CTR may vary from 5% to 10+% or more depending on your site content and depending on your ads placements above all.

First - let's assume you have content and ads placement correct and a CTR of far above 5% site wide average - anything below would mean you have failed to optimize and failure is subject to a later article in the future.

To be successful in web publishing you need $ - funds are needed for best possible root server, SW, SW-tools, HW, HW accessories, travel and related expenses and last but not least for your living, family, children, recreation and charity. Success in life is when you can improve the quality of living, improve the happiness in life of as many others as possible and feasible.

To offer advertising space on your web site serves 2 purposes at once:

1. Advertisement helps other business to reach out to new customer potentials and thus to optimized their own revenue in accordance with their own efforts to produce a quality product or service. Hence to offer ad-space on your web site is a service to both - advertisers and their employees or families and your site visitors as well who may have a need for supplementary products or services or information directly related to the topic of your own web site or page they are currently visiting.
2. advertisements on your web site will be a substantial source of income allowing you to invest solid amounts into improving your own services, participating in seminars or workshops to learn needed skills or experiences, obtain all necessary state of the art tools, SW and HW and to have sufficient funds ready any time to invest in a better future for you and all your family in addition to supporting others by your personal charity projects.

To offer web space for advertising needs to be cost effective. You need to earn a honest amount directly proportional to the investment you made into your own web project. Hence if you invested - like I did - ten thousands of hours work, years of living, 6 digits amount in time, resources, HW, SW, expenses, travel, charity, ... then you need to earn such amount first before spending such huge sums. Hence you need to earn what you need to continue or maintain a professional level of quality publishing in any topic of publishing.

You need sufficient income to allow for professional, most efficient methods of working, producing, practicing and experimenting new technologies where needed - to always stay in front of the progress and keep on succeeding - because as a successful web publisher doing something really useful or / and helpful - your success may be the basis of your readers' success. Hence the more successful you do your job - the more successful your site-users / -readers may be if they do or use correctly what you offer or teach them.

To understand any extreme changes between high adsense eCPM and sudden extreme lows you need to understand the price bidding precess a little better. AdWords users -. advertisers - bid for a keyword a maximum price. Google loves all and wants all to have always the "best" deal. Hence to help saving money to their / our advertisers an advertiser pays only one cent more than his next lower competitor if that advertiser wants to be on top of the bidders list on a top page placement for his ad. now let's get a bit more precise and a little more theoretical - then you know the physics of price fluctuations and how to counteract in time to always get the maximum out of your adsense revenue.

Google policy allows a web publisher to put a certain maximum number of ad-units on a particular page. these days it's 3 ad-unites per page. read Google help pages and policies to assure you use current TOS.

3 ad units per page

Google also publishes the most successful ad-formats to help you adjust your ad-formats to the actual needs of the advertising industry and needs of advertisers - on a page about howto optimize adsense CTR I prepared I added a few links to the most important Google sections for adsense optimization. Google too is a huge site growing so fast that at times it is difficult to find the right information in the jungle of information.

Let's define:

1 "ad-unit" - depending on its size can have a different number of "ad-slots" For example the medium and large rectangles - both suitable for text, image and video ads - are currently among the 3 successful formats. Both have space for 4 text advertisers. Hence both have 4 ad-slots

I use on most pages one of each of the 3 successful formats - the 160x600 ad-unit has 5 ad-slots - the 300x250 and 336x280 rectangles have 4 ad-slots each.

When your eCPM drops - reduce the number of ad-slots offered in that site-section until your eCPM goes up again.

If your eCPM is below 10$ you need to reduce the quantity of offered ad-slots. When reducing ad-units to maintain healthy price level for eCPM - look at your detailed channel data. Keep the best paying ad-unit and remove the one with the lowest eCPM - to maintain the single best or the top 2 ad-units.

the switching criteria for me usually is the 10$ eCPM limit to reduce and 12-15$ eCPM to increase ad-unit-numbers.

The best paying ad unit usually always is either a 336x280ATF top-center/above the fold placement. That will be the one always up and running - which of the lower paying one is the lowest may depend on the page topic and hence on the industry advertising on those pages. On my pages on all sections the next 2 levels of ad-units are almost identical - hence the 160x600 or the 300x250 and it is up to you to figure out on which of th e2 lower paying units you have the lowest revenue. Part of that deleted ad-unit revenue may shift to the remaining one or two ad units by increasing the click price ( eCPM ) on the reduced number of ad-slots.

Makes maximum on a page with one a.m. unite 13 ad-slots. if you have 10 advertisers bidding for the keyword of that particular page-topic that means you have less advertisers than ad-slots. Or in other words you have less demand than available supply.

In this situation smart-pricing kicks in and drops your ad-prices per click way down to hell. just a few $ eCPM - too much to starve to death but also far too little to be happy and successful as a web-publisher.

The key point to understand is that the advertisers all or most have a bidding price MUCH higher than the actual smart price is when demand is lower than supply. Hence most of them all agreed to pay much more - so how to get their max price or near their max price ?

the solution from web-publisher point of view is simple - but requires control of your advertisements. IN another article I will write how a few links of code can give you easy control over your ad units shown, even over what advertiser to display on a page without the often complex use of an ad-server such as openads.

If on certain days - like holidays or weekend days - a part of all advertisers interrupt their ad-campaign and thus contribute to a sinking demand in ad-slots, then your eCPM may instantly within minutes drop to a tiny fraction of your normal revenue in eCPM - you have to reduce your ad-offers by removing 1 or 2 of your 3 ad units per page to reduce the available number of ad-slots below the demand FOR ad-slots. At this time again - makes sense - does it ? - when demand is greater than supply, the healthy advertisers offer a few cent per click more or use their full bidding limit to get the spot they wanted while the weak advertisers lose their cheap spot and may drop completely out of your pages.

If you know that certain topics or subsections of your site permanently have lesser competition in advertisers - then on those pages you place only 1 or 2 ad-unites instead of the maximum number of ad-units by default. On my sie I have regular fluctuations between week days and weekend days.

If advertiser-competition increases and eCPM goes UP - ad one more ad-unit in a prime placement

To have a healthy and honest ROI on your site for advertisement you have to keep advertisers actually bidding for their ad-slots or entire ad-units by keeping offered number of ad-slots smaller than demand for ad-slots by strong advertising partners. Keep in mind that nature of mankind tends to try to get everything at lowest price or free when ever possible. Reducing ad-slots below the number of competing advertisers forces the advertisers to give their heart a kick and actually calculate their bids and hence they all end up at a honest bid that satisfies both ends - you as a web publisher who has invested years or an entire life to become an expert in a field and then to publish your expert knowledge to the world as well as the businessmen who wants to sell a product the single most efficient was.

My own advertising revenue now is entirely Google Adsense based. Adsense is the most successful method I know - those who are less successful are so because they decided to use less efficient or old outdated advertising methods. If properly applied, then your adsense revenue may easily cover all additional expenses and allow for a decent life-style in addition to any other income you may have from your web site. Without Adsense I had a permanent struggle replacing damaged computers, paying bills and helping the richest ones on this planet - you - while at the same time supporting the poor and needy ones on this planet.

Google Adsense is an ideal way to add links to sites or suppliers of relevant products of services. Google's contextual ads, image ads or video ads are targeted to exactly the keywords of your individual pages to offer best possible relevancy for readers of pages as well as highest possible chance for an advertiser to find new customers or to help seeking surfers to find what they need to accomplish their task.

To sign up with Google Adsense is easy - all you need is a website or blog site with content and traffic.

Without Google Adsense most of my current progress of the last 5 months would have been impossible. Only the substantial additional revenue each months makes it possible to invest in all the improvements I made during the course of last months.

Think of Adsense as part of a family business - the businessmen out there who wants to advertise on your site may as well be a business woman - may be even your future wife - or an uncle or aunt - a best friend needing a popular high traffic platform to reach out to a few hundred or thousands of different people each day to get the number of customers he needs for his good work to survive or even prosper in his way of living. In exchange of offering your website as advertising platform - you get paid like all the major newspapers and magazines are getting paid. without the sponsorship of advertisers there would be some 300'000+ people less each months to receive free online tutorials for all aspects of God and Love in all parts of their family and professional life.

The same for your publishing - whatever you do - you never have to worry about receiving donations for your work. If you do - fine and your work will be even easier and more rewarding - else also fine and you still can continue your work you love to do.

Technical howtos, software developers of open source projects and many more may fully pay their entire living if sufficient traffic is created. how much traffic you have depends on the quality of your publishing work, on the usefulness of your publishings as well as on the SERPS - the search engine ranking positions you achieve for every post. you have to be really good and know exactly what and how to publish to be successful - but as I did all the learning without ever having anyone to ask - during my early years there were NO others to ask - we all were among the first ones on the web - like web publishing pioneers. now you have it much easier to learn all the web publishing secrets and rules to be really successful.

More to follow soonest.

Previous posts and follow-up articles on successful web publishing

More soon - to read all follow ups and previous articles of this free online web publisher tutorial just read the posts published in the topic category Internet - see top of my blog - to find previous articles around search engine optimization - see topic SEO and to read more about being successful in general view the topic Love - as love is the key to success in work. Work is nothing else but the expression of love toward a wider audience, or even toward all.

No one wants to have a looser as partner - all enjoy to have a successful and hardworking partner.

Enjoy your job - be successful in all you do, then you also will be successful in your love-life and have a happy family

love and bliss

hans