Earn Cash with Adsense

The Ad’s Appearance


Blend the color of your ad with the page background: This is the most obvious tip repeated around the internet for ages. Basically, you just need to keep the border color and the background color the same as the color of the background where the ad lies. There might be a problem if your website has a page background gradient, in that case you should try putting it in a bordered container. I’ve written a post earlier about blending ads.

Match the color scheme of the ad with the color scheme of the web page: If your blog/website has boxes with white background and gray border then create an ad with the same color scheme to show that the ad is a part of the page and make it blend in with the template.

Use a background image to make the ad more prominent: This works best on blogs with lots of graphics. In a web page like this, putting an ad with blending colors will not do the trick. Be a little creative and put the ad on an image. For example, if you have a website about growing apples then you might want to pick an image of a red apple and then put an ad with red background and border and fit it in perfectly. This background image will help get some attention and more clicks.

Set the font according to your page: Along with other updates adsense has put in, it has also allowed us to change the default font to the one matching in your page. So check your page font and then change the ad with that accordingly. This also helps your ad look more as a part of the page.

Set the font size according to the rest of the text on the page: Same goes with the font size. If you have bigger font on the page then the click through ratio for the ad will be very low because it would look very awkward, so be sure to set that accordingly.

Increase the font size of the ad to make it a little more prominent: I tried this out and it really worked well. Basically, you just need to keep the font size for the ad a little bigger than the rest of the font on your page. Just like H1 and H2 headings get more attention on a page. The same will be for the ads, as the first step is to get the attention of the visitor. Just don’t set it to large.

Give the ad title the same color as other headings/links on the page: When a visitor comes to your page, he recognizes the color of headings and links on the page. There are many people who might not just recognize the links in the ad at first so you should always keep the link of the title in the ad settings to be the same as other links on the page. Although some people recommend to keep it as the default ‘blue’ links, I would only recommend that if your design is extremely simple.

Try not to use the rounded corners, the square corners draw more clicks and attention: After playing around on my websites, I found that rounded cornered ads get less clicks compared to square corners. So stick to squared corners unless it really messes up with your design, no need to get into this if you’re keeping the border to be the same as the background.



Try to keep the ad background as light as possible, the border and the title darker than that: Light backgrounds are always an assistance to readers. Especially if you have a website with a very dark background then there is no need to blend the ad. You should use a lighter shade of the same color and watch the clicks go crazy.

Don’t use Adsense’s default palettes: This is obvious because Google Adsense has been around for around 6 years now and most websites use the default palette of adsense. This has triggered an ad filter in the minds of people with that palette. So no matter what, try not to use the default palette.



The Ad’s Positioning

Try placing the ad within the content: Visitors are usually interested in the content, so putting it at a place within the content would increase the chances of the ad getting seen and then getting clicked.

Ads are most effective on the left side: Naturally, we always look from left-to-right when we read something because of the English writing standards. Similarly, ads are most likely to be seen when they’re on the left side rather than being in the right most. Ads in the middle are also better than the ones on the right.

Place images around the ad: This is a little old but works so darn well on websites that only an idiot will not try this if he had a website which is not all about content but pictures and videos or just a fun tool.

Try to put the adsense in the most keyword rich place: Generally, we are told that Google Adsense ads are fetched by looking at the content all around the page, but usually this is given less weight. Adsense tries to deliver ads most relevant to the place where it is found. So try to put the ad where the keyword is used the most. Please note, that I did not mean to spam the hell out of your article just to get good ads!

Try to keep all ads above the fold: Many users don’t even scroll down when the visit the page and if you want to make the maximum money, you cannot risk to leave out those people who don’t scroll down. Instead, put them above the fold so that everyone can see them and improve your chances of getting more clicks. For your information, above the fold means that part of the web page that is visible without scrolling down.

Don’t put advertisements in the footer: This is just a stupid reason to lower your click-through ratio and get smart-priced. If you’re mistaken the please understand that nobody clicks ads in the footer so please remove them!

Don’t put two ads together, put some content between them: This would definitely be a very stupid thing to do. Firstly, it gives a bad impression to the visitor and makes the page look like spam. Secondly, it might display irrelevant or the same ads on both units. So always putting at least a paragraph of content before putting another ad unit.



The Ad’s Size

A leader board works best on the top of the page: A leader board on the top of the page, preferably on the right side (Because there is usually a logo on the left side). Although you can experiment, my results were the best when I stuck to image-only ads for the leader-board instead of the text ads.

A Medium banner works best under the header: Right under the header (Or the first 100-250 pixels of the height), a medium 468 x 60 ad works wonderfully. This works good for both, text ads as well as image ads.

Horizontal link lists work best under the header navigation: Long 728 x 15 horizontal link lists get lots of clicks. This used to work great, in fact it still works great in terms of more clicks. However, you might give it a second thought after keeping the new Google Adsense interest-based advertising in mind.

Square link lists should only be used in the sidebar and best tried to match the format of other widgets: Since you cannot modify the size of ads except the ones available, adjust your sidebar to fit the size of the square link list. Also try to imitate the style of links on the link unit to other widgets in your sidebar, so that link list looks just like other links and their titles in the sidebar. This is what I call ultimate blending.

Large Rectangle and Medium Rectangle work best within the content: If you want maximum clicks, then just place a large or medium rectangle within the content preferably on the left side. This is the best known adsense ad optimization. After all, a little extra money won’t hurt right?

Sky scrapers and Wide sky scrapers work best in sidebar: Putting them a little way down the right or left sidebar works great. But be sure that these are text-only ads. Image ads don’t work here.



The Ad’s Type

Image ads get twice as much clicks as text ads on media blogs: By media blogs, I meant blogs which are primarily about pictures and videos and other graphical forms of presentation. On a place like this, text-ads would be like a cyclist in a nascar race. Hence, to match the graphics around always use image-only ads here.

Text ads are much more effective when embedded in the content: When you have articles or post or other information presented in the form of text, embedding text-ad rectangles works the best.

Test, Test and Test: You never know what might just work great so always keep testing. This might seem to be contradicting to number 24 but I’ll explain that. For example, if you have a post about pictures of britney spears and you have an ad near it that reads: ‘Contact Britney Spears’ or ‘Meet Britney Spears’, then you can imagine how many clicks that would get. So be sure to test for once at least to see what works best.

Generally, image ads grab more attention: Even if you want to grab some attention within the content then you might want to try image ads because generally they do grab more attention and if they are good they will attract more clicks. You can check that out with the adsense sandbox.



The Ad’s Tracking

Always put a custom channel on the ad to track that which ones work out to be the best: You have got to be missing out a lot if you don’t use custom channels for each and every different ad unit that you have. The real secret to adsense is optimizing and getting the most revenue out of the same traffic and space. You can never decide what works best until you put custom channels to see what works best.

Integrate your adsense account with your analytics account: If you haven’t done this already, you can find the link on the adsense dashboard after you create a google analytics account. This is very useful in tracking.

Check out which pages make the most money and try to replicate the success of those pages: This gives you a chance to see that what works the best. Since you’re the one who owns the website, you know what you did and then you can do that again to replicate that success to make more money. I mean that would be called making easy money online, how long does it take to replicate something you’ve done?

Check out which kind of traffic gives you the most adsense revenue and try to increase that: Normally, this would be search engine traffic but you can always see that for yourself. Why listen to me and not see it for yourself?

Check your adsense referrers and try to stabilize your revenue: On your Google Analytics account there is an option called adsense referrers. When you click that, you can see that which websites sent the visitors that clicked ads the most. You can use that information to try to increase visitors from that website.

Try to improve your website in the search engines to get more clicks: If your pages are getting most ‘adsense-clicking’ traffic from search engines then try to increase that traffic by doing some search engine optimization on your website. Concentrate on getting more backlinks to increase your website’s overall authority, you can read that on my article about how to get backlinks.

Try to improve position for search phrases that generate most revenue: You can also see that which keywords the visitors came from who clicked the most ads. Chances are that the nature of that query attracts the visitors to ads. There are also chances that you are not ranking number 1 for that, so you can always increase your earnings by ranking better for those key phrases.

Start filtering the ads on pages by looking at what kind of ads work on what kind of page: Unlike custom channels, google analytics also shows you which pages generated the most revenue. This way, you can carry out site-wide experiments and then see what works best on which page and then keep the ones that work good and remove the rest.

Keep track of the click-through rates before and after amendments to find out which worked better: With Google Analytics, you get a more in-detail view of the performance of your ads. This way you can make amendments on a page and then see whether it worked for good or for worse. It is demonstrated in in the form of statistical graphs which makes it very easy for us.

Use the website analyzer on google analytics to see where most visitors click and then try to replace that place with ads: The website optimizer is a great tool and it tells you about the places where your visitors click the most when the visit that page. You can use this information to substitute that with ads and make more money off that.



The Page design

Don’t overdo the designing: I don’t really think that adsense ads work so well with very ‘fancy’ designs. The simpler, the better.

Keep the background as light as possible, preferably white: I’ll share a secret with you. While some might give you other nasty techniques to make more money with adsense, I’ll just say: Give the user what he wants plus a good experience on your website. So make the background light, this is an aid to easy reading. Get the idea?

If the background is darker then make the background of the ad lighter than it: I discussed the same thing earlier and I’ll say it again. If you have a dark background like black then don’t make the ad black as well. In fact, make the ad background gray or white and this will get a lot of clicks. There are some times when you just don’t blend the ads.

Experiment fancy containers for the ad to see which one works best: Let your creativity go wild. Let it travel around the vast horizons of your thinking to bring out some cool yet silly things. After that, just put them to work and then keep experimenting till you know you’re one step away from busting your brain. That’s when you’ll know what works best. By the way, I was talking about creating good background images to place your ads on.

A very simple design with neatly blended ad can result in a high CTR: Yes, you heard it right. Our normal thinking is that fancy graphics and flash animations are a very cool thing. If you think from the perspective of a visitor, you will not think the same. Same as point 34, keeping a simpler design to enhance a better user interface will result in more revenue in the long run.

Create several imitations of the square link list: This is something you need to do with your sidebar. Even a newbie CSS learner could write a few lines of code to imitate the adsense link list. I’ve seen thousands of websites do this. Since people usually click less on ads, this way they’ll switch of the ad alert in their brain and click the ad.



Miscellaneous

Put adsense on those pages which get most of their visitors from Google: Now here comes the important part. We all know that mostly adsense ads are clicked by searchers. So you should put adsense on those pages that get most of their traffic from google, yahoo or bing. Now, if you’re thinking why should you do this, the answer is pretty simple. You should know that when people don’t click on your ad after some time you get smart-priced which means that you will not get the same amount per click that you usually get. So this helps eliminate the chance of your ad being seen by those who will not be interested in it generally.

Show google ads to searchers only: While the first step was more general and was all manual. In this, I’ll let you know about a nifty trick to show google ads to be seen by searchers only. If you’re using wordpress, just add the following code before and after your adsense code and then it will only show to google searchers:





$ref = $_SERVER["HTTP_REFERER"];

if (strpos($ref, “google”)!==false)

{ ?>

[Google Adsense Code Here]





Test google ads and then decide whether they’ll be worth putting: Use the google adsense sandbox to check what ads will display for a certain keyword or on a specific page. You can check out the adsense sandbox. This is very useful as it can let you test out what kind of ads will display before you actually put them.

Look for better paying keywords and use them to pull high paying ads to make more money: First you need to open google adwords keywords tool. Next, you need to enter the primary keyword. When it shows all the keywords then select ‘Show Estimated Avg. CPC’ from the drop-down menu. Now just order them in descending order of the Average CPC and there you are with the most profitable keywords. Try to use them within content to experience the highest paying ads. You might also want to check them out using the adsense sandbox.

Use the ad filter to filter all ads which pay very low amounts like $0.05~: There used to be big lists around. You can still google them and find the list of low-paying advertisers. Once you’re logged in, first click on ‘Adsense Setup’ after that click on ‘Competitive Ad Filter’ and then paste the list of those websites in the big text box that you’ll see on that page. There you are, you’ve filtered all the low-paying advertisers.

Putting adsense on a website after it gains stability in the search results: This is very effective. Don’t put adsense on a new site. This has been self-tried by me and I only put adsense when the site gains a stable position in the search results. If you put adsense from day one, google thinks that you are probably in for the quick money and might send your site to the sandbox which will stop you from earning for about a year.

Try to keep one page more focused on one topic: I usually try to avoid putting adsense on pages which are very general and not focused on a specific topic. The reason is that the ads will not be so targeted and then there will be less chances of getting click-throughs. Having a low click-through rate might result in getting smart-priced which results in very low revenue per click.

Create more and more content, grab out for as much keywords as possible in different pages: Try to create targeted separate pages for each and everything you find on the topic of your website. Being more targeted increases the chances of getting clicks on that page and would also increase the overall authority of your website on that topic.



Don’t put adsense on every page, especially if you have a personal blog: You really wouldn’t want to put adsense on a post where you’re talking about your trip to cousin’s house. Reason being, a normal person wouldn’t be intersted in that topic. Those who will be interested in knowing about your trip will definitely not be interested in the ads. So, it is just another reason to get smart-priced.

Avoid non-english characters to avoid irrelevant ads (Via Eric Giguere): I found this to be stating that putting Non-English characters like a french last name on your page could result in multi-lingual ads which would be a really bad thing if you have an English only website. So try to reduce Non-English characters in your page to get the best ads.

According to Google’s new interest based advertising, recommend your visitors not to click the ads if they have no interest in it: I really do not have much knowledge on this but as far as I heard, google recently released their interest based advertising. For getting more revenue, you should advice your visitors not to click the ads if they are not interested in them. You never know, a few people who are not interested click the ads and adsense bans you for invalid clicks.

3 ad blocks per page maximum: This has also been discussed by google representatives and I think it is also in their TOS. Abide by this rule, it is for your own good. Personally, I’ve never put more than 2 ad blocks on a single page and 90% of the times there is only 1 ad block on the page. Trust me, 1 or 2 are better than 3 or 4.