I should firstly explain a little about myself, I am a real internet evangelist. Since creating my first ever website on Geocities, many many years ago, I’ve been hooked.

I like to run ‘experiments’ online, just trying out ideas, so I have a couple of domains I put stuff on, either trying new tools, mucking around with code, that kind of thing – I’m certainly no real web developer but I dream of turning some of my great ideas into real web products some day (and then using the cash to fund my addiction to flying!).

Getting to the point…

I added AdSense to one of my domains, to see what effect this had (on both revenue and generally SEO aspects). I had wondered if adding AdSense would have a negative effect on SEO by making my content less appealing to users – I admit I don’t think my content is that great anyway.

I didn’t realise AdSense would increase my visibility on google by 100x!

Here is the evidence…

Firstly these are my impressions in Google AdSense – note I added ads to my site on 14th March.

Impressions on Google AdSense (click to enlarge)

And here are my impressions on Google for the same period, according to Webmaster tools.

Impressions on Google (click to enlarge)

You might have noticed from the above – I get 100x more impressions on Google! Great news? Well not if you look at the traffic.

Traffic according to Analytics (click to enlarge)

So what are my conclusions?

• Adding Google AdSense to my site increased my impressions on Google. POSITIVE!
• However the greater impressions did not lead to more traffic.

This is very interesting, it means with a greater visibility on Google I have an opportunity to turn those impressions into clicks. With the webmaster tools reports I can find out what keywords I am more visible for and make sure my content will appeal and get clicks.

If I don’t do this, not only is it a missed opportunity – but potentially it is worse. My effective click-through rate on Google is less than half of what it was before, so if Google optimise organic positions as they do with Google Adwords, this might result in worsening my overall site performance on Google.

So if anybody reads this, I hope you will give this a try and let me know what you find, or let me know if you know any more about this subject!