One of the common things I’ve been debating over for a while now with myh website, is whether or not I’m going to disable Google Adsense.
Sure, it makes me money, but I feel it has an overall negative effect with my website. Nobody likes websites that display adverts, even though it’s the primary way of making money for low user sites like mine. However, I feel that I can make more money by seeking out direct affiliate networks.
I’d rather use the space on my websites to serve ads that give me a higher CPM than a lower one. I have a good CTR for the niche of my website, however except for the occasional high CPM advert, most of them only give me a couple of pence here or there.
Additionally I’ve been wanting to disable it, because it hurts the speed of my website, several of my pages take a couple of seconds to load because of Adsense calling in Javascript to display adverts, and I only display a couple of them. I’ve been aiming to get high scores on my Pagespeed insights and Core Experience as fast sites always are better for SEO. I feel they don’t fit in with the content of my website, although I do still enjoy using them. I may end up using them for another website that’s more designed for adsense.
I’ve decided that I will be disabling adsense when I reach my next payment threshold (or at the very least minising it to my blog only), so that I can focus on obtaining better paying CPM leads on my direct How to articles of my Automotive section. I know my site can get the traffic, because I rank in the top 5 in Google for several terms related to Volkswagen and Audi repairs
I do plan on using affiliate marketing with this website in the long run, but my core aim has always been writing the guides. I’m working on developing more content related to my projects, as this gives me something constant to write about. One of the problems that I’ve encounted when fixing my car is that I can only write content when something actually breaks, or there’s something on the car that I’ve been meaning to repair. So it’s great if your car is an unreliable piece of crap, but not so great when your daily driver only breaks down every now and then.
Generally every article I’ve written for my car is either #1 in Google for the queries, or within the top 5, so I get a strong % of the traffic. I’ve been focussing on developing content so that I can attract more users to the website, as you can’t make money without users.
The threshold payout for me with Google Adsense is £60, so I’ll be reaching that in a couple of months, and hopefully my users should see a nice performance increase to the website load times through minimal ad loading.
