0 comments Posted by Help My Internet at Sunday, May 23, 2010

1. Ad Position

Most AdSense publishers have seen the neat little heat map that AdSense has produced to show where ads work best on websites. In general it works fairly well and is a great place to start, but make sure you experiment with new positions for ads and see what works best for your site.

2. Numbers of Ads

More ads earn more than less ads. don't they? Unfortunately it isn't always the case.

Test different combination's and numbers of ad units on your site. There's usually a 'tipping point' where you hit a ceiling of how many ads your users will accept - push it too far and you could hurt reader engagement, traffic, and in the long run your earnings. On the flip side of this, don't be afraid to have more than one or two ads on a page, particularly if you have long pages with lots of content.

3. Ad Design

I can still see the first ads that I first used on my blog back in 2003. I can still see them because they fried their imprints into my retina -- they were so LOUD!

I figured that the ads would do best if people noticed them so I went for the most crazy color scheme I could come up with. Over the years I began to experiment with different combinations of ads and found that more subtle or blended ads tended to work best for me. Having said that, you can sometimes blend too much, to the point that the ads become invisible to your reader. So test different colors and designs of ads to see which work best. Use the ad rotating tool that AdSense offer publishers to rotate different designs to work against ad blindness among regular readers.

4. Ad Sizes

AdSense offers us a range of different ad sizes, so experiment with them all to see which works best. Hint: Some might think that the bigger the ad the better it performs. This is not always true.

For example, I found that the 'large rectangle' ad (336 x 280) didn't work as well for me as the smaller 'medium rectangle' ad (300 x 250). It turns out that more advertisers (at least those in my niche) prefer the medium rectangle ad as it's a more standard ad unit size than the larger one. Again, the key is to experiment and see what works best for your site and niche.

5. Ad Formats

I've found that choosing image and text ads works better than just choosing text ads, but that's not the only choice we get as AdSense publishers.

AdSense also allow us to run link units, AdSense for search, etc. I've found that each of these different formats will work differently from site to site. I've had blogs where the link unit ads were the best performing units on the site while on other sites it didn't really perform at all. You'll never know unless you test it!

6. Which Content Converts?

One of the best advances that AdSense has made in the last year has been the integration between it and Google Analytics. To be honest I'm still digging into the metrics that this opens up, but the insight that this gives has amazing potential to increase earnings.