t know, Google allows us to highlight the content rich part of our page that needs to be targeted by Mediabot (Adsense crawler) on showing relevant ads. This can prove very useful in many cases, because the Adsense bot may show ads related to your sidebar, let’s say. We don’t want that and we can point out the section within our content to be targeted with some simple HTML tags. You can also designate sections you’d like to have ignored, for example, the sidebars. You can see the tags and documentation here . Note that Section Targeting when applied doesn’t trigger immediate results within your earnings. Mediabot visits your site rarely and you should wait a week or so until you can see proper results.

I hope that this will help you increase your Google Adsense earnings and I’ll wait for your results