Google Adsense is the most used for of PPC advertising worldwide for publishers – fact. As well as this, I do not doubt for one minute that website owners/publishers of Adsense check up on their Adsense homepage to see how their website/s are doing and to try and improve of them too. The fact of the matter is that knowing how to optimise a Google Adsense account is difficult: if you do not know what statistics are worth pushing aside and ignoring and what statistics are the driving force behind your Google Adsense earnings. For this reason, here are two important statistics you should take the most care with in Google Adsense and look to improve where possible.
 

#1 RPM

RPM stands for ‘revenue per mille’ and signifies the amount of money that is generated per 1,000 views. The RPM is the driving force of your Adsense account. If you find your RPM is decreasing, it is most likely because of ‘sub’ statistics which all contribute to the RPM:

1. CPC bid adverts or ‘cost per click’
2. CTR or ‘click through rate’ of adverts
3. CPM bid adverts of ‘cost per mille’

The CPC, CTR and CPM are all important statistics. However, at the top level, it is the RPM that is the most critical to your publisher account’s success. If you are struggling to gain a respectable RPM, it will then be a wise move to look at the above statistics as you are sure to find that one of them will not be performing up to the standards you were expecting.
 

#2 Active View Viewable

A statistic which could be considered fairly new for Adsense, the active view viewable percentage identifies the percentage of traffic that was able to actively view your advert. This is a very important statistic as it can tell you a whole lot about your website and Google Adsense strategy:

• If you have a high active view viewable, that’s great!
• If you do not, it might be for the following reasons:
  • Adverts below the fold of the page – If people are not scrolling down your webpage to view your website, your advert will not have been actively viewed. Therefore, you may want to change the location of your adverts so they will be more actively viewed, such as above the fold of your webpage.
  • Ad blockers  – Ad blockers prevent advertising scripts from running, reducing the amount of people that can view your adverts. Unfortunately, not much can be done with this but it is still interesting to see the rough percentage of users who use ad blockers online (if all your adverts are above the fold of the webpage and your website’s bounce rate is low).
  • Your website’s loading time – The actively viewed percentage depends quite a lot on the bounce rate of your website too. For example, if your website takes forever to load, the actively viewed percentage will be low and the bounce rate will be high as people quickly click off your slow website. Therefore, if you have a high bounce rate, do not be surprised if the percentage of actively viewed adverts is low.

For an advert to count as being ‘actively viewed’ it must obey two conditions:

• At least 50% of the advert must be viewable on screen.
• The advert must be displayed and viewed for at least 1 second.