- 1. Types of adsense units to use.
- 2. Positioning of your adsense units.
- 3. Colour choices for your adsense units.
- 4. Time and patience
Types of Adsense Units to Use
Most people recommend using the large rectangles, 300*250 and 336*280, and usually with 2 placed next to each other. I tried this but for my particular website they never really fit into the design of the webpage. It always looked like I was making a website just for advertising. My own personnal choices have always been a tall skyscraper 160*600, leaderboard 728*90 and the banner 468*60. I know I get a lower CTR than most other websites using the rectangles but for me the adsense was only ever designed to pay for the hosting and a little pocketmoney. A lot of people also talk about using link units. These are not real advertisements but rather suggestions that google displays. By clicking on one of the single word links you are then taken to a real google search for that term. I tried one of these a little while ago and placed it directly under my website title bar and made it look like part of the website navigation. Indeed I did get a very large amount of people clicking on that link unit, and also a greater CTR than any other of my adsense units, unfortunately each click amounted to 1 pence. Needless to say that was taken away very quickly.
Positioning of Yours Adsense Units
I`m sure that if you are looking for information on adsense units you have probably seen the heat map already. Effectively anything at the top and left of your website gets looked at more often as this is traditionally where titles and links to information have been placed since the birth of the internet. By placing adsense units in these areas your visitors are more likely to see an advert and click on it. Again this never really worked with my website so usually I place my skyscraper on the right next to the scroll bar. I`m sure that I get accidental clicks there but that is just unfortunate for the advertiser. I have read previously that upto 25% of all adsense clicks are through mis-clicks. I also place either a wide banner above the main body of the webpage or a small banner after the information displayed to catch a few of the people who read to the end of each page. These seem to be a good rule of thumb that many people recommend. They work for me and most of my clicks seem to be evenly distributed between my 3 adsense units. One of the ways that I use my units though is in dynamically generated webpages so I can program my php scripts to place my units in different positions to suit different topics and layouts. When you have over 100000 webpages, dynamically generated is the only way I can do this.
Colour Choices for Your Adsense Units
Firstly your background and border should be the same colour as your webpage background. Your adsense titles should be coloured with 000088 as this is very similar to a normal link colour but the darker aspect seems to draw people to clicking more often. This colour has given me an increase of about 40% on my CTR. The url should be a very light grey if you have a white page. You are not allowed to make the url invisible but you can make it pale. The main text in the advert should be the same colour as your main text for your webpage. Obviously what you are trying to achieve is to make your adsense adverts look the same as your webpage. In other words you are trying to fool your visitors into clicking on adverts. Before you are worried that you might be breaking google terms and conditions fear not. They describe these tips on their own website.
Time and Patience
Any alteration you make will take time for you to fully see any changes to CTR. If you have a very low visitor count say below 100 visitors a day you might never be able to tell if your alterations have done anything. I have around 1800 visitors a day and it still takes over a week for me to see if I have been able to increase the CTR. The other factor about increasing your adsense earnings is time and the age of your website. It has taken me 6 years to get to this volume of visitors as I am in a fairly competitive topic but my earnings are increasing naturally on their own. I have tripled my earnings in the last 2 years so if I can continue that in another 2 years I`ll be very happy. You have to realise that not all websites will make money but with time and effort you should see some return. However, in any other job for the work I have done to my website I would expect to have earn around £20,000 instead of the considerably lower value from adsense. The only advantage with the adsense is it should be earning for the rest of my life.
To summize
I have tried many different configurations with my own adsense units but I always come back to the same ones that I have now. I`m happy with the money I get, and I`m happy to still keep playing around with the adsense units. If you feel the same way then you are looking at adsense in the right way. To get rich from adsense alone you need to be in the top 10000 websites in the world. The rest of us must be happy with pocket money.
