Why I Only Use One Adsense Box per Webpage

If you are using Adsense to monetize your website or webpages you have had to make the decision on how many ads to use, what size, what placement, text vs image, among other choices.  I could fill a book talking about all the different options, testing, monetization performance, etc… concerning putting Adsense on your site but today in this post I’m going to talk only about the quantity of Adsense boxes I use.  I use one.  That was easy, huh?  So why do I use one?  Testing, testing, testing.  Consider a keyword, let’s say “dog food”.  If you think about the advertisers on Adwords for this keyword, picture them as a ladder.  The highest paying advertiser is the top rung, all the way to the bottom advertiser at the bottom rung.  There may be 50 or 100 advertisers bidding for this keyword.

We all obviously want the top rung advertisers to put their ads on our site because they pay the most.  Ideally, the advertisers paying the most will also have smart ads that entice people to click them so the CTR should be higher when you have the top quality advertisers’ ads on your site versus the low rung peons.  In an ad box you may have 3 or 4 advertisers’ ads.  If your site is a quality site, good content, and good SEO than it is likely the ads shown on your site will be of higher quality (i.e. higher up on the rung ads).  What happens if you put two more ad boxes on your site?  A few things actually…

Your site begins to look like a site trying to get people to click on ads, rather than a useful and respectable site.  When people land on a site that is littered with ads they will jump off that page quickly.  This will increase your bounce rate and lead to a shorter ‘average time on site per user’ metric and I believe both these play into Google’s SERPs.  But putting that aside, now instead of having 4 ads in one ad box of higher on the rung ads, you are adding 8 more ads on your site of lower rung advertisers.  Why is this a problem?  Because you will lower your CPC.  If a user was going to click on an ad, with only one ad box they would guaranteed to be clicking on one of those 4 ads which were higher on the rung, but now with 12 advertisements on the site you are offering them the option to click on a lower run ad.  I had a site where one click would bring me over $10 per click, and another click would bring me less than $1.  This is when my site was littered with ads back in the day.  After I removed all the ad boxes except for one I saw my average CPC earnings go up almost 50%.  Because… (are you following me)…  I removed the lower rung ads from my site by only putting one ad box on there.   But don’t take my word for it, if you’re one of those Adsense box lovers who proliferate your site with as many Adsense ad boxes as their policy allows try removing all those boxes by one and see what happens.  You might just become a one Adsense box monogamous type of guy/gal from now on.