Know Your AdSense Dead Zone
Almost every AdSense account has a “dead zone”, a time period in which earnings hardly ever increase. When you first start out the dead zone is pretty much the entire day (!) but over time as your traffic and content increase your should see the dead zone (or zones, there can be more than one, but typically one is more pronounced than the others) shrink.
For North American publishers, the dead zone tends to start around 2-3 AM Eastern time, which is when the people in California stop surfing and go to bed. That dead zone is pretty easy to track, actually, because the daily AdSense earnings flip back to zero at midnight Pacific time, i.e. 3 AM Eastern time. For a long time I had no appreciable earnings in that time period until about 8 AM Eastern, after which it would continue to climb.
Things have changed for me, but I’d still characterize the period from 2 AM to 6 AM as my AdSense dead zone because it doesn’t earn me nearly as much as the rest of the day.
If you’re not in North America, your dead zone may be harder to track. This is where an ad tracking script comes in handy. Even though they’re not as reliable as they once were, ad tracking scripts are still useful for collecting data about which specific pages are making you money (and where the traffic came from) and when the clicks occurred. By collecting statistics for a week or two (you’ll often find a big variance in click patterns on weekdays vs. weekends, so it’s good to use a week or more of data) you can discover your AdSense dead zone.
Once you’ve done that, do some simple analysis to see what part of the world your traffic is coming from during the dead zone period. A simple tool like the SunClock will show you what parts of the world are currently in daylight. Using this and data from your web server access logs you can quickly figure out which areas of the world are making you money and why. You can use that information to guide your content creation decisions.
Of course, targeting other parts of the world isn’t necessarily easy. Language is a big issue. I’ve seen people sell pre-made AdSense sites that come with an automatic translation feature, but the translated pages are truly terrible. (Of course, maybe that’s why those sites work… the translations are so ugly that the readers click any link they see just to get away…) Creating content that appeals to other parts of the world isn’t easy if you’re not doing it in your own language.
Then again, you don’t necessarily have to do anything with the dead zone and instead work on increasing your earnings throughout the rest of the day. Again, knowing where your traffic comes from at any given hour is valuable information that can guide your writing. Knowledge is power, and power is money, so in theory knowledge is money… (though at times it’s not clear that transitivity really applies..)
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Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
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One Response to “Know Your AdSense Dead Zone”
Another tactic could be to just sleep during the dead zones. lol. Do the majority of your work when the high paying zones are awake.