The Affiliate Journey

I know a lot of you have come to the same conclusion in the last year or two that Adsense is the worst performing affiliate program out there.

Maybe calling it the worst is a little harsh, but in comparison to programs that are targeted to your visitors it does not earn you the maximum revenue per visitor.

Recently something was brought to my attention that potentially we could be leaving a few bucks on the table each month by not having Adsense on some of our pages.

What exactly do I mean?

If you’re not familiar with conversion rates take a minute to read my post about increasing conversion rates to pump up your income.

You see not every page on your website is going to convert visitors to sales as well as each other. This could be because of the keyword people are finding you for, your content, or a slew of other reasons.

That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to capture a few bucks from those visitors though.

so here’s my:

3 step plan to maximize earnings per visitor with Adsense

1. )Know your conversions and where your sales are coming from.

The first step is knowing which pages generate sales on your website. So you must setup tracking for each page on your site. This way you will know which pages are generating the most click-through s and which are generating the most sales.

From here you can see which pages are under performing (i.e. lots of traffic and no click-through s or sales). You can first try to increase click-through s and sales (tweaking content, testing different calls to action) but if you can’t seem to get the numbers up this is where Adsense comes in.

2.) Place Adsense in a prominent position on your under performing pages

First off I don’t think we should just splash Adsense everywhere. If you have a top ranking page that reviews a high converting ebook placing Adsense on that page isn’t necessary (nor does it make sense in my opinion).

How ever if you have a “how to” article that doesn’t seem to convert that well but gets a lot of visitors each day this is prime Adsense real estate.

So place Adsense on those pages that revealed themselves to be under performers in terms of sales and conversions.

3.) Track your results

From step 1 you could have effectively figured out your earnings per visitor by looking at your analytics to see how many visitors came to a page in a given number of days, and then compare that to the earnings from that page for the same time period.

This isn’t easy to do with Adsense unfortunately (because it’s tough to track individual pages with Adsense), but you can look at the over all increase in revenue of your site after you’ve added Adsense and compare that to the affiliate income you’re still getting from those pages.

The over all revenue should increase. If it hasn’t then consider taking Adsense off of the pages.

This isn’t going to double your income or anything (Or at least I hope it doesn’t, if it does revisit your keywords and business model).

It will add a few bucks to the bottom line each month. It’s a worth while test in the quest to squeeze every ounce of revenue from a website.