How L’express Increased Adsense Earnings by 18% and CTR by 69%

How L’express Increased Adsense Earnings by 18% and CTR by 69%

May 16th, 2021 eyal katz

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For L’express, advertising serves an important part of their monetization strategy and when they started encountering obstacles preventing revenue growth from Adsense, they were clearly keen to try new methods of improving it. They turned to AdNgin’s comprehensive testing suite to run multiple experiments on the website. These experiments employed an algorithm based on the multi-arm bandit model [1], which exploits the best performing variation to increase revenue while testing and continuously over time. Below is a detailed description of two of the experiments they ran. The results of these experiments will surprise you and may even change your previous opinion on banner ad performance. But before we dive into the actual steps taken by Le’ Express to increase RPMs and CTRs, we should probably try to understand why Adsense earnings have declined for many publishers? So how did L’express manage to increase their Adsense revenue with AdNgin? With this in mind, the advertising team at Le Sentinelle, one of the largest publishers in Africa and owners of L’express, approached AdNgin. They had previously attempted to optimize their Adsense using Adsense Experiments but found it lacking the necessary sophistication and comprehensiveness of modern conversion optimization tools. Using AdNgin, they set up extensive tests examining below the fold and above the fold ads, left vs. right placements, different ad sizes, in-content placements, text ads vs. image ads, text ad color palettes, mobile vs. desktop traffic, single page customization, and more. Below are two of those tests. Results For the above the fold image ads displayed on the right, 300×600 ads received a clickthrough rate that was almost 8% higher than the 300×250 equivalent. The in-content ads also demonstrated that bigger is better with the 200×90 version producing a CTR higher by almost 10% than the average of the other two. However, the proportional difference in CTR between the 180×90 ad to the 125×125 ad was less than 4%. This test demonstrates the law of diminished returns. The law of diminishing returns basically means that we can’t sustain the same growth for the same investment over time. Or in the terms of our experiment, you’re not going to achieve proportional correlation between CTR and increased banner sizes over time. You have to find that sweet spot where you’re maximizing your revenue from Adsense and not annoying your visitors with over obtrusive ads. Otherwise, visitors become de-sensitized to the larger ads and clickthrough rates start dropping again. Therefore, for testing to be done right it has to be an ongoing and perpetual process.