I recommend following your statistics for all sorts of factors and variables, but must admit that I have not always taken the time to follow my own advice. I need to make the process more systematic … but in the mean time, I finally got around to analyzing my Adsense income for the preceding 12 months about six weeks ago.

Several of my sites showed very poor results. Some had terrible click-through rates, while others had a fair number of clicks, but they were so poorly valued that the results were insignificant in regard to my total income.

So I decided to replace those ads that were not producing with more profitable links. Nothing new there, many people have recommended that. But having built a Web Empire, I did things a bit differently.

For the pages with poor click-through rates, I simply found other advertisers that pay for static text links. But the higher click-through folks caught my attention. These were people paying attention to the ads, and clicking on them — but I was getting next to nothing. Rather than send such valuable customers off to some text link buyer, I decided to keep them by replacing the Adsense with links to my own sites — particularly those sites with the best pay-per-click performance, be it Adsense or one of the other PPC ad programs.

These people are only going to click on my ads if they are ’surfin’ with no clear destination in mind. My other sites are mostly not directly related to the sites the pages the ads are on, but may be in the same general field or some variation on a larger theme. Those who do click-through to one of my other sites are highly likely to continue ’surfing’ by clicking on one of the higher-paying ads on that site, after they digest the information on the landing page.

And that is in fact what happened. I found that ad revenue on the targeted pages went up by far more than I lost from removing the ads from the low-producing sites. In comparing those sites where I redirected to my sites, with pages where I sold relevant text link ads — the redirects to my own sites were much more profitable. In part that is because I only redirected the ‘cream of the crop’ to my own sites … but still, the lesson is well learned. Profitable advertising can be directed within your Web Empire as well as sold externally. Plus the new links will help those target pages (usually not the main page of the site) in the SERPS.