Step 1. Ad Types, Position & Style
Ad Types
Choosing your Ad format is the first step to make, as remember Google’s Adsense is mostly an EPC (Earnings per Click) scheme whereby you get money each time someone clicks on the ads rather than when visitors simply view them, or actually buys something at the end of it. Therefore it’s in your best interest to have as many of your visitors as possible click on your adverts.
Obvious that is, easy that is not, hmm?
So what are the best performing ad sizes? According to Google the best performing ones are:
160×600 Skyscraper: Google say that advertisers like these size ads and tend to bid more for them, who are we to argue?
728×90 Leader board: Very popular for site headers, footers and forums
300×250 + 336×280 Rectangles: Another popular size and one Google personally recommends, also used quite extensively for video ads.
Link Units: These are recommended by Google for sites that have limited space, and recommended by me because they can be slipped into a horizontal navigation seamlessly.
Position your Ads
Slapping your ads on a page and hoping for success will lead to failure just as sure as eating a curry after 14 pints ‘to settle the stomach’ will lead to vomiting. You need to know where the hotspots are on your website; the locations that users are most likely to click (what is a hotspot not? …not a good spot! Actually in this instance it’s very good, so read on). Identifying these hotspots is simple, as user trends are fairly constant. Then you place an ad where the user is most likely to go first.
In fact, if you’re unsure about where users are most likely to click on your website, Google Analytics even shows you an overlay of your website marked out where your visitors click – if you have it installed; if you don’t, why not?
So where are visitors most likely to go? Why, the navigation links of course! They can usually be found vertically on the left of the page and horizontally at the top of the page. When visitors naturally head for these hot-spots they’ll be finding your ads instead of site navigation, earning you money.
If you’re thinking any of this might be a little underhand, or against Google’s TOS, don’t panic… Google actually offers advice on this itself in the Adsense FAQ, and even offers extra tips for ad placement within your forums and blogs.
Let’s look at a couple of examples of successful advert placement from some Adsense websites.
This website utilises the left hand navigation slot for the Adsense links, knowing that most users will automatically look there in an attempt to navigate the website – earning the website owner money from the clicks.
Notice the links at the top of the page? They’re not navigation links; they’re Google Adsense link units, masquerading as navigation.
For a much better example however I’ve used one of my own sites, anonymously of course, to show how to truly Adsense up your website.
Here you can see use of the Link Unit and the 160×600 skyscraper to maximum effect. Obviously with the normal navigation slots used for Adsense placement the usability of the site suffers, and the bounce-rate is extremely high… but the exit links are almost always to Adsense. That, of course, is the idea!
Style your Ads
This is the real trick, where the serious optimisation comes in. Your CTR will soar if your ads don’t look like ads, and instead look like the rest of your site.
Now hold on! We can’t go and style up our Adsense ads outside of the limited colour changes Google affords us can we, it goes against their TOS? True, you can’t… however, you can style up your own text and links to match the Google ads. This is perfectly OK with the big G. Make sure that your link text is the same colour, same font and same size as the Adsense ads and that it is underlined the same. Also make sure you have descriptions underneath your links to match the style and layout of the Google ads.
To be really sneaky (and again even Google recommends this) you can make your Adsense adverts’ background colour the same as your website’s, AND even lose the border on the Adsense ads. This makes them blend in seamlessly with your website.
This is probably the optimization which is mentioned most regularly, but it’s for good reason. You really should experiment with different ad positions and different colour combinations. Each time you make a change leave the ads for a week and see how your earnings alter. Make a note of what works and then try something new. I was always sceptical when I read these comments before but since I have started playing with positioning my adsense revenue has multiplied by 4 times (crazy but true). Personally I’ve found that blending ads into the site works very well but it’s not the only way and you should try all the combinations you can think of.
Step 2. Different date, different adverts
This is one of my favourites and I intend to write a post on how to do this next week, for now I will stick to the what and why.
In simple terms, the older the page the more ads you show.
Despite the fact that I have advertising, I don’t actually like it. I have 0 to very few adverts on new posts, and increase the ads on older ones. This isn’t so obvious here on Binary Moon, but on Binary Joy I have gone a little crazy - but there is a method to my madness. The theory is that older posts will be more appealing to search engines, and visitors who come from search engines are more likely to click on ads. Another side effect is that I “reward” regular visitors by not annoying them with adverts, so I feel this is a good compromise. As I said above I’ll go into this one in more detail next week (with code).
Step 3. Content Targeting
This one is a very simple change and is ridiculously straight forward to implement. Google have a simple comment tag that you can place around your primary content, and this is what your ads will be targeted to.
Key page content here
The idea is that you place these comments around your core page content. That is, the content which is mostly text, and which best reflects the content of your site. On a blog this will generally be the main post content. The reason you do this is so that the adverts don’t target irrelevant content such as the links in your sidebar.
You can also add regions you want Google to ignore. I haven’t used these myself but they are something I intend to try in the not too distant future. You can read more on the section targeting page of the Google Adsense help.
Step 4: Increase Earning
You may wonder when checking your Adsense stats that you’re getting a lot of $0.01 clicks. The reason for this could be one of three things:
A) Your account has been Smart Priced
B) Your site is in a low paying Niche
C) You’re getting a lot of MFA (Made for Adsense) Ads on your site
Lets concentrate on C for now. Firstly, how do you know if you’re getting lots of these types of ads on your site. Install the Adsense Preview Tool which will allow you to preview the ads showing on your site.
The reason for low paying clicks is called Adsense Arbitrage. Webmasters bid low amounts on every keyword possible, they then redirect the user to another page where they are displaying higher earning ads. So for example say they get a particular keyword for $0.01 but they redirect the user to a page where they’re making $0.40 per click. That’s a markup of $0.39.
There is a way to filter out these types of sites. You can use the tool to visit them & see for yourself if it’s just a page full of ads. You can also visit Adsblacklist and use their constantly updated list of MFA Sites.
You should notice a considerable increase in your EPC (Earnings Per Click) when list is applied to your Adsense Filter List (Which is found in the Adsense Setup part of your Account).
Here’s the Adsblacklist top 20 worst Offenders:
www.8-topsites.com
www.toseeka.com
www.away.com
www.5-top-sites.com
www,digg4it.com
www.best4sites.net
www.everyrule.com
www.anrdoezrs.net
www.25-topsites.com
www.purebusiness.com
www.thinktarget.com
www.healthline.com
www.toptensites.org
www.10-bestsites.com
www.everyclick.com
www.megasearch.biz
www.8bestsites.com
www.olx.com
www.geekinterview.com
www.best8sites.org
www.expert-expert.com
www.storage.expert-expert.com
www.7-topsites.com
www.splise.com
www.10-top-sites.com
www.mp3advance.com
www.9topsites.com
www.healthcentersonline.com
www.chosenresult.com
www.e-nternet.com
If you have implemented these changes & found them useful please comment & share your experiences.
Step 5: Increase Earnings with competitive Ad Filter
Do you ever wonder why it is you get low clicks sometimes? 1 cents - 10 cents?
This is because the Adsense Publishers are offering low amounts. Some times they offer a low amount because they have Adsense on their website too. And they might get 10 cents a click for every 1 cent they pay. These sites are known as “Made For Adsense” Yep, it does suck!. But there is a way around this to increase your earnings.
Go to Adsblacklist, Sign Up, put in your URL and keyword, click generate. You will then get an extensive list of 200 sites to block in your AdSense competitive ad filter.
Now go to your Adsense account, Click on Adsense Setup, Then click on competitive ad filter, copy and paste the websites you were giving from Adsblacklist . Now wait till Adsense blocks those sites.
Step 6. Referrals
Google Referrals don’t make me a huge amount of money, but I like to include them on all my sites. Currently I only use one referral package and it only displays in Internet Explorer on the PC. It’s for the Firefox browser, and earns me roughly a dollar for every new install I generate. Some sneaky css removes the ad for Firefox users so that they don’t get pestered with unnecessary adverts.
To do the show/ hide css on your refferal code all I do is have a div with my referral button in it, which I hide. I then use conditional css comments to load some css to display the advert in IE.
I’ve put together a simple example of what I mean below. Just copy and paste the code below into a new htm document and then view it in IE and Firefox. In IE you will see the ad block at the top of the page, in Firefox is “magically” disappears.
Step 7. SEO and Content
I get about 75% of my traffic from search engines and, in my opinion, search engine visitors are the ones most likely to click on adverts, far more so than the regular visitors (which ties into the date based adverts above). Search engine visitors are on a journey to find some information, if they can’t find what they want on my site then they might as well find it on one of my advertisers sites, and that’s the good thing about contextual advertising - the ads are relevant to my readers.
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If you have already tried and been disappointed over and over again by those get rich quick schemes, then you’ll probably go to the other extreme and say: Well I have to be innovative (like Google, Amazon and so on) and need a big investment to make money online, I can never make money as the ‘little guy’ online. This is FAR from the truth.
