Analyzing My Second $100 from Google AdSense – in One Third the Time

My first $100 in AdSense revenue was generated from my three blogs in approximately 10  months. My second $100 was generated in just over 3 months – from March 4 to June 7 2009. It took 327,383 served ad impressions to generate the first $100,  189,290 to generate the second.

As I described in my ‘Analyzing My First $100 from Google AdSense’ post, for this last three month period I dropped footer ads in lieu of what I hoped to be a more lucrative ad type – inline text ads. I was right. Some how I also benefited from higher per-click revenues (see details below) for the second $100 than I did for the first $100.

Ad Structure

For the last three months each of my sites used the following three primary ad types (channels in AdSense parlance) – each as depicted in the image below:

• tower ads (120 x 600 down the right column);
• cube ads (250 x 250 in the middle column); and
• inline text ads (468 x 60 in-post text ads – below the title, categories and tags fields and above each post entry).

Below is the AdSense report showing exactly how much was earned from each such ad/channel type on each of my three blogs:

When I aggregate the totals for the three ad/channel types across my three sites, the results for the second $100 earned, were are as follows:

For the first $100, cube ads generated 51% of my revenue. This time, its down to 25% with tower and inline ads taking up the slack. Last time tower ads paid the most, with an average per-click revenue of 17.5 cents. This time all of the ads have a higher per-click average. But, as you can see, tower ads are still the highest paying at an average 31.8 cents per click through.

Other 2nd $100 Statistics

	first $100	second $100
time period to generate $100	10 months	3 months
paid clicks during period	656	409
ads served	327,383	189,290
average revenue (cents) per click	16.5	24.4
average # served ads to earn a penny	33	19
average page views to earn a penny (at 3 ads per page)	11	6.3
average pages served to generate 1 click	166	154
page views needed to generate $1.00	1,100	631
new posts in period	187	44
average revenue earned per new post	53 cents	$2.27

 

Aside from the in-line text ads more than taking up the slack for dropped footer ads, my average per-click revenue inexplicably jumped up by 48% from 16.5 cents to 24.4 cents per click. This resulted in the number of pages served to generate $100 falling from 1,100 to 631 pages. My traffic has also risen month over month, but has stabilized around 800 to 1,000 page views per day.

Amazon Ads

In the first 10 months of The Daleisphere I generated about $50 in Amazon.com affiliate ads. In the last three months The Daleisphere generated approximately $71.11 in referral fees, once again, mostly from the iPhone App books I recommend in my ‘iPhone App Development – Where to Start’ post – by far the most popular post on The Daleisphere. My generic Amazon ads generate revenue from a hodge-podge of other sold items. I might break that down at some point if I can find a way of making a sensible blog post out of the data.

Moving Forward

As you can see I make almost nothing from home-page ads – $2.11 in three months (see bottom three rows in ads/channel table above). I’m thinking I’ll drop the under achieving cube ad there and add another inline-text ad on that page.

I want to look into the other advertising options that Dave Zatz mentioned in the comments section of my original $100 AdSense post. If my site qualifies for any of them I may give them a try.

short of new advertising possibilities, I’m not expecting similar revenue acceleration for the next $100 period because my average daily revenue seems to have leveled off some, in tandem with my average daily page views.

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