Case Study: How Made With Lau increased page RPM by 351%

Lauren Lauren Fitzpatrick

Randy Lau launched the website and YouTube channel Made With Lau in September 2020 to celebrate his parents by creating a living repository of family recipes, stories, life lessons, and Chinese culture. Readers connected with the beautiful stories and recipes, and the audience for Made With Lau grew rapidly.

The Opportunity

Randy initially monetized Made With Lau by running AdSense ads while he grew traffic to the 100,000 monthly pageviews needed to qualify for AdThrive.

“As soon as we met the minimum traffic metrics for AdThrive I jumped at the chance to apply. AdThrive quickly became one of the most important parts of our business and monthly revenue.”

Randy Lau, Made With Lau

Made With Lau has a unique layout, where each recipe step has an associated YouTube video. By striking the right balance between his existing video tutorials, written content, and reader-friendly ad layout, Made With Lau was in a good position to significantly increase its AdSense earnings.

The AdThrive Approach

We worked with Randy to customize an ad layout that complemented his videos and site design. Randy kept his YouTube videos and was able to incorporate the AdThrive video player to further diversify his video earnings. Once we established an ad layout, it was time to install his AdThrive ads!

While AdThrive usually takes care of the installation, publishers have the option to self-install their ads if they prefer. Randy created his site from scratch and chose to install his own ads — we provided our head tag and he installed the code.

The Outcome

Randy installed his AdThrive ads in late April 2021. Within days, Made With Lau saw a 351% page RPM lift, and that was just the beginning. Traffic and earnings continued to trend upwards throughout the year, with earnings outperforming the previous highs every month.

“We also have a fast-growing family recipe channel on YouTube, and as incredible as YouTube is, our blog revenue is much more predictable and the RPMs are significantly higher than Google AdSense,” Randy told us. “Being able to rely on AdThrive for a steady source of revenue has allowed me to grow our team and set our sights even higher for 2022 and beyond!”

Thank you to the Lau family for welcoming us into your kitchen — we’re honored to be a part of your journey and can’t wait to see what happens next!