Hello, friends! We're doing our monthly detour away from food today and diving into some behind the scenes blogging details today instead.
And by monthly I mean every month except for last month. Did you notice there was a mini gap in these reports? If you did, you are more observant than I am. I haven't blanked like that since my being pregnant days. And no, that's not the reason I missed the August report.
I've decided not to play catch up and instead continue on with the September report. After a quick snoop through TEMs income and expenses, I wanted to share with you some details about which ads perform the best. My super awesome ad company, AdThrive, helps to break down this data for me. If you're managing your own ads, I think this information will be helpful to you.
Let's start with the numbers …
INCOME
Total Income: $5,303.84
EXPENSES
- SiteGround – $90 – My new and much loved hosting company
- MadMini– $59 – *NEW*
- Tailwind – $10 – Pinterest scheduler – LOVE them!
- Vaultpress – $5 – Backs up all TEMs files.
- Teachable – $29
- Adobe Premiere Pro – $19.99 – What I use for video editing.
- CrashPlan – $5.99
- CloudFlare – $20
- OptinMonster – $16.58 – what I use for my newsletter signup forms
- Support staff – $406.53
Total Expenses: $662.09
TOTAL PROFIT: $4,601.75
Note: The income reported here is in USD. Although I am Canadian the majority of the income I earn through TEM, and my expenses, are in American dollars.
RPM is a handy formula to calculate how much money your blog is earning. The acronym stands for Revenue Per Mille, or revenue per thousand pageviews.
Total Profit ÷ Total Pageviews x 1000 = RPM
Using this formula we can calculate The Endless Meal’s RPMs:
$4,601.75 ÷ 290,818 x 1000 = $15.82
TRAFFIC OVERVIEW
Ad Unit Earnings
That image is a screenshot from my AdThrive dashboard. Until last month, all the earnings were lumped together, so it was impossible to tell which ads were performing the best. The results were surprising to me, so I wanted to share them with you.
Footer Ad
You can see that the ‘Footer Ad', outperforms all the others, by a long shot. The footer ad is the banner ad that runs along the bottom of the page and remains in place even as you scroll.
To be totally honest with you, it's the ad I like the least as I find it is the most intrusive. When I'm on my website, I often find myself clicking the X in the corner of it to turn it off. Given its top spot on the earnings chart, it's an ad I'll definitely be keeping.
Sticky Sidebar
The sticky sidebar ad is the last ad in the sidebar that stays in place even as you scroll. It's only really visible on a desktop as the sidebar gets pushed to the bottom of the page on mobile. Before AdThrive, I used a plugin called Q2W3 to make the last ad sticky.
One thing that AdThrive suggested to me was to shorten the number of things on my sidebar. This keeps the sticky sidebar ad in view longer and increases earnings.
Recipe Ad
This is the ad that's directly in the recipe. Before seeing the earnings chart, I would have guessed that this ad ranked higher in the list.
Header
This was the biggest surprise for me. When I was running my own ads, I always assumed that the header ad should be the most profitable since it's right on top. Seeing how little it earns, my guess is that readers quickly scroll down the page so the ad isn't always visible or even loaded.
If you're managing your own ads, I hope that seeing the breakdown of which ad units of mine are earning the most money will help you in your strategy.
As always, if you have any questions, reach out in the comments below. I love hearing from you!
Kristen Stevens
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Hi, I’m Kristen! 
Myfinancekits says
January 21, 2018 at 12:42 pmYour Adthrive is actually doing well
Kristen Stevens says
January 23, 2018 at 10:56 amYes! I absolutely love working with AdThrive!
James says
November 3, 2017 at 5:10 amHi Kristen. I recently switched to AdThrive and so far I don’t see my earnings being much different than regular Adsense. Do you remember if it takes time to optimize? I agree about the footer being intrusive but yeah it makes pretty good money; I’ve seen it myself.
Kristen Stevens says
November 3, 2017 at 6:58 amIt did take some time! I saw an increase right away, but at first, it was a small one. They are constantly working on optimizing your site to make you the most amount of money so I’m confident you’ll see better returns soon. It took a few months before I saw a big spike. Hang in there!
Cynthia says
October 28, 2017 at 5:31 amKristen this is honestly inspiring. I want to start my own blog and I can’t wait until I have enough page views to join adthrive. I have only heard very nice things about them and they seem to pay better than mediavine.
Also I would like to know what package you pay for on site ground for hosting
Kristen Stevens says
October 28, 2017 at 7:51 amYou should start your own blog! It’s been one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done. And yes, AdThrive all the way. I’m constantly blown away by how awesome they are. There is no way I can say enough positive things about them. There just wouldn’t be the time to list them all lol. It took me a while to get on with them, even when I had enough pageviews, but it was so worth the wait.
I use SiteGround’s cloud hosting. It’s a lot more expensive than a basic plan, but I can scale it up very easily if I there are traffic surges (which is a great thing) so there is no downtime. If you’re just starting out, I would recommend going with their startup web hosting package. BTW I see on their website that it is on sale right now. Maybe a good time to take the plunge?!!