Published by NewsPR Today | July 2025
Let’s be real for a second. You’ve poured blood, sweat, and probably too much coffee into your website. The content is solid, the traffic is trickling in, and you finally got that AdSense approval email. But when you check your earnings, the numbers are… well, a bit rubbish.
Sound familiar? Staring at a low RPM (Revenue Per 1,000 Impressions) or a laughable CPC (Cost Per Click) can make you wonder if it’s even worth the effort.
Here’s the thing: you have more power here than you think. Getting your AdSense earnings up isn’t about some secret hack. It’s about being smarter than the average publisher and making a series of smart, deliberate tweaks. As we navigate the choppy waters of 2025—with a cookieless web on the horizon—this stuff matters more than ever.
So, let’s get our hands dirty. Here are 10 proven strategies to move the needle on your AdSense revenue.
1. The Brutal Truth: Your Niche is Everything
Before you fiddle with a single ad setting, you need to have a hard look at your content’s topic. Advertisers will happily throw money at some niches and barely give others the time of day. It’s simple economics.
High-CPC keywords live in industries where a single customer is worth a lot of money: finance, law, insurance, software, and marketing. A click on an ad for a “business loan comparison” is just worth more than a click on a “vegan brownie recipe.”
This doesn’t mean you have to ditch your passion project. But you need to find the commercial angle. If you run a fitness blog, an article on “The Best Personal Trainer Insurance” or “Reviewing High-Ticket Home Gym Equipment” is going to attract much higher bids than “My 5 Favourite Stretches.”
2. Take Control of Your Ad Placements
Google’s Auto Ads are clever, but leaving everything to the algorithm is like letting a sat-nav drive you through central London at rush hour—it’ll get you there, but it won’t be the most efficient route.
A hybrid approach is king. Let Auto Ads handle the fiddly bits like anchors and vignettes (more on those later), but you need to manually place your prime ad units.
- The Money Shot: Put your best-performing ad unit (a 336×280 or 300×250 rectangle usually works a treat) right at the top of your content. Either just below the title or within the first two paragraphs. It’s the first thing people see, and it commands the highest price.
- Break It Up: For long articles, strategically place ads within the content to recapture attention. Use a free tool like Microsoft Clarity to see where people spend time on your page—that’s your sweet spot.
3. Not All Ad Formats Are Created Equal
Are you still using fixed-size ads from 2015? Stop.
Your ad setup should be a mix of the best-performing, modern formats.
- Responsive Ads are a Must: This is non-negotiable. They automatically resize to fit any screen, which is critical for mobile traffic (where most of your users are) and massively boosts the chances of the ad being seen.
- Turn on Vignettes & Anchors: In your Auto Ads settings, make sure these are enabled. Vignettes are full-screen ads that pop up when a user navigates away from your page, and anchors stick to the bottom of the screen. They have a brilliant RPM and are easily dismissed by users, so they aren’t as annoying as they sound.
4. Be Ruthless: Block Rubbish Ad Categories
This is my favourite tip because it feels like you’re finally fighting back. Why would you let an ad that pays £0.01 per click take up space that a £2.00 ad wants?
Go to Blocking Controls > All sites > General categories in your AdSense account. Now, sort the list by % earnings with the lowest first. You’ll probably find a bunch of categories contributing a pathetic 0.1% of your income. If a category like “Astrology” or “Ringtones” is cluttering up your serious business blog, block it. Just click the switch. This forces the ad auction to find a more relevant—and almost always higher-paying—advertiser to fill the slot.
Watch out for this: Don’t go mad and block everything. You can accidentally reduce the competition for your ad space too much, which can backfire. Start by pruning the 10-15 most irrelevant, lowest-earning categories and see what happens.
5. Speed Up Your Site (It’s Costing You Money)
A slow website doesn’t just annoy users; it actively drains your bank account.
- Viewability: If your page takes ages to load, your ads might not even appear before the user gets bored and leaves. An ad that isn’t seen pays nothing. Simple as that.
- Bounces: Slow site = frustrated user = instant bounce. No user, no impression, no click, no money.
Get a decent caching plugin (like WP Rocket), compress your images (use TinyPNG), and consider if your cheap hosting is a false economy. Every millisecond you shave off your load time is a win for your wallet.
6. Attract Better Traffic
Here’s a secret: not all visitors are worth the same. Traffic from Google is usually worth far more than traffic from, say, Facebook.
Why? Intent.
Someone searching for “best accounting software for small business” is in a buying mindset. They have a problem and are actively looking for a solution. They are prime candidates to click on a relevant ad. Someone scrolling through their social feed is just killing time. Focus your efforts on solid SEO that targets keywords with commercial intent.
7. Find Your “Ad Balance” Sweet Spot
This is a little-known tool in AdSense that can make a big difference. Buried in Ads > Global settings, you’ll find the “Ad Balance” slider. It’s probably set to 100%, meaning AdSense tries to fill every possible ad slot, even with low-paying duds.
Try sliding it back to 90% or even 85%. This tells Google to stop showing the bottom-of-the-barrel ads. Your overall impressions might dip slightly, but your RPM and CPC often rise because only higher-quality ads are being shown. It also makes for a cleaner user experience. Win-win.
8. Get Ready for a World Without Cookies
The “cookie apocalypse” is less of an apocalypse and more of a big reshuffle. With third-party cookies disappearing, advertisers are desperate for your first-party data. This is your chance.
The single best thing you can do is build an email list. A newsletter gives you a direct line to your most loyal audience, a way to drive them back to your site, and a pool of valuable, privacy-compliant data you can eventually use with tools like Publisher Provided Signals (PPS) to increase ad bids.
9. Fix Your Mobile Site. Seriously.
Pull out your phone right now and navigate to your own website. Be honest. Is it a bit of a dog’s dinner? Are links hard to tap? Do ads cover up the text?
If the experience is clumsy, people are leaving, and you’re throwing money away. Over half your traffic is likely on mobile. If you aren’t putting your mobile experience first, you’re basically telling the majority of your audience (and advertisers) that you don’t care about them.
10. The Easiest Win: Refresh Your Best Stuff
You almost certainly have a few articles that are your star players—they bring in consistent traffic and revenue. Don’t just leave them to gather dust.
Go back into those posts. Update the information for 2025, add a new section, swap out old images, and check for broken links. When you update and republish an article, it sends a powerful signal to Google that your content is fresh and relevant, often giving it a nice little bump in the search results. More traffic to a page you already know is a winner? It’s the lowest-hanging fruit on the tree.
So, What’s the Big Takeaway?
Boosting your AdSense earnings isn’t a one-and-done job. It’s about shifting from being a passive website owner to being an active revenue manager.
Don’t get overwhelmed. Pick one thing from this list—just one—and do it this week. Block a few rubbish ad categories. Run a site speed test. Spend 30 minutes updating your best article. Small, consistent actions are what separate the publishers earning pennies from those earning a proper income.
