11 Simple tips to definite AdSense success!

Many bloggers use Google Adsense as their primary monetizing method. Although it works in many blogs, sometimes I feel that some blogs can earn much more money by altering their AdSense placement/color codes just a little bit. It’s a shame to see them wasting money since my philosophy states, ‘a penny not earned is a penny wasted’

I had been able to boost my AdSense earnings by following some of these tips and I believe I must share it my readers, to let you guys try ‘em out. Please be sure to let me know you find ‘em ‘really’ working.

Don’t put AdSense blocks all over your blog!

Why?

1. It’ll confuse your readers and give the impression that you’re a sellout.
2. Your earning will significantly drop.

Since you can probably figure out number one, I’ll shed some light on to the number two. Yes, It’s True! More AdSense units mean lesser payouts. Suppose there are 3 units of ad blocks in your page. (AdSense TOS only allow you to have a maximum of 3 ad blocks per page, by the way) Hypothetically that the same ad is displayed throughout. If the top block pays you $0.20 for a click, the next one would pay you $0.15., and the bottom one will only pay $0.10! (Please note that those are hypothetical values. These rates differ for various reasons) So if you have adsense blocks crawling throgh out your pages, I recommend having only 1-2 ad blocks per page. Not only will it remove the clutter, it will also increase your revenue.

Of course, Google won’t tell you this directly. They get a fixed rate per click from advertisers. To the extent of my knowledge I don’t see Google getting reduced payouts depending on the ad placement. But have to research a bit to be sure. It only matters to the publisher. I found this out by only experimenting with my Ad channels after some top-notch bloggers revealed it.

Placing an ad block, right-in-the-face!

Have one AdBlock right-in-the-face of the visitor. This is usually called “above the fold” placement. Because I want to be clear and concise in my description, I invented the term”right-in-the-face”!

Have one AdBlock that catches the visitors eye right when he/she visits your page. Without scrolling, and without getting distracted by something flashy. This helps you to actually get a reader to read your ads, and increase the chances of that user earning you some bucks.

Suppose that you’re enjoying a huge traffic spike from StumbleUpon; some of those users will only stay in your site for under 1 seconds before they click the ‘Stumble!’ button again. Getting them to read one of your ads is a sweet deal!

Quality, not the quantity!

Except for having 14 different Ad Blocks throughout your site, stick to 2-3 well-performing ad units. Off the first tip, this will help you earn more and reduce the clutter.

These ad block types might change from blog to blog depending on your blog design. But most of the time, the medium and the large types out-perform the others. D’oh!

Blend it with your content.

Although Google’s Ad Sense FAQs state that it’s good to have contrasting Ad Blocks, I respectfully disagree.

Don’t treat Ad Sense blocks as a separate part of your site. They are IN you site so that makes them a part of your site. If you’re expecting to create a spammy blog, go ahead, contrasting can do you wonders. And also, can make your site wonderfully amateurish. But if you’re planning to run your blog for a blog time, blend, blend, blend!

If you bend in your ad blocks with the existing site content, readers will anyway read them as a part of your blog. May it be deliberate or accidental. Contrasting would either make them read it or make them ignore it at the first glance. All in all, blending it with the content is the safest bet.

Ad block colors

Have a contrasting border and if possible, keep the link color blue. Getting the ad block background to blend with the site content and border to be contrasting would give you the edge in catching the eye of the reader.

And the blue links? People are used to blue as the link color. Which means, if it’s blue, they know there’s something to click there. But if these changes feel like you’re ruining the flow of your blog design, you can safely ignore these two things.

Keep an eye on the CTR and evolve!

Keep your eye on CTR. CTR means the click-through rate and you can spot that in your AdSense dashboard. If you get around 1-2 clicks per 100 impressions, that means you are not doing very good converting your traffic into revenue. (Impressions mean the number of times a page with your AdSense ad code had been viewed) This tells you whether it’s time to evolve or not.

Rotate your blocks around the blog a bit and see whether CTR improves. If it doesn’t improve even then, you need a new approach. Perhaps, change of ad block units and all. Keep evolving. That’s the only way to stay on top of your game.

Make use of the channels

Many bloggers don’t use AdSense channels or use them poorly. If you already use AdSense channels to track the performance of single pages in your blog, well, you can take a step further and create different channels for different ad blocks. This way you can see in what shapes and forms your AdSense revenue is generated from and exploit it.

This helped me gain some valuable expertise into maximizing my AdSense revenue. And it had been very helpful in getting these AdSense tips straight. So, please do consider tracking AdSense block per channel. Might be a hassle but it’s worth every single second sacrificed!

Relative content and a smaller scope does really good.

As you may know, AdSense for content displays the relative ads picked up from your content. Diversified blog posts or very long blog posts about random things will often force AdSense to display irrelevant ads or public service ads. To prevent this from happening, keep your blog posts clear and concise and in a relatively small scope. If you tend to post larger posts, split them up if you can afford it.

Section Targeting for non-niche bloggers

If you’re a blogger finding it hard to follow the earlier tip, and if you’re a non-niche blogger, try section tageting. Section targeting allows you to tell AdSense to display ads relative to a specific part of your blog or blog post. For and example, if you blog about mobile phones and happened to mention NASCAR as well, you can target the mobile phone ads by highlighting content about mobile phones.

Want to know how to do section targeting? Read this section of AdSense help.

Consistent ad word density

Although this might make a blog look a bit spammy, a good content writer can always make it happen. But overdoing this will only make you lose your readers. If you keep a good density of ad words throughout your posts, you can get the relative ads you are targeting. It’s almost like writing for a search engine spider targeting search engine traffic.

Experiment frequently and evolve!

Web page tend to have declining revenue from AdSense if they don’t evolve. If your blog has repeating visitors, the same ad blocks with the same placement unchanged for months could make them virtually invisible towards your ad placements. Don’t do that! Experiment frequently. Even if you have a CTR of 35%, that doesn’t mean, through experimentation you can make it 45%.

Keep an eye on all your AdSense statistics, channels, CTR(as I said before) and try to pull off the best possible recipe. Also, be patient. Some successful AdSense publishers I know had to wait for an year or so before they started making money from their blogs and web sites.

There are no magic beans for sustained long-term AdSense earnings. Play your cards right and be patient. You can undoubtedly get there! MindBlogger wishes you best of luck.

Update [March 17th 2008]:

Allen from 366 FREE Internet Marketing Tips AND Secrets let a comment on this blog, which unfortunately got caught on Akismet spam by mistake. However, I’ve recovered it and I believe it’s a comment, noteworthy.

The only thing I’d like to add is that if you do want to max out a page with Adsense, you can have 3 normal ads, 3 referral ads AND 2 text link ads. With all things Internet the answer of course is to test and what I generally do is give all the ads the same channel code and then work out the best number and combination over the next few weeks.

If you like, you can check out this great AdSense article by him, here.