Treble your Adsense
Income in 60 Minutes
Google's Adsense is one of the most powerful weapons in website publisher's
arsenal. It enables you to monetize your sites easily and if used properly can
generate a very healthy income. However, if you're not using it properly and
maximizing the income you squeeze from it, your leaving money on the table –
something we all hate doing.
Boosting your return from Adsense can be done very easily and quickly, and
you'll be amazed by the results.
I ran Adsense on my sites for over a year before I discovered these techniques,
and like many people, I though I was doing pretty well. My clickthrough rates
and CPM figures were very healthy, and I didn't honestly think that they could
be improved a great deal. How wrong I was. Immediately after I implemented a
few quick changes my clickthrough rate more than doubled, and by doing some
fine tuning I manged to get nearly three times as many people to click on the
ads as had been previously doing so.
The first technique is one that was 'discovered' by the amazingly helpful Debs,
on Site Sell's SBI! forums. When I read it originally, it made sense and I
decided to give it a go, but I wasn't prepared for the immediate impact it
would have on my income. It involves making only a few simple changes to the
format and positioning of your Adsense ads.
Firstly, forget about using banners or skyscrapers. These ad formats are almost
universally ignored by surfers. Why? Because we've all been conditioned to
recognise a skyscraper or banner as an advert and as
these adverts are rarely of any interest, we ignore them. What's needed is
a way of integrating Adsense ads into the editorial on your site as seamlessly
as possible. To do this you need to do three things:
1. Use the 250 x 250 rectangle format 2. Make the background color of the ad
the same as the background color of your site, or as close to it as possible.
3. Make the ads borderless by setting the border color to be the same as the
background color of the ad.
These changes can be made by logging into your Adsense account and creating a
custom format. Just select the 250 x 250 ad format, and create a custom color
palette. Use the color picker to pick the color you want. The Javascript is
automatically generated at the foot of the page, ready for you to copy and
paste into the pages on your site.
Now, you need to position your ads where surfers are most likely to click on
them. Research using retina scanning technology has shown that the place that
surfers tend to look at first and most often is the top left. I don't know the
reasons for this, perhaps it's because that's where we're used to seeing the
most useful search engine results (at the top of the rankings) and search
engines are the sites we most often visit, so we automatically look at the same
place on other sites.
Whatever the reasoning, as soon as I made the above changes to my Adsense ads,
clickthrough rates doubled, immediately.
The second technique is much newer and one which is entirely based on my own
experience. Google has recently added a new type of Adsense format,
called Ad links. This displays a series of links on your page in the same style
of Ad unit as regular Adsense ads. When a user clicks a link they are taken to
a page of adverts that resembles regular Google search results.
As a publisher, you are paid every time a user clicks one of those ads.
Adventurous soul that I am, I jumped in with both feet and started to trial Ad links on my most visited pages as soon as it was launched. I'm using the four
links in a square box format, positioned top left of my page content. After a
few weeks of running Ad links alongside regular Adsense ads, it's clear that the
return on Ad links is about a fifth to a quarter higher than regular ads.
There's no clear reason for this but one explanation may lie in the fact that
clicking on an Ad link takes the user to page of 'results'. When a user clicks
on one of these, you are paid for the click. If the user finds what they want,
great, if not, it seems that they hit the Back button on their browser and try
again, just as you would for normal search engine results. Then they click on
another result, and you get paid again. So it's possible to be paid more than
once from the same Ad link click. Now, this reasoning is speculative, but it
does make perfect sense in the light of my Ad links results.
Finally, Adsense has some excellent tracking statistics that allow you to track
your results across a number of sites on a site by site, page by page, or just
about any other basis you choose. This is a very powerful tool and you should
use it to find out which ads are performing best for you and fine tune your
Adsense and Adlink ads accordingly.
So you see, by spending an hour or so of your time making a few adjustments to
the Adsense ads on your sites, you can very quickly treble your Adsense income.
Give it a go, you'll be amazed by the results.
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