Google Adsense: Is January Going To Be My Best Month?

A lot of people have different opinions about Adsense; some say that they like using it alongside their affiliate offers and others eliminate Adsense completely, saying that it takes away attention from their offers.

They want to focus on getting more affiliate sales as there is more potential there.

I definitely agree with both sides, but I'm one of those who has experimented with Adsense to see whether it could be used alongside my affiliate offers. Who would want to throw the possibilities of a little side-earner in addition to affiliate sales, right?

Oct 2018 - Applied For Adsense

My website has been around since December 2017 so as you can see, I didn't even consider adding Adsense until MUCH, MUCH later.

Part of the reason was because I did really want to focus on affiliate sales at first because of the potential. When I did later decide to experiment with Adsense, I thought that it was for the best to not have implemented Adsense earlier on because of the following reasons:

1) Applying too early would just get me rejected.

2) I was able to focus more on developing my website FIRST; so I was experimenting on different themes, colors, layouts, writing style.

3) I was able to increase traffic to my website. I had started publishing one post a day from Aug 2018 to Oct 2018. I also wanted to grow my referrals to WA and increase conversions.

Which I actually did, because though the number of my referrals were up and down month by month, it was really improving over time.

So not having a distraction with Adsense for MYSELF and focusing on writing better and improving my posts is what set me off at pretty good earnings in Nov 2018.

Nov 2018 - Experimentation Starts

I implemented Adsense on Nov 4th, 2018 and for that whole month, I made $50.70 CAD (about $38.52 USD) which wasn't so bad! It was definitely more than what I was used to making, especilly since I hadn't had any WA sales at that point.

But what I noticed was that it didn't interfere at all with my referral count since the number of referrals was even higher that month than all the other previous months.

So I decided to keep Adsense a little longer.

Dec 2018 to Sept 2019 - The BIG Dip!

The following is what I made in each month from Dec 2018 to Sept 2019;

Dec 2018 - $57.96 CAD

Jan 2019 - $44.28 CAD

Feb 2019 - $39.65 CAD

Mar 2019 - $23.05 CAD

Apr 2019 - $16.82 CAD

May 2019 - $8.88 CAD

Jun 2019 - $2.87 CAD

Jul 2019 - $6.15 CAD

Aug 2019 - $5.24 CAD

Sep 2019 - $8.81 CAD

What a big difference, right? I started off making good money from Adsense and slowly, it died upto 95%! What happened?!

Well, I did contnue publishing almost 1 post a day, so that wasn't the issue. What I found out later in May 2019 was that the problem was my theme! It was slowing down my website.

I tried optimizing my images, but that didn't do anything. That's actually what I had been working on from Mar 2019 (when my earnings had been cut in half) to Jun 2019.
I wasn't publishing much during those times because I was so busy trying to figure out what was happening.
But optimizing the images didn't work. When I tested the speed of my pages, I decided that it was either the plug-ins or the theme.

I deactivated the plug-ins one by one and it didn't make a big difference, so I knew that it HAD to be my theme and thus, in Jun 2019, I changed my theme. And it was at about the same time as the Google Update.

As you can tell, both the Google Update and the change of my theme hit my website hard; I made $2.87 CAD in Jun 2019 from Adsense, which is the lowest it had ever been.

My traffic had been slashed by about 70% at that point too (from around 100 visitors a day to 30).

From June onwards to Sept, I started doing the 1 post a day again, because I knew I had to lift my website out of the dumps and that was the only way to do it. And the results showed because the number of my referrals to WA were increasing and so were my Adsense Earnings.

Oct 2019 to Dec 2019 - A Strong Come-Back!

In Oct, I tried publishing as much as I could, but I remember being slowed down due to work. I still must have published around 15 articles to my website though. And the referrals kept coming in and the adsense earnings kept going up.

Referrals - 73

Adsense Earnings - $36.12 CAD

And in Nov 2019, I had the highest number of referrals to WA as well as the highest Adsense earnings that I've ever had:

Referrals - 154

Adsense Earnings - $65.98 CAD

And my traffic had grown to 11,000 visitors a month! Needless to say that I was ecstatic. My website had made a big come-back and was earning me more than ever.

Then, in Dec 2019, referrals were still high at 109. It was lower than Nov but that was expected because of the holiday season. However, my Adsense earnings kept climbing and reached $74.12 CAD.

I was thinking that's also because of the holiday season, since there would be plenty of ads around about things people wanted to buy, so people were clicking more on those ads.

No matter! I was still happy with how Dec turned out.

Jan 2020 - How Will Adsense Do?

At the end of the day, that's the big question, right?

Well, so far this month, Adsense has been pretty solid for me. I've already earned $63.20 CAD, which is almost at par to what I earned in Nov. Will I beat the Dec 2019 Adsense Earnings?

I see a strong possiblity of that happening since we're only Jan 23 today and we still have about a week to go 'til the end of Jan. I'm really hoping that it continues to climb!

My Final Thoughts - Will I Keep Adsense?

So far, my experiments have shown that Adsense is not really interfering with the number of referrals that I'm getting at WA, so I will definitely be keeping it.

If you were on the fence on whether to try Google Adsense or not on your website, then I hope that my blog post has enlightened you a little bit. My suggestion is still not to lean too heavily on it and to continue developing your website for affiliate sales.

I still do believe that THAT is where most of the money is.

However, it does not mean that you cannot make both work at the same time on your website. You just have to find the balance between Ads and affiliate offers that works for you.

Have I Changed Your Mind On Adsense?

Let me know in the comments below. Have you been using Adsense so far? If not, why? Are you going to try and implement Adsense any time soon?
If you have been using it, how has it been going for you? Have you earned much?

Thanks for reading guys!

Lots of Love,

Reyhana