dslade.blog

A quick post on improving your Adsense relevancy, and thus CTR, via improved meta description. Which adds to my belief that SEO should focus on good content as the ultimate-suprimo-uber-priority.

So a little background:
I have several websites (private lessons, home repair, cocktails and bar guide, etc.), and a never-ending to-do list for any given site. Out of that lot, the jokes and humor site, which I started for fun when I wanted to try out Wordpress a while back, has become the defacto guinea pig of the lot, and thus often gets the least amount of love. Chalk it up to not enough hours in the day.

Originally I had put a couple Adsense ads on there in the hopes that it would at least pay for the hosting, but it never did. not even close (less than a $1 a month. $2 if things are great.) I didn’t have high hopes, as ad targeting for jokes, is not an easy thing because each joke is seemingly random content, and people usually aren’t in the mood for ads.

Need for change:
I think the site some good, fun content, and it’s slowly but surely growing in traffic. I decided it’s about time to try and give some optimization love and to rethink the design, which is currently something I hobbled together more than a year ago. But before that, I though I’d give it a full SEO walk through, considering I’ve learned a lot in the last 2 years, which probably isn’t reflected in the site.

- cross linking. check.
- decent amount of content. check.
- titles, not bad. check.
- relevant tagging. check.
- ok categorization. check.
- will spare you the rest, it’s a long list. check.

Bright light appears over his head:
After the review, I noticed that I’d never spent any time on category descriptions, which also appear in the meta descriptions! (Wordpress we’re talking about here, but it’s relevant for other sites). I know, a lot of people may go “duh!”, but how is that related to Adsense?

So I’ve spent some time working on well crafted, relevant descriptions for each category. and there’s a lot of them. Since then, I’ve noticed that the relevancy (give it at least a week) for the ads, sharply increased. It appears that Adsense gives a fair amount of weight to meta descriptions.

a couple figures to throw atcha for aguywalkedintoabar.com:

December: CTR = 0.38% (yes, ouch), eCPM $0.91 (not hot either)
January (after changes): CTR = 1.33%, eCPM $0.91

As a point of reference, my sites that perform well with Adsense have a CTR between 4.5-6% with an eCPM of $18-$20.

Influences to be considered:
Stats aside, there’s a lot of factors that can influence how your ads perform:

1. what your site is about
2. how well targeted it the site is, ie, is it a niche?
3. well written content with relevant keywords
4. amount of content
5. is it related to a topic with really competitive Adwords spend
6. Is the site B-to-B or B-to-C? the former always has more advertising power
7. and our learning, quality meta descriptions

So from the stats there is a growth curve through January, so I hope and assume that the figures will continue to rise. Remember it takes time for changes to be picked up by Adsense.

Learning:
So it seems the change to the quality (well in this case, adding) category page meta descriptions had a reasonable impact. I think a lot of people probably over look the power of well built category pages, and only focus on detail pages. Now it just needs a good depth in content for the categories. I’ll have to write an update next month, if anyone is interesting.

Hope someone else can learn from this! Has anyone made other discoveries, or can expand on this? Disagree?

~Dave