>> 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 SiteSell's SBI! forums. When
I read it originally, it made sense and I decided to
goive 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 coor 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 Adlinks. 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 Adlinks 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 Adlinks alongside
regular Adsense ads, it's clear that the return on
Adlinks 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
Adlink 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 Adlink click. Now, this reasoning is
speculative, but it does make perfect sense in the light
of my Adlinks 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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