The AdSense Publisher Scorecard was a tool offered by Google to help publishers optimize their earnings and improve user experience on their websites. It was discontinued some time ago.
Here’s a breakdown of what the Scorecard was:
- Function: It provided publishers with a score (out of five blue dots) in three categories: Revenue Optimization, Site Health, and Google+ Integration (which is no longer relevant).
- Goal: Help publishers identify areas for improvement in areas like ad settings, website loading speed, and content.
- Criticism: While helpful in some ways, it was criticized for being too general and not offering specific actionable advice.
Even though the Scorecard is no longer available, there are other resources that can help you optimize your AdSense performance. Here are some tips:
- Focus on high-quality content: Create valuable and engaging content that attracts and retains visitors.
- Optimize ad placement: Experiment with different ad formats and placements to see what works best for your audience and maximizes clicks.
- Ensure fast loading times: Slow loading times can significantly hurt your click-through rate (CTR).
- Stay updated with AdSense best practices: Google provides resources and documentation to help you get the most out of AdSense. You can find them on the AdSense Help Center https://support.google.com/adsense/?hl=en.
After celebrating 10th anniversary, Google AdSense introduced scorecard for their AdSense Publishers on Wednesday, June 19, 2013. With the help of this scorecard publishers will be able understand and improve their site’s performance in a better way. Thus, it is nothing but an optimization tool for AdSense Publishers.
Many AdSense publishers might have ignored the scorecard results because Google says that they do not take any account actions based on the scores. But, I personally experienced that this tool really helped me a lot to understand my users’ behavior and pages speed Insights besides AdSense revenue optimization. So, I am sharing all my readers some tips and guides to increase Traffics and Earnings with the help AdSense Publishers scorecard.
There are three categories of Publishers Scorecard viz. Revenue optimization, Site health and Multi-screen and each category shows one () to five () blue dots which indicates your ranking relative to other publishers. Under each category you will see different items that receives scores. Following three marks will indicate the scores against each items:
Green Signal: If you see green check mark then there is no significant issues were found and you have excellent score. Thus, there is no need to make any changes to this item.
Yellow Signal: Yellow exclamation mark indicates that you may make further improvements to this item to get better score.
Red Signal: If any item receives red exclamation mark as score then you have to take immediate action to fix this item.
What should be done to score high in all three categories of Google AdSense Scorecard?
Our target is to get green signal against each item. Following are the key factors which will help you to improve your score against each items under different categories of scorecard:
1) Revenue Optimization: Under revenue category following three items are analyzed by AdSense Publishers scorecard.
A) Crawler Errors: On span of every two days Google calculate the score that depends on how many crawler errors were noticed last time Google AdSense tried to crawl your blog/site. Crawler error indicates that AdSense crawler are not able to view your particular webpage and therefore your site’s pages are not indexed properly. To reduce crawler errors you should care about these things:
i) Robot denied: Check whether your robot.txt file denies to access Google AdSense crawler to access your webpages. You may see live txt file of your site by typing http://www.example.com/robots.txt in address bar of your web browser. However, if you have signed up with Google Webmaster Tool then you may test robot txt files with the help of Google robots testing tool.
ii) Content behind login: This means you have a login page (User ID and password) with contents. AdSense crawler shall also ignore that webpage having contents behind login.
iii) 404 Error: It means AdSense crawler does not found that particular page while crawling your site. You should type the URL of that webpage in address bar and see if that page really exist on your site. If you have deleted that page then make sure that either you have redirected that page to new updated page or a request has been made to remove that page from being crawled.
B) Text and display Ads Enabled: This score is an average of the past seven days. If you have not enable both text and display ads for all AdSense ad unit then it may cause decrease in the competition among advertisers biding for appearing on your blog/site. Therefore, you should enable both types of ads for every AdSense Ad Units for earning more.
C) Recommended Ad formats: This score is also an average of the past seven days. Unnecessarily you should not use any ad format that displays either large ads or even small ads on your webpage. It totally depends on your site layout and Ad slots and therefore you have to choose ad format very carefully.
There are five ad formats has been recommended by AdSense:
1) The 300×600 half page;
2) The 728×90 leaderboard;
3) The 336×280 large rectangle;
4) The 300×250 medium rectangle; and
5) The 320×100 large mobile banner.
Note that you should not use more than maximum allowed AdSense Ads i.e. three standard ad units on a particular webpage. If your site/blog runs on responsive them/template then you may use responsive ad unit instead of standard format AdSense Ads.
2) Site Health: Google analyze how well your pages with the highest number of ad requests perform on desktop computers as well as on mobile devices. Thus, site health score depends on the page speed analyzed for both desktop as well as mobile. Better speed will results more ad requests than slow sites.
To speed up your site follow the suggestions made by Google PageSpeed Insights which analyze the contents of a webpage. However, you may consider following factors to improve your webpage speed:
1) All CSS codes should be combined into one linked stylesheet and place it before closing of </head> tag.
<link type='text/css' rel='stylesheet' href='Replace with your CSS file URL.css' />2) Try to combine all JavaScript files into one single file and place it above closing </head> tag.
<script type='text/javascript' src=''Replace with your JavaScript file URL.js'></script>3) Use CSS for background color combinations instead of images.
4) PNG and GIFs are best image format for website logos and buttons whereas the JPEG format is usually performs well for scanned photographs or images.
5) Remove unnecessary widgets/Gadgets from your website/blog.
3) Multi-Screen: Your score for this item depends on the PageSpeed Insights mobile user experience analysis of your pages with the most traffic. If you make changes to improve the user experience of your pages on mobile, it might take up to 7 days for your score to be updated.
Avoiding landing page redirects is one of the best way to score high in Multi-screen category. Accordingly, you should use responsive template/theme for your blog/site which makes your webpage multiscreen viewable ranging from Desktop to mobile devices. One another thing which I strongly recommend all of you to test whether your site is mobile friendly or not.