Increase your Google Adsense Revenue

It can be pretty frustrating seeing a decent number of Adsense impressions being recorded for your blog or website but getting hardly any clicks on your ads, I was recently asked by a visitor to my blog how do you increase your Adsense revenue without shoving your ads in the face of your visitors.[ad name=”Adsense4″]

Well to be perfectly honest there is good news and bad news associated with that question, the bad news is that you can’t really expect to increase adsense revenue while trying to hide your ads away, you need to make a decision do you want adsense revenue from your blog or not?

If the answer is that you do then there are a few things you can do for Google Adsense optimization. The good news is that it is best to be subtle with your ads and blend them into your website, these are not secret formulas they are actually the techniques advised when I attended a Google seminar on this very subject and below you will find the general rules for increasing the chances of getting a better click through rate on your ads: –

• Adverts need to be above the fold and for those that don’t know the fold is the part of the website that is visible when you land on the page i.e. the part you do not need to scroll to.
• Large ads work best so select from the sizes 336×280, 300×250 or 160×600
• Make sure that you have enabled both text and images for your ad format
• Blend your ads into your page color scheme i.e. make the background color the same, use your standard font type and colors and make the link text the same as your website link text
• Avoid using borders, just let the ad blend in as a part of the general presentation
• the best position to place your primary ad is just above your page content
• the top left hand corner or under the nav bar are also good places, as is at the end of your content text just above the footer

Now the ‘blending in’ part may sound a little contradictory to saying don’t hide your ads away, but if you think about it then it really isn’t, the ads are placed in a prominent position but they are made to look like a general part of your website or blog when in a text format. The reason being that it seems people have tended to develop a natural aversion to clicking on ads, so placing your ads in a prominent position and blending them into your website gives the ad the best chance of being registered simply as contributing information. They are still identified as ads by Google, just in a more subtle way.

The image ads on the other hand are simply following research that has shown people like pictures, they are more appealing and make the presentation more interesting than large blocks of text.

It is also worth knowing that you can have 3 ads per page in addition to 3 links per page, links are simple text links that you can place throughout your pages to supplement your Google Adsense ads.

There is further option that should be mentioned and that is the use of the Google Adsense search facility, during the seminar it was stated that 80% of the people who can’t find what they are looking for on a site will leave, but of those leaving 50% will elect to use the search facility providing you with a further option for reaching them with your ads. So it is well worth the effort of including that search option and if you are really smart you will use your analytics data to find where the most common exit point is and place your search in a prominent position on that page.

You also need to stop and think about your visitor, why they are visiting your site and where they might focus their attention. Then try and make the ads compliment your site and add to the visitors experience, rather than get in the way and clutter up the page.

The best way in the end of finding out what works best, is to experiment with your ads in terms of colours, sizes and position to find out what really suits your visitors. Also don’t be afraid to change if you find after time that the click through rate drops off again, what might be good one period can change in the next.

A recommended way of testing ad effectiveness is to use the ‘channels’ option available through Adsense to track how many clicks you get on your ads. You can name a channel whatever you want and assign a page, or whole site for that matter, to that channel; make the channel name descriptive of what you are tracking and you will know exactly what configuration you are checking and more importantly how well it did. Just run the different configurations for a while and monitor the results, I would suggest you make the time periods the same so you are measuring like for like.

[ad name=”Adsense1″]

Taking a slightly different tack on how to increase your Adsense revenue there have been a few sites that have come to my attention recently that will provide you with a back link to your posts and also if you register your Adsense ID with them will give you a share of the Adsense revenue they make. One of these is She Told Me and they give you 100% from an ad placed in a prominent position next to your article. I have begun to see regular contributions from She Told Me since I registered with them and also from Add Blog URL which is another site that delivers a similar promise and again I am seeing regular contributions to my Adsense revenue.

To track the revenue from another site all you have to do is add their URL channel to your Adsense account in ‘Adsense set up’ under ‘channels’.