Accidentaly Improving Adsense Income
This is another of those posts about sharing experiences and experiments. A couple of months ago I reported on the revenue streams of one of my sites and how the biggest slice of pie revenue was taken by Adsense and how I wanted to increase other income sources to minimize this dependency.
One of the other revenue streams I looked at was Tribal Fusion. They are a CPM ad network meaning you get paid per impression rather than per click. I implemented them a couple of months ago and placed a 468×60 banner at the top of each page, a vertical banner on the left navigation bar and rectangle in between posts on index pages. These ad positions were previously not used for anything constructive so any income generated should just be an addition, thus reducing the Adsense percentage and increasing the income to boot.
The first full month of the Tribal integration resulted in $1000 of extra revenue, without adversely effecting the other income streams. In fact with my recent Adsense optimisations, overall income from Google had actually increased so if anything the Adsense dependency had increased (not part of the plan but who’s complaining 
).
One thing I had noticed of late is that page load times have been getting slower, the site is very image heavy but I was finding that the top title section would display first and then a second or two later the rest of the page would load. As the highest paying adverts were in the the rest of the page this is far from ideal.
To resolve this the first thing I tried was a server side push, meaning as soon as the html containing the Adsense was generated on the server I would push it down to the client. I did this using the php command, ob_flush() (PHP manual). It was worth a try but in this case made no difference at all.
After a bit more investigation it turned out that it was the Tribal Fusion code that was causing the problem. When the TJ top banner was being displayed it was stopping the rest of the page loading, and when the TJ servers were busy it resulted in one hell of a delay.
The solution to this was the same as what I did with my previous Adsense optimisation, I used CSS to display the TJ adverts at the end. The result of this has been much faster page loads, a 25% (or so) reduction in TJ income but most importantly an improved CTR (~1% improvement) of my most profitable Adsense unit.
So in conclusion, I’m now earning an extra $750 a month from Tribal Fusion and my Adsense income has increased by ~$100 per day. So I’ve failed in reducing the percentage made from Adsense but as I’ve increased overall monthly income by a nice margin I won’t complain.
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I’ve noticed this problem with a lot of blogs, they add all these widgets in and some of them really hang pages, and I think a lot of people don’t know CSS well enough to do as you have and re-arrange the page so these load last. I’m quite forgiving when pages take a while to load, but when they hang from something that I can see is obviously some useless widget then it annoys me a bit.
Do you have an aff link for TJ?
I am thinking of joining them and placing an advert on http://www.domainleft.com/ because its getting a lot of good traffic thanks to this site’s tips. So thanks for that. I am getting 100+ uniqes for the third day running. So thanks
I don’t think TF has an affiliate program unfortunately. Good to hear that your traffic is building Abdul.
Oh thats a real shame, I know it wouldn’t be much but I feel that i need to repay you for all these useful tips.
Thanks so much
How much does Tribalfusion pay you for the 468×60 banner (CPM) ?
The 468×60 is the worst size and pays ~0.50 CPM, but it will be different on different sites and niches. I find if the space is other wise unused it’s better than nothing.
Thanks i will give it a shot on the bottom right space on my site
Since your first post on using CSS to display what you want first/last I have been working on my own template, so its good to know those hours are not wasted
The template I knocked up is a result of many hours looking at how the bigboys do it
As far as layout goes I would love some feedback on it & would be happy to share the template with anyone if they want. All the ads are pics “for test puposes”
& deciding that I’m tired of trying to reinvent the wheel
Top left is rotating links will probably go to random authorative sites,
Top banner will rotate between AS & Afiliates & Sponsors
Search - Search I noticed most all large sites have this feature which I ignore normaly even though I make a few bucks from it on the single site I use it on.
Square AS Block loads first thanks Al
I will rotate different versions / colors / pics ect to obtain better data
Middle pic rotates from a folder of pics
NEWS link bottom right rotates from a list of different keywords on each refresh
Bottom Banner like top
Site is here http://barbadostraveltips.net
Feedback aprechiated,
Have a great day
Neale
It looks good in IE but is screwed up a bit in (meaning a lot) in FF with the images overlaying the text.
With the rotating link in the top left, what do you want to achieve with those?
Thanks Al
I Have heard it is advisable to have a few outgoing links to authorative sites on your sites subject as this reinforces what your site is all about in the eyes of the SE
Any idea if a site exists where you can see a site through the eyes of different browsers ?
Linking out to authority sites about Barbados could help your rankings but it needn’t be the first outgoing link on the page as you don’t want people to follow it as such. However linking out to non related sites like Yahoo and MSN won’t help you IMO.
Have a look at something like http://www.browsercam.com/ to test on different browsers
I Found A all browser viewing site here
http://browsershots.org
So I will look in to it thanks
off-topic,but absul,on your domainleft site,your titlebar spells it domeain left
Soopry you got me totaly lost with this
“absul,on your domainleft site,your titlebar”
sry for the double post,can i edit my previous comments? Anyway, that seems a pretty cool way of getting extra revenue from your site, what is TJ short for or mean, is that the Tribal Fusion site,im a bit confused haha.
I meant TF for Tribal Fusion, I was just testing to see if anybody reads it
I had experienced the exact same thing with google analytics on one of my sites. I opted for statcounter instead.
Thanks for the tip. I had read that Tribal Fusion was causing some page loading issues for sites. My traffic is not to that level yet but it is nearly doubling every month.
I thought that haha,but then abdul said about an affil. for TJ,then i got confused haha.
Two questions:
You can run Tribal Fusion with Google Adsense on the same page?
Is Tribal Fusion a CPM only advertiser?
I have a forum, where the previous owner was banned from adsense due to click fraud. I don’t want the same to happen to me so I am looking at other places such as Adbrite :/ Unfortunately it looks like adbrite doesnt payout much per click.
You are allowed to use Tribal Fusion and Adsense on the same pages. Though with anything like this it is always advisable to read the terms&conditions your self rather than reading what somebody else says on the Net.
[...] Self Made Minds shares how they increased the CTR on their most profitable AdSense ad unit. [...]
Thanks for the info on Tribal Fusion, Al. You have a new reader.
[...] Self Made Minds shares how they increased the CTR on their most profitable AdSense ad unit. [...]
I’ve used CPM networks with success however there’s nothing better then a highly optimized page for AdSense, it can create extremely high click through rates and thus revenue easily when done exactly right. It’s not necessarily an art but it’s definately not an easy thing to do without guidance.