Social traffic is the worst for this. Let me illustrate with a real example – The other day one of my sites was “Stumbled” and for a while received a major traffic boost from StumbleUpon. These are the stats:

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Wait for it…

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These are phenominal stats…

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Average time on site = 1 second (which has dropped the normal average time on site to 2 minutes 14 seconds, I inlude it to indicate just how useless StumbleUpon traffic really is).

Bounce rate = 90.14%

That means one in ten StumbleUpon visitors stayed long enough to raise their average time on site to one second!

One second!

That’s not even enough time for the fastest web page in the world to open…

But it’s enough to drop a decent Adsense click through rate to almost nothing, and the amount paid per click plummets.

Search engine traffic on the other hand tends to be a bit more motivated, these are visitors who are looking for information, and far more likely to click on an interesting Adsense Ad to get more information.

So how do you set your site up to only show Adsense ads to search engine traffic?

A fella by the name of Rhys wrote a good tutorial which shows you How to Hide Adsense from Social Traffic. He uses a simple system which only displays Adsense Ads to search engine traffic and normal text ads to all other traffic – it’s well worth taking the time to put this solution to work on your own sites.

I know that… But never did anything about it. It’s one of those blatently obvious points I never gave a second thought, until I read about it and thought “idiot!”

I had my “idiot” moment while reading a post on Grizzly’s blog about making money with affiliate marketing. Down near the bottom of the comments, a reply by Grizzly jumped out and gave me a wake up slap. It’s an important piece of information (if you use Adsense).

In your Google Adsense account is a form for adding the domains on which you want your Adsense ads to be published. If your ads appear on any other domains, the ads will display but no clicks (or payments) will be registered. It’s a basic defense mechanism you should use.

Here’s how:

1. Login into your Adsense account and click on the “Adsense Setup” tab.
2. Next click on the “Allowed sites” link (under the tabs on the blue link bar at the right hand side).
3. Click the “Only allow certain sites to show ads for my account” button and then enter each of your domains (one per line) into the text box. Don’t forget to add your Blogger blogs.

Form for adding allowed domains to your Google Adsense account