Google Adsense can be a useful and fairly simple way to monetise your blog, right? WRONG! It may be easy to generate the ad code and paste it into your site, but the job doesn’t stop there. This post looks at some of the issues involved in maximising your return from Adsense with advice and experience from other bloggers.
Design is important. In fact, many businesses don’t realise just how important the design of your website is. I wrote a post on the issues surrounding converting traffic into sales, so it’s worth having a read through that before you proceed with the rest of this article.
Done that? Good, let’s move on.
Google is a good start to find out a bit more about ad positioning – their guide for blog positioning here is pretty good and tells you most of the stuff that other people are saying around the web;
- Select image & text ads for above the fold targeting – it encourages Adwords bidders to select the spot for branding purposes.
- Select image & text adds for sidebar skyscrapper. Again, this is good for companies wishing to brand – but it also is big enough for a few text ads.
- Embed a 360 * 280 square at the top of your articles with text wrapping around it. Google suggest the top right positioning is better. This helps target users arriving on the page who might then click on.
- Add another 360 * 280 between your blog post and your comments. This targets users when they finish reading your article.
There are loads of Adsense tips articles out there – a lot are definitely worth reading over. Here are a selection of tips from some of the best;
- Adsense How To - Track your page performance by making channels of ads in your AdSense Control Panel and experiment till you are satisfied with your CTR.
- Adsense Team – The sizes we’ve found to be the most effective are the 336×280 Large Rectangle, the 300×250 Medium Rectangle, and the 160×600 Wide Skyscraper.
- Jensense – If you are a publisher who has multiple ad units on a page, whether it is because of personal preference or simply because it is a long content-heavy page, you need to make sure your placement isn’t leaving revenue on the table.
- Keyword Country – If you develop a poor quality content website, it will likely give you high CTR and clicks, but you will be getting low priced ads.
- My Adsense Formula – Provide some free space around ads so that they stand out and users know where to find them.
- Quick Online Tips – Usually it is recommended to place towers on your right, as users tend to use the mouse to scroll the bar on the right side wiht a higher chance to see your ads.
- WMtips – Blend your ads with your website themes. For example, if your background color is white, change your ads border and background color to white as well.
Does anyone else have some top Adsense CTR tips they’d like to share?
