article by David UK
About 18 months ago I made my first change that prompted an increase in earnings. I had a right aligned skyscraper, and following advice here I tried a large rectangle central to the page. earnings doubled, and remained high. I started to see some days when my epc was really silly.
Then came smartpricing, and like most webmasters I saw a drop. This slide continued for a couple of months, but I made one further major change that arrested the fall, and has turned the trend line on the chart in a positive upward direction. This change was over a month ago.
The change was to add any scraper sites and made for adsense sites that I saw on the site to the block list. My list isn't large - probably 30 sites, but it's enough to ensure I have well targetted ads the vast majority of the time.
The initial result of this change was to have the clicks/ctr drop by half. however, the epc was over double. The result was a 20% increase in earnings.
The longer term effect on seeing only relevant, quality adverts on the site is that smartpricing *seems* to have upped my site in it's rankings of providors of quality traffic that converts, hence I'm seeing a further increase in epc.
I know that some will say that the changes are probably due to external factors. I've been with adsense since Jan '04 so I am aware that what you earn often has no elation to what you do, and the externals are beyond your control. however, the externals cause short term blips - not sustained improvement.
