Smaller earning pages can account for large percentages of Adsense income

It is quite natural for us to pay attention to the big earners among our web pages. They stand out at the top of Analytics reports reports. "Hey, look at me: I made you a lot of money!". Who wouldn't pay attention to that? These are our star performers.

If you are like me, you can probably name the top five or ten right of the top of your head. You might even know which one was on top last month and if one starts to lose ground, you run right to finding out why. These are important pages!

Somewhere down at the bottom of the Analytics reports are the little also-rans. They are just a blur to you, because they don't matter: they made a small percentage of what the super stars earn, so you don't pay much attention to them.

That could be a mistake.

Another Perl Script

As I did at "Simple Perl Scripts for Google Adsense" , I'm going to once again use Perl to analyze data. This time we'll be exporting a TSV file from the Google Analytics "Top Adsense Content" Page. To do that, click on "Export" and then on the "TSV" link.

You could also choose Excel and do this analysis manually in a spreadsheet. You don't need Excel, though: any spreadsheet program will work.

However, I'm going to do it with Perl. It's quicker and, at least once you write the script, much easier.

The script itself isn't much. As I have noted in other articles about using Perl, I'll be using this at the Mac Terminal command line.  Here's the script:

#!/usr/bin/perl
$skip=shift @ARGV;
while (<>) {
 $count++;
 next if $count < $skip;
 ($page,$amount,$junk)=split /\t/;
 print "First amount  $amount\n" if ($count == $skip);

 $counted++;
 $total+=$amount;
}
print "$counted $total\n";

Not very threatening, is it? Probably even many non-programmers can understand what this does. Basically it looks for what line to start at and adds up the money earned from that point to the end. The TSV will have data sorted from highest to lowest, so we can quickly see what our earnings would be if we dropped the top 10 earners, the top 20 and so on.

Google includes some extraneous data at the top of this report, so I went in with a text editor and deleted the first 45 lines of the TSV file and the very last. That left me with the 500 pages and only those 500 pages. We could write the program to be a little more complex if we wanted it to do that for us automatically, but I didn't bother with that.

Results

Let's see what happens.

 ./worth.pl 1  *.tsv
First amount  89.758424
500 1002.860342

That told the script to start adding at line one. As expected, it looks at 500 lines, tells us that the very first page earned a little over $89.00 and the total was a little over $1,000.00

Let's strip out the top ten, shall we?

$ ./worth.pl 11  *.tsv
First amount  13.14994
490 687.25847

We see that our top ten are responsible for more than 30% of total income, so they certainly are important, but that $687.00 isn't anything to sneeze at either. We certainly wouldn't want to lose it, right?

How about we look at the bottom 250?

$ ./worth.pl 251  *.tsv
First amount  0.354441
250 17.472021

Not so much, but you wouldn't just take that out of your wallet and throw it on the ground, would you?

The bottom 400 are worth a bit too:

$ ./worth.pl 101  *.tsv
First amount  2.5432
400 213.14734

Worth your time

Obviously these "unimportant" pages are worth your time. Aside from their cumulative worth, there is something else to consider: they are proven earners, and especially so if they are turning up moth after month. It may be that all you need to turn them into stars is a bit of adjustment to the content. That might mean improving the page, using some different keywords or improving the summary text (meta content "description" outside of HubPage).

What would change if the bottom 400 just earned 20% more? That's easy to see: we know now it would be an extra $40 or so. That certainly makes it worth an hour of time to look at a few of these, doesn't it? 

Yes, certainly your top performers are important, but so are the little worker bees at the bottom of the report. Remember to give them some respect and attention too!

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