Tips for Using AdSense

About My history

It was in October of 2006 I had no idea on what I was doing. That day when I logged in to see how much I'd earned it was barely enough to buy me a coffee.

However, on that day I was thinking that those few dollars in earnings showed potential and I determined within myself to learn how best to use AdSense to grow that income. Almost everything I've learned since that day has been through trial and error.

It was a long process of testing and tracking results. You see, while there are a few good home works that seem to work on most sites, every website or blog that I've used AdSense on is different. Some things work well on some sites, but it is rare to find something that will work on every site. As a result I tend to experiment with my use of AdSense in these six ways:
1. Ad Position -All Most all AdSense publishers have seen the neat little heat map that AdSense has produced to show where ads work best on websites. In general it works fairly well and is a great place to start, but make sure that you experiment with new positions for ads and see what works best for your site.

Hints: Ads near contents have worked the best. I've also found ads at the end of content perform well. People get to the end of reading your article and then are looking for something to do or click -- an ad positioned there can work well.

2. Numbers of Ads - More ads earn more than less ads... don't they? Unfortunately it isn't always the case.

Test different combinations and numbers of ad units on your website or blog. There is usually a 'tipping point' where you hit a ceiling of how many ads your users will accept push it too far and you could hurt reader engagement, traffic, and in the long run your earnings. On the flip side of this, don't be afraid to have more than one or two ads on a page, particularly if you have long pages with lots of content.

3. Ad Design - The design is also important for more earning. You should place an appropriate design on a suitable place. For example Leaderboard should place below the headline,Wide Skyscrapper should place on right or left side of your blog or site.
I figured that the ads would do best if people noticed them so I went for the most crazy color scheme I could come up with. Over the years I began to experiment with different combinations of ads and found that more subtle or blended ads tended to work best for me. Having said that, you can sometimes blend too much, to the point that the ads become invisible to your reader. So test different colors and designs of ads to see which work best. Use the ad rotating tool that AdSense offer publishers to rotate different designs to work against ad blindness among regular readers.

4. Ad Size - AdSense offers a range of different ad sizes, so you can experiment with them all to see which works best. Hints: Some might think that the bigger the ad the better it performs. This is not always true.

For example, I found that the 'large rectangle' ad (336 x 280) didn't work as well for me as the smaller 'medium rectangle' ad (300 x 250). It turns out that more advertisers (at least those in my niche) prefer the medium rectangle ad as it's a more standard ad unit size than the larger one. Again, the key is to experiment and see what works best for your site and niche.
5. Ad Format - I have found that choosing image and text ads work better than just choosing text ads, but that's not the only choice we get as AdSense publishers.

AdSense also offer us to run link units, AdSense for search etc. I have found that each of these different formats will work differently from site to site. I had blogs where the link unit ads were the best performing units on the site while on other sites it didn't really perform at all. You'll never know unless you test it!

6. Which Content Converts? -
One of the best advances that AdSense has made in the last year has been the integration between it and Google Analytics. To be honest I'm still digging into the metrics that this opens up, but the insight that this gives has amazing potential to increase earnings.

By looking at this data you can see what type of content is converting and what is not. You can also see what type of traffic is converting and what is not. For example, I have found that search engine referrals are converting better than traffic from social media sites on one of my blogs. Knowing this is powerful as it tells you what type of ads to serve to what types of traffic.