Alex

It's a known fact that AdSense serves its ads based on a lot of different factors such as the user's previous search history, geo location and/or other criteria.

The goal here is to increase the overall CPC and therefore earn more money in the long run without even having to do anything else. Increasing traffic and CTR is obviously something you should always aim for, but for now let's see how we can actually raise our average CPC.

Practical Advice

Except for being in a "high paying niche" which you will always hear from everyone, checking out the actual ads that might appear on your website is really a great idea. Keep in mind, this is a contextual concept, you will not always serve ads relevant to your website because Google tracks everything and it is now more concentrating on serving individually tailored ads by some of the criteria that we mentioned above.

But nevertheless, if your major revenue share comes from traffic that results from organic rankings which is further delivered by highly relevant keywords that you have covered on your website already, you can expect to raise your average CPC by simply blocking and excluding ads that lead to extremely low quality resources.

How to Check?

To check the ads that might appear on your website, use AdSense's very own "ad preview tool".

From my experience, you can catch ads that lead to parked domains (arbitrage?), low quality affiliate websites and anything else that you might think is delivering those $0.02 - $0.05 clicks.

By blocking these advertiser URLs you will make sure they do not appear at your website again. Block as many as you can but keep in mind that if your website is really about something that does not have a lot of advertisers in Google, all of this might not be such a great idea. Only block those ads that you are certainly sure they do not pay much. Again, these could be ads leading to parked domains, poor grammar websites obviously made by someone who's looking to turn a quick buck without spending much etc.

You should always control what types of ads show up on your pages.

Also, you can temporarily disable interest based ads, review more of your "contextual" bidders as you block some of those really low quality sites out and then turn back the interest based advertising again when you're done. If you do not, you can potentially decrease your average earnings because there will be less ads competing for your pages.

Stay tuned for more posts on how to track and analyze revenue by traffic sources, individual keywords as well as common sense tactics and strategies for earning more via this great PPC network.