In content sites I always try to use at least one large rectangle but remember that a webpage can often accommodate more than one ad unit.
Adsense Ad Placement: Optimization
Placement is the fundamental factor that will effect an Ads performance - its click through rate. The first reason for this is simple - a visitor cannot click on an ad that they cannot see.
The second reason (which I talked about in Adsense Psychology) is that your traffic will interact with webpage and consequently your ads in the way that you want them to interact with them. This is obviously a generalization as not everyone will interpret your layout in the same way but the principle is sound.
For example, I generally don't like ads at the head of the page above your content and navigation nor at the very bottom below both of these. These postions are too reminiscent of the traditional banner advertisement and for me don't come close to taking advantage of what Adsense ads actually offer.
The bottom line is that Adsense works best when the ads are integrated into your website as additional content. Adsense generates ads that are related to the actual words in the content of your page. To perform at it's best they have to be placed next to these words.
If you think it through this is just common sense.
This leads us to two places where content is contained on each and every website.
1. The actual body of that particular page - If you've built your website correctly then each page will be about a distinct topic. As each page differs in what it provides the Adsense ads will vary to match these differences. For example, a motorcycle insurance page will generate different ads to a motorcycle parts page. This means that the hottest spot for Adsense on every page is roughly where I've included the large rectangle on this page. Inside the page topic and above the fold.
2. The website navigation - Your navigation includes further pages which may be of interest to your visitor. Relevant Adsense Ads will also be of further interest to your visitor and therefore, a good supplement to a large rectangle ad inside the content of your webpage is a 160 x 600 skyscraper in your navigation (this often works best in the left navigation although I have several sites where the conversion is good on the right). Adlinks work well here too.
Google has produced a heat map to assist Adsense Ad positioning which pictorially confirms what I have been saying here. You can see it and read Google's own answer to the question of Ad placement here.
Adsense Ad Colors: Optimization
In line with my basic philosophy that integration is the key to Adsense success, I've always found that blending the ads by using the same colors that exist on your website works best.
This is often referred to as the three way match whereby:
1. The background color and the border of the ad matches the background color of the webpage.
2. The color of the link matches the color of the links on your webpage.
3. The color of the ad description (the ad text) and advertiser url matches your text color.
I generally only make three exceptions to this:
1. I make the actual ad link darker than the other links on the page but keep it in a similar color palette. For example, on this page I may use this color or this color. When a visitor is finished with the page they are on and are looking for someone else to go they tend to see darker colors before lighter ones. I believe Google makes the links bold for the same reason - intensity draws the eye.
2. I use the standard internet blue link. Although this isn't as widespread as it once was, internet users still often associate this color with being a link. On certain sites I've more than trebled my ctr by changing it from the link color of my actual site to the standard 0000CC.
3. I make the advertiser url a very pale shade of grey. It's still visible as it must be to conform to Google's policies but the link and the text draw the visitors attention and the ads appear more like internal links than Adsense ads. The success of this modification will often depend on the market your site is targetting. For example, webmasters know what Adsense ads are and so this change will have little impact. If your site targets people who are less familiar with the internet making the ads appear more like an internal link (ie simply a link and a description of what you'll find when you click on it) can increase your ctr.
The reason blending works better than colors that draw attention to the ads is that it's not a color that is going to make someone click on an ad - even if it's their favorite color!
Humans respond to words or better put still the meaning of words - and it will be the word or combination or words which your visitor connects to in the ad. This is why they will click on one rather than another.
Attention grabbing colors will only serve to put a barrier between your visitor and the words in the ad. More people may see them but less will click on them and Adsense is pay per click, not pay per view!
Number Of Adsense Units: Optimization
The Adsense rules stipulate that you are allowed to include 3 regular ad units and 1 link unit per page. The number you should use per page will completely depend on the structure and design of your website.
What you don't want is a webpage that appears like a collection of Adsense Ads. Such a site is valueless and will struggle to get any traffic unless you enter the world of spamming or decide to pay for traffic - both offer only diminishing returns. For a visitor to click on your ad means that they must want to go forward from your website to another website. If your page repulses them straight away they will hit the back button (read about Breaking the Back Habit in The Perfect Page) and return to the search engine that they came from to find another site that will answer their query more effectively.
Entice your visitors into your site and then cleverly place ads at points where they will be focusing as discussed in Ad Placements.
So how many is not too many? This website can easily absorb two ad units and an adlink as it does. It could also include another ad unit at the bottom of the articles which I may introduce over time.
As a general rule I'd start with more ad units than less, set up channels so you can monitor how each performs and then make changes accordingly. If you're building your website from scratch try and build it with enough flexibility to allow you to test different variations.
One Unit - A large rectangle (or at least the 250 x 250 square) inside the body of the page with the article text wrapped around it.
Two Units - Either
1. A more aggressive tactic is to include two large rectangles together either side by side or on top of each other. If you're getting a fair amount of traffic this will really improve your ctr and is worth tyring. Just keep an eye on your web stats to check it doesn't undermine your visitors experience which will be highlighted to you through a decreasing traffic rate.
2. The large rectangle inside the content and a skyscraper (preferrably the 160 x 600) in your left navigation. The right navigation converts much lower.
3. A large rectangle towards the top of your content and another at the bottom. This gives your traffic two ways out from inside the same page.
Three Units - If you can fit three in you can now mix and match, for example:
1. Two rectangles inside the content and one skyscraper in the navigation.
2. One rectangle inside the content and if you have a right and left navigation, one skyscraper in each of these (I know of websites this has worked well on)
3. One rectangle inside the content, one skyscraper in your navigation and one leaderboard at the header of your page.
4. Three rectangles inside the content - this can work very well if you have a lot going on inside the page and it is long enough to absorb the three ads allowing them to be placed far enough away from each other.
Including an Adlink Unit
Your one prescripted Adlink can virtually always be included as they can slot in to the smallest of places. Many publishers still neglect Adlinks as they have wrongly convinced themselves that the requirment to click on a keyword phrase before they can click on an ad is requiring too much from a visitor. To learn more about how best to use Adlinks go here.
Adlinks: Optimization
The common prejudices against using an Adlink instead of or as well as the traditional Ad unit are faltering as Publishers are finding more and more ways to turn these little units into high converting Ads.
The basic assumption goes something like this: as the Adlink unit requires a visitor to click first on one of the four or five topics and then on one of the ads they will be clicked on less as it requires them to do two things. In a sense this is true but the best way to see Adlinks is not to compare them to the traditional ad unit because basically they are not the same.
Whereas the regular ad is best utilized as additional content for your website, the Adlink is best utilized as additional navigation. Most navigation links are solely the number of words which prescribe the meaning of that navigation and this is what Adlinks replicate.
They come in two main formats - horizontal and square (each of which has several variations). Therefore, they can be used effectively in a variety of places:
1. The favored hot spot for Adlinks is the top left of your navigation where on this site it says "Make Money With Adsense". If you include them there and match the link, border and background color to the colors you are already using you will generate a high ctr.
2. A 728 x 15 in the traditional leaderboard position can work very well (just underneath your banner and above your actual webpage). This golf store has done it well.
3. A 468 x 15 above or just below your actual page title can also work well. On this page it would go either above or below "Adsense Adlinks - Best Practices". Bear in mind that the 468 sometimes isn't long enough to cater for the amount of words that it generates and will result in it being squashed together. You'll have to test it for your content.
4. You can also use one of the square units at the bottom of your articles. WiseGeek uses this method and have done so for as long as I remember their site being online suggesting that the conversion is pretty good.
Adsense Ad Relevancy: Optimization
There must be an ad pool for your market and on the assumption that there is, there are certain things that you can do to stress that your page is about X and not about Y: Stressing it in this way will improve the relevancy of the ads generated on your webpages and improved relevancy will result in an improved click through rate.
1. Include your target keywords in:
- Page title
- Meta tags
- Description tag
- H1 heading tags (plus include related keywords in H2)
- Body of the text several times (top and bottom)
- Bold and / or Italic tags a couple of times
- A link to the home page with the keyword anchor text
2. Use Google's Section Targeting facility.
Monitoring Adsense: Optimization
Monitoring is an important part of increasing your Adsense revenue. It's the only way that you can tell whether a change in format, placement or color has had an effect on your click through rate.
The best way to monitor your ads performance is to set up several channels inside your Adsense account. By setting up a channel for a particular set or type of ad you can monitor their performance and compare them to other ads.
For example, on this website I have four channels operating:
1. One channel for the whole website - UnderstandingAdsense.com,
2. One channel for the 336 x 280 rectangle inside the page content,
3. One channel for the 160 x 600 skyscraper in the right navigation,
4. One channel for the Adlinks in the left navigation.
When I make changes to these ads I'll be able to see what effect this has on my click through rate and it is through these methods that we work out many of our best practices.
The standard channels I always set up on any Adsense monetized website include:
1. One for the whole website,
2. One for each type of ad used,
3. I may also set up channels on different groups of pages or even individual pages to compare performance across different topics.
For how to set up channels on your own Adsense campaigns I recommend reading Googles guide.
Adsense Keywords: Optimization
Different keywords pay different amounts. Other things being equal a website based around debt consolidation will generate more revenue per Adsense click than a website based around football cards. This is why an industry built around selling high paying keyword lists to Adsense publishers has become so profitable.
But it’s more complicated than this as different keywords in different niche markets also pay different amounts. If your website is not targeting the “right” (as in profitable) keywords you will probably be earning less money per Adsense click than you should be.
For example – if you increase your average CPC (cost per click) from $0.20 to $0.30 you will increase your revenue by 33%. There are two ways of doing this on your already existing website and the best tool for doing the research is Keyword Country.
1. Better target your existing webpages:
Which words are you using in your Title Tag, Meta Tags, H1 - H3 Header Tags and inside the body of your content? Google's content matching technology generates ads related to the meaning of the words on your page. If the high paying keywords for that page topic aren't in those 4 hotspots I just listed the quality (relevancy) and CPC of your ads will be lower than if they were. Google wants to match their advertiser ads to the pages which are going to offer the greatest return otherwise their whole system collapses.
This means that you want to make sure the high paying keywords are included in your hot spots. If I use UnderstandingAdsense.com as an example I logged into Keyword Country with the intention of finding the highest paying keywords for the Adsense market. I typed in Adsense and was presented with a list. "Making Money With Adsense" has the highest average CPC of $0.73 so when I've finished building the site I will optimize the home page and several other pages for that keyword so as to generate the most relevant and high paying ads possible. I will do this by including that keyword phrase (and related ones like "make money with Adsense") into the four places listed above.
2. Add additional content to your website which targets related high paying keywords:
The most important word here is related. Don’t add content pages about Viagra to your website which is themed around motorcycles just because the average CPC for Viagra is very high. Instead do one of these two things:
1. Type your primary keyword, in this example, "motorcycle" into Keyword Country, wait for the results to appear and then click on CPC. This will arrange all the related keywords by their CPC value bringing the most profitable to the top. I did this and found that -
“Motorcycle Insurance In Michigan” has an average CPC of $10.25
“Motorcycle Insurance” has an average CPC of $4.28
“Motorcycle Loan” has an average CPC of $3.34
These are very high average CPCs for which you could develop new content. These content pages would generate higher cost per click Adsense ads from your visitors.
2. Your second option is to type in keywords which are related to your principal topic. Continuing with the motorcycle theme you could type in Harley-Davidson a popular manufacturer of motorcycles. The results show that “Harley Davidson Boots” has an average CPC of $0.84. You could build a page today pre-selling Harley Davidson Boots and generate a nice Adsense stream from that page. Another extension would be the keyword “chopper”, a popular type of motorcycle enhanced by the big shows of the last few years. On Keyword Country a search for chopper brings up related keywords like West Coast Choppers, a famous chopper builder which has an average CPC of $0.95 – again a page or several pages around this topic would be a nice addition to a motorcycle based website.
Whatever your topic, virtually every website can incorporate new high paying content. So before you try and build a website in a new niche check that the website(s) that you’ve already put the groundwork into (link building and seo) can’t be better optimized for higher paying keywords and / or have additional high adsense paying content added to it. There will be at least five new pages of content that you could add to your existing website today that would create higher paying average clicks than what you are already generating.
The large majority of Adsense Publishers are still not taking advantage of these tools and are still working in the dark so to speak - unsystematically adding content, optimizing their pages and building new niche websites with no fore-knowledge of the value of a particular topic nor its potential profitability. I guarantee that if you test Keyword County for just a day you won’t want to unsubscribe - it makes our job of making money with Adsense that much easier.
They also have a free “sneak peak” tool whereby you enter your target keywords and it will give you the most high paying keywords related to that phrase. If you follow this link and click on the “try now” button in the top right you can test the three different parts of the application yourself.
Google Adsense is an amazing contextual advertising program that lets you earn revenue from your site by a variety of revenue generating programs. Pay per click ads, Adsense for search, referrals for Firefox with Google toolbar, Picassa, Google Pack and the adsense program itself. This is a compilation of common Google tips and tools to make more money from Google Adsense.
