How Trendelier.com increased AdSense earnings by 217%

Trendelier.com is one of the largest entertainment news and buzz worthy content publishers. It’s also one of the largest websites that operates a traffic arbitrage operation.

Trendeleier used AdNgin's testing and optimization platform for AdSense publishers to improve CTR and boost overall RPM by creating 2 experiments:

1. On mobile devices
   
   1. Experiment 1
      
      1. 250*250 ad unit below the page title
      2. 250*250 ad unit above the pagination navigation buttons
      
      
   2. Experiment 2
      
      1. 250*250 ad unit above the page title
      2. 320*50 ad units below the page title
      3. 250*250 ad unit above the pagination navigation buttons

mobile v5.jpg
Results
Overall, variation 1 increased CTR by 28% over variation 2. This increase in CTR led to an increase in RPM of 44%. The control received almost no traffic during the experiments

1. On desktop devices
   
   1. Experiment 1
      
      1. 728*90 ad unit below the page title
      2. 728*90 ad unit above the pagination navigation bar
      3. 300*250 ad unit in the right side bar
      
      
   2. Experiment 2
      
      1. 728x90 ad unit below the page title
      2. 300x250 ad unit below the main image
      3. 728x90 ad unit above the pagination navigation buttons

Variation 1 (2).jpg
Results
There’s a significant amount of research that demonstrates how visitors see native ads more than baer ads. However, more eyeballs don't necessarily mean a higher overall page CTR.

In the above experiments, the first variation received an overall page CTR of 2.56% while the second variation had a page CTR of 1.75%. In other words, the classical layout, with a "box baer" placed in the sidebar beat the native style layout by 46%. This was also translated into a 68% increase in AdSense RPM for Trendelier.

Overall Results

During a period of 5 weeks Trendelier ran 9 different experiments to improve their overall AdSense eaings by 217%. The two experiments above were the most interesting experiments because they demonstrate that Webmasters and Online Marketers should not take current conceptions at their face value. Instead, always test to see if what you or other think to be true actually works for your website.