Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Tips for Improving AdSense Performance

Tear Down the Borders

Remove borders on your AdSense ads. Web visitors eyes wander around the screen; borders stop them from wandering.

Removing borders from your AdSense ads can lead to a significant boost in CTR.

Use Matching Fonts

Match the font of your site content to the fonts of your AdSense ads.

Use Matching Colors

Match the colors of your AdSense ads to the colors of your site content. Make the ads look like content and more visitors will look at them.

One exception to the color matching rule is sites that are designed to appeal to scammers and spammers. Those sites sometimes perform better with highly contrasting colors.

Use Blue Links

Another exception to the color matching rule is to set the links in your AdSense ads to blue. Blue links tend to have a higher CTR than other link colors, because people have become used to clicking blue links.

Use Large Ads

Larger ads outperform smaller ads. Wider ads also outperform more narrow ads.

The Large Rectangle (336x280) is the best performing ad unit.

Use Lots of Ads

Google allows you to use three ad units and one link unit on each page.

Use them all. The more ads you have, the higher your Page CTR will be.

Place Ads Above the Fold

"The fold" is industry jargon for "the part of the page that the user sees without scrolling down". This will vary depending upon the resolution of the users screen and the size of their browser window.

Place as many ads as possible above the fold. Ads placed below the fold are seldom seen and seldom clicked.

Place Ads on the Left

Web users are accustomed to seeing menus on the left side of the web page. Move your menu to the right and place your AdSense ads on the left.

Use the Heat Map

Use the Google AdSense Heat Map to determine where to place ads. The darker spots are areas where users spend more time looking. Place your ads in the darker areas.

Integrate Ads with Content

Visitors will be reading your content. Keeps your ads as close to your content as possible to ensure that the visitors also look at your ads.

Use Custom Channels

Use AdSense's Custom Channels to test the performance of different ad sizes, placements, colors and fonts.

Don't use Low-Paying Competing Ads

Don't clutter your page with competing ads that don't pay. If a user clicks on an ad that pays you $.01, they are not clicking on an ad that pays you $.30.

Use URL Channels

Use AdSense URL Channels to determine which pages are making you the highest CTR, CPM, and earnings. Focus your efforts on building pages like those.

Use an AdSense Reporting Package

Google only supports 200 channels. If you have more than 200 pages, use AdSense reporting software to give you more insight into your AdSense earnings.

Don't Compete for Other Peoples High Paying Keywords

If a keyword is on a list of high-paying keywords, that means that thousands of spammers are already competing for that keyword.

Don't be a follower. There is no money in being one of the crowd.

Do Compete for Your Own High Paying Keywords

Monitor your AdSense URL channels to determine which keywords are making you the most money. Compete for those keywords. Build more pages optimized for similar keywords. Get inbound links for those keywords. Spend your time and efforrt on the keywords which are making you money.

Increase Traffic

In the long run, the best way to increase your AdSense revenue is to increase traffic to your web site.

About the Author
Will Spencer is the author of The Internet Search Engines FAQ, Entrepreneur Support and Find A Job.

Sunday, January 08, 2006

Google AdSense Tips

Google AdSense Tips: "Tip #1: Don't put ads on empty pages.
When I reworked my site, I built a skeleton set of pages that had no content, just titles and some meta tags. I displayed ads on those pages, however. Although all you see are public service ads at first, the very act of displaying ads on a page causes the AdSense web crawler to quickly fetch that page for analysis. A page with good content will thus begin showing relevant paying ads fairly quickly.
If you don't have any content, then, Google will have to guess as what your page is about. It may guess wrong, and so the ads that it displays may not be relevant. You'll have to wait until Google re-crawls the site for the ads to correct themselves. Here is what Google had to say when I asked them about how often the AdSense crawler updates a site:
Thank you for taking the time to update your site. New ads will start appearing on your site the next time our crawler re-indexes your site. Unfortunately at this time, we are unable to control how often our crawlers index the content on your site.
Crawling is done automatically by our bots. When new pages are added to your website or introduced to the AdSense program, our crawlers will usually get to them within 30 minutes. If you make changes to a page, however, it may take up to 2 or 3 weeks before the changes are reflected in our index. Until we are able to crawl your web pages, you may notice public service ads, for which you will not receive any earnings.

It's better to flesh out the page before you start displaying ads on it. "

Saturday, January 07, 2006

The Biggest Mistake Affiliates Make With Google AdSense

It's very easy to make a lot of money with AdSense. I know it's easy because in a short space of time, I've managed to turn the sort of AdSense revenues that wouldn't keep me in candy into the kind of income that pays the mortgage on a large suburban house, makes the payments on a family car and does a whole lot more besides.

But that doesn't mean there aren't any number of mistakes that you can make when trying to increase your AdSense income - and any one of those mistakes can keep you earning candy money instead of earning the sort of cash that can pay for your home.
There is one mistake though that will totally destroy your chances of earning a decent AdSense income before you've even started.

That mistake is making your ad look like an ad.

No one wants to click on an ad. Your users don't come to your site looking for advertisements. They come looking for content and their first instinct is to ignore everything else. And they've grown better and better at doing just that. Today's Internet users know exactly what a banner ad looks like. They know what it means, where to expect it - and they know exactly how to ignore it. In fact most Internet users don't even see the banners at the top of the Web pages they're reading or the skyscrapers running up the side.

But when you first open an AdSense account, the format and layout of the ads you receive will have been designed to look just like ads. That's the default setting for AdSense - and that's the setting that you have to work hard to change.

That's where AdSense gets interesting. There are dozens of different strategies that smart AdSense account holders can use to stop their ads looking like ads - and make them look attractive to users. They include choosing the right formats for your ad, placing them in the most effective spots on the page, putting together the best combination of ad units, enhancing your site with the best keywords, selecting the most ideal colors for the font and the background, and a whole lot more besides.

The biggest AdSense mistake you can make is leaving your AdSense units looking like ads.
The second biggest mistake you can make is to not know the best strategies to change them.

Copyright © 2005 Joel Comm. All rights reserved Joel Comm is Dr. AdSense, an Internet entrepreneur who has been online for more than 20 years. Joel is co-creator of ClassicGames.com, now known as Yahoo! Games and is the author of the web's best-selling AdSense ebook, "Google AdSense Secrets (Or What Google Never Told You About Making Money With Adsense)".

Thursday, January 05, 2006

Where to place you Adsense

Did you know that Google actually tells you the best spots to place your adsense to get the best return.
You should consider the following things according to Google.
  • What is the user trying to accomplish by visiting my site?
  • What do they do when viewing a particular page?
  • Where is their attention likely to be focused?
  • How can I integrate ads into this area without getting in the users' way?
  • How can I keep the page looking clean, uncluttered and inviting?
Here are some tips for a forum:
http://adsense.blogspot.com/2005/10/six-adsense-optimization-tips-for.html

Here are some tips for a website:
https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html

Ofcourse if you want to know all the Adsense Secrets you should really check out Joel Comm's ebook "What Google never told you about making money with Adsense"

Get your free copy here