How to increase Targeted Traffic

After your created your website (or blog) and optimized your Adsense, the next and perhaps the most important thing is to attract targeted traffic. Targeted traffic means visitors who come to your site because of genuine interest in the content you provide, not merely by accident. Such kind of visitors will probably search further and are more likely to click on your ads.

So you need to make your site visible to the people who are looking for the content you provide. Some of the common ways people find your site are:

• By search by keywords on search engines such as Google and Yahoo: If you optimized your site properly, Search Engine Traffic can be fairly targeted and can produce good value for Adsense publishers. As they are searching for your content, these visitors can spend time on your site and explore further by clicking on related Ads.

• Links on similar sites: If you manage to have your site linked from other websites that provide similar content as that of yours, these links can directly produce a highly targeted traffic. More over such links can increase your Page Rank, and increase the sites popularity on search results. So this helps in two ways.

Things to do for increasing Traffic:

So you should be doing the following to have your site visible to the users.

• Keyword Optimization: Keyword optimization is an important task you have to do to make your content searchable for your keywords on search engines.

• Building Links with similar sites: More people are likely to find you more easily on other sites and such links can increase your Page Rank, and increase the sites popularity on search results. So this helps in two ways.

Some techniques to get Targeted Traffic:

Not only that you have to get visitors to your site, you should also have to keep them there if you want some clicks.

• Provide good, relevant content that keeps your visitor interested. Maintaining high targeted traffic means not adding just anything to your web site, but focus on your particular niche of interest. Update frequently, give readers reasons to come back.

• Promoting your site by means of a Pay-Per-Click is probably the most effective way to increase targeted traffic. Visitors coming from PPC Ads are usually highly targeted. But this must be done very carfully and scientifically. You should not pay more per click to Google than a visitor is worth.

• Focus on clean and appealing site design. You should organize your content and make is easy for users to find the content they need. This is a great way to increase the number of impressions.

• One other good way is to write articles for Article Sites such as ArticleCity, eZineArticles etc. This is a good way to get one-way links to your site.

• Spread the word about your site. Participate in related groups and forums. Show to the community that you are indeed an expert in the niche of your site. This gives credibility.
  

Adsense Ad Color Optimization

To make money with Adsense, one of the widly agreed recommendation for Adsense Ad Color Optimization, is to make use of those colors that make your look like an integral part of your content. This is done by blending the ads by using the same colors that exist on your website. For more information, please visit Making Money Online.

There are three things you need keep in mind to do this:

• Make the background color and the border color of the ad to match with the background color of the webpage.

• Make the color of the link to match with the color of the links on your webpage.

• Make the color of the ad description (i.e the ad text) and the ad url to match with the text color.

I generally only make three exceptions to this:

• I make the actual ad link darker than the other links on the page but keep it in a similar color palette. When a visitor is finished with the page they are on and are looking for someone else to go they tend to see darker colors before lighter ones. I believe Google makes the links bold for the same reason - intensity draws the eye.

• I use the standard internet blue link. Although this isn't as widespread as it once was, internet users still often associate the standard blue color with being a link.

• I make the advertiser url a very pale shade of grey. It's still visible as it must be to conform to Google's policies but the link and the text draw the visitors attention and the ads appear more like internal links than Adsense ads. The success of this modification will often depend on the market your site is targetting. For example, webmasters know what Adsense ads are and so this change will have little impact. If your site targets people who are less familiar with the internet making the ads appear more like an internal link (ie simply a link and a description of what you'll find when you click on it) can increase your ctr.

The reason blending works better than colors that draw attention to the ads is that it's not a color that is going to make someone click on an ad - even if it's their favorite color!

Humans respond to words or better put still the meaning of words - and it will be the word or combination or words which your visitor connects to in the ad. This is why they will click on one rather than another.

Attention grabbing colors will only serve to put a barrier between your visitor and the words in the ad. More people may see them but less will click on them and Adsense is pay per click, not pay per view!

Google Adsense Products

Google offers 3 various Adsense products that can be used or promoted to monitise a website. Lets us examine these products.

Adsense for Content

The most common and most usful of all Adsense products for the content sites. These are the ads that you see at the right side of Google Seach results and on various other Adsense sites. These Ads are relavent to the content of your website and when ever the visitors clicks on one of these you will earn revenue. For more information read our article "Adsense Ad Formats"

Adsense For Search

Adsense for Search allows you, the publisher, to place Google search box on your site. This allows your visitors to search from the Google indexed pages of your website or from the Web using the database of Google's search engine. For every search by your user, Google dispalys ads related to that search (just like on the Google site) and you earn revenue when your users click on those ads.

Referral Products

These are non-contextual products that Google allows you to promote and rewards you for such promotion. In this Google offers products like "Google Adsense Subscription", "Google Adwords Subscription", "Fire Fox browser with Google home page", "Good Picasa Web Album" etc. When a user downloads and installs one of these Google pays you a fixed commission.

How to increase Adsense Click Through Rate (CTR)

Maximizing the CTR means a lot to a publisher who wants to make money with Adsense.

Making maximum possible money with Adsense depends on three factors:

• Maximizing your CTR (Click through rate)

• Maximizing the targeted traffic

• Maximizing the pay per each click.

The techniques you follow to maximize your CTR can not only increase the user responsiveness but also increases the targeted traffic.

Let's see what Google AdSense Engineers has to say about Adsense CTR:

"Due to the dynamic nature of Google AdSense, fluctuations in your revenue will occur. Your earnings will depend on a number of factors, including the types of ads being served to your pages, the cost per click or cost per impression of these ads, and your users' click through selections. Regarding ad placement - the best ad format varies from page to page. We've observed that, in general, wider ads perform better because of their reader-friendly format. We strongly recommend putting your users first when deciding on ad placement. Think about their behavior on different pages, and what will be most useful and visible to them. You'll find that the most optimal ad position isn't always what you expect on certain pages."

What should you do to increase Adsense CTR?

Webmasters have very diverse views on how to increase CTR. It largely depends upon the the quality of its content, keywords you are targeting, design and layout of your website, placement of AdSense ads, page optimization and various other factors. Generally, AdSense blocks wrapped between the quality content works the best. For the websites having poor quality content, placing the Ads before the start of the content works best.

• Quality Comtent: If you develop a poor quality content website, even if you have high CTR and clicks, you will be getting low priced ads and also nobody will like to add your url to their favorites. But if you have quality content, that keeps the visitors glued, even if you get a little low CTR (not that you will), but you will be getting high priced ads and regular visitors, too. So the bottom is concentrate on providing quality content that provides value to your visitors. For Adsense, quality content is the king.

• Proper Ad Positioning: Proper positioning of ads on your website has direct impact on your CTR. Change the location of the ads and watch changes in your CTR regularly. Try to locate the area of the page where the focus of the visitor can be. Generally, AdSense ads near the quality content or other crucial areas like navigation bar tend to perform better. But it really depends upon the keywords you are targeting, and the traffic you have.

• Right Ad Formats: As the Google engineers say, more user friendly ads, more widespread tend to do better than towers and others. But you have to decide what work best for you based on your site layout, design etc.

• Right Ad Colors: The colors you use for your Adsense Ad Units also affects the CTR. As a rule you have to use those color that will make the Ads look like an integral part of your content. Blend in colors are often recommended.

Tweak and Experiment

Experiment and experiment a lot, till you are satisfied with the tweaks you have done to achieve highest CTR. Track your page performance by making channels of ads in your AdSense Control Panel and experiment till you are satisfied with your CTR. Though, each such experiment will make you loose money for a day or two, as Google may take time to adjust with new changes, but it will be beneficial in long run.

KeywordCountry helps AdSense webmasters in increasing their AdSense revenue. KeywordCountry is a library of 2.83 million Top paying keywords containing thousands of niche keywords

Tips for making money with Adsense

Google Adsense is one of the best ways to monetize the niche content for Webmaster and online content publishers. And to create an Adsense site, all you have to do is have a free Google Adsense Account, a website or a blog (you can use Blogger or Wordpress for free blogs), and some interesting content, of course. Once you get your site up and running, the Adsense ads will be targeted to your content.

Therefore, those looking for your content will come by, read your articles, and have a high probability of being interested in the targeted ads. Every time someone clicks an ad, you get paid.

Let's look at seven tips for creating Adsense sites that create money.

1: Keyword Density

Before you place ads on your site, be sure your keyword density is good. You will want to be sure that the right kinds of ads are placed on your site. A free way to determine what the ads will look like on your site is to go to http://www.resultsgenerator.com/adsense/ and type in your keywords. You will then be able to see exactly what ads would show on your site.

If you don't like what you see, then you know that you need to make changes to your keywords. You can get keyword suggestions from Results Generator from Overture or from the free trial version of Word Tracker.

2: Niche and Focused Content

Not only will the ads be based on your keywords, but they will also be based on your content. You definitely want your keywords and your content to match as closely as possible. See How to build a Niche Site for more info.

3: Frequent Content Updates

The more information you have the better. Why? Because the more content you have, the more visitors you get. Many people suggest that you write a new article every day since no one wants to come back to your site to find the same old messages.

4: Choose the right Format

Adsense allows you to choose many different ad formats. Research has shown that wider ads are more successful. The top three formats are:

• 336x280 large rectangle
• 300x250 medium rectangle
• 160x600 wide skyscraper

Additionally, the 468x15 horizontal ad link under the navigation bar is also performs well in some cases..

5: Choose right Colors

You have the option to create a Google Adsense ad in any color of your choice. The best thing to do is to make your ad blend well with your site color scheme. You should make the border color and the background color the same color as your web site. You will want your text color to either be black or the color of your main content.

When creating your Google Adsense ads it is recommended to use the color scheme and style of your website so that the ads blend in well. Ads without background color and borders perform better than ads within borders with background color. See Ad Color Optimization for more info

6: Choose the right placement

It is well known that visitors to a website scan the site to determine if it is worth reading. You definitely want them to see and scan your AdSense ads. Therefore, the best place to put them is in the top left part of your page or directly under your headlines.

7: Increase Number of Ad Units

Adsense allows you to use up to three Adsense units on a page, two Adsense search boxes, and two units of ad links. Using all that you can increases the chances of earning money. In addition you can use video ads and referral ads.

Keep these seven tips in mind when creating your Adsense site and you will find that your click-through rates increase, thus increasing your money making potential.

How to Qualify for using Google Adsense?

Qualifying for Google Adsense represent an interesting matter, as the demands for acceptance a site are mostly common knowledge and are nothing extraordinary.

To qualify for using Google Adsense in your website all you need is a decent website with atleast 10 to 15 web pages with qualifying content. Google specifies a list of topics for which they won't server Ads. Other than that there is no strict conditions such as how big the site should be and how much traffic should it attract. However a webmaster has to first understand Google's Terms of Service, in which Google outlines the Dos and Don'ts of using Adsense on your web site.

The webmaster need to be very careful before applying to Adsense and make sure that his website or blog indeed qualifies for Google Adsense. It is very difficult and frustrating to get into the program or reapply to the program, if you are once rejected. So here we outline some of the things you need to keep in mind before approching Google for Adsense (and to get success out of it, ofcourse).

Content

You need to keep in mind that Google Adsense is there primarily for content-based sites. Websites that focus on pure product sales or only for Ads kinds of sites may not be proper for Adsense. Moreover, all you are promoting is your own product(s), then hosting Adsense might work against you, as the Ads that show up will be direct competitors. So it makes no sense in such cases. If you are building content that is usful for general website visitors, or content focussed on specific topic (niche sites) then you will have good chance of succeding with Adsense.

Forums & Blogs

Some blogs or forums may not be accepted. Still, if the forum or blog is information-rich then they are not only accepted, but may work really well with AdSense for their owners.

Google started with not accepting this type of sites. But it turned out that, in some cases, they represent exactly what users are looking for: Honest, useful, unbiased information, where anybody can express just what they truly think, and right when they feel the need to do it. On condition they are not artificially created for other purpose than that of letting their users interact in the world of ideas and benefit from each other's experience and knowledge.

Suggested blog such as Blogger.com and Wordpress.com

Image Galleries

Image sites may host AdSense if the images are accompanied by as little as some brief explanatory lines, relevant for the Mediabot, the Googles Media crawler. But these may not yield good results compared to content sites.

Chat Sites

These are not suitable for Google Adsense and thay may not even allow these kind of small talk sites.

How to build website for Adsense?

To create your own website to make money with Adsense you need to: Buy a Domain name. Take Hosting Account. Build the website content. Apply for Adsense. Integrate Adsense code into your website content. First of all, you need a domain name to put your website on. First this you need to buy a domain name that describes the topic you are building your website for from any of the domain registrars such as GoDaddy. Domain names usually costs you less than $10 for a full year. Once you have a domain name, you need a place on the web to put your content. For this you need to buy a web site hosting service. For this you tipically spend around $6 to $8 per month. Once you have the hosting, you then have to actually build the content and upload the content to the hosting server. The content you thus uploaded to the hosting server can then be viewed on web using your domain name. To build content, you should either know HTML (and a web programming language such as ASP or PHP for dynamic sites) or if know nothing about web languages you may buy a website building tool such as XSitePro. XSitePro is a very good content development tool that has made the process of building a website so easy and is streaks ahead of all the other tools on the market. Within two to three hours you will have worked your way through the tutorial and will be in the position to build your own successful money vehicle. It's literally built to facilitate what this website is talking about and even has an insertion facility for Adsense. You then have to learn about the basics of how to use Adsense in your site. For the complete newbie to Adsense, AdsenseHowTo.net has it's limitations as it doesn't go into the very basic stuff of how to get the code, how you change the variables etc. The site focuses on what actually makes money with Adsense and this is down to building the right websites, integrating Adsense correctly and bringing traffic to that website. Therefore you are going to need another source so that you can get to grips with the basics. There are two that I would recommend: (i) The Google Adsense Help Center - From the people who made the program this is a good tour de force of Adsense and how to use it. They also have some good "heat maps" which give you ad placement ideas depending on the type of website you are building. (ii) Adsense Forums - Digital Point and Webmaster World both have good Adsense forums if you're the type that can happily sit and sift through thousands of posts.

Adsense: Why Bloggers Don’t Get It

In doing the research for my series of Adsense articles and web business, two common ideas kept getting repeated:

• My Adsense ads are horrible, they only pay out (insert low dollar figure here)
• My Adsense CTR is horrible, I only get a (insert extremely low CTR here)

To be fair these comments weren’t coming just from bloggers, but bloggers did make up an overwhelmingly large percentage. I think this stems from a misconception on the part of the bloggers that they are entitled to high payout and CTR. I’d like to spend a little time to share my feelings on this subject. In the early days a blog may just have been an online diary or journal, but like the days of the Nehru jackets, they are gone. What a blog is now is Chronologically Structured Content Management System, as opposed to the classic web hierarchical structured implementation. Let’s be clear, you can still use a blog as your online diary or journal, but nowdays it’s just as likely to be used as a commercial blog. Yes, I did just say commercial blog, and no the earth didn’t open under my feet and swallow me whole for saying it. Let’s take some time to look at a your typical blog.

You may post about commercial related subjects like your job, what you like to buy, or even your hobbies. However these posts are all about your life, they are no more commercially viable or attractive than say Aunt Millie’s Holiday Newsletter. Yes we all have an Aunt Millie in our family, every year she sends out a finely crafted newsletter in a coordinating envelope she ordered from paperdirect.com telling us all about her family. We learn how hard her husband works, how many activities her kids are in and how good they are at them. We also read the details of how her scrapbooking business hasn’t taken off yet, but she promises to spend more time on it right after New Years. So if you were a business owner would you want to advertise anywhere on Aunt Millie’s Newsletter? Then why would a business want to pay you top dollar to advertise on your blog? What’s that, you say your blog gets (insert a high number here) of readers per day, surely that has to be worth something? Well did you know Aunt Millie sends out over 800 copies of her holiday newsletter to 17 countries, on 4 continents? Now before you get all fired up about it, understand that I don’t have a problem with you having a personal blog or sharing it with the public. However your expectation that it has value outside of your family/friends/community, is a serious misconception.

So what exactly is a commercially viable blog? Don’t think of it as publishing a blog, think of it as publishing an online magazine. You need to start out with good content or articles about a small area or niche topic. You will need lots of content, and unless you are well known, don’t expect much to happen until you’ve written at least 100 and more likely over 200 articles. Yes you will have to devote some time and effort to publicizing and marketing it as well. Once you’ve got a significant focused reader base, that’s the time to slowly ad in the advertising. Now here’s the one that causes lots of people to freak out. BE PREPARED TO GIVE UP SOME PRIME SCREEN REAL ESTATE, IN THE CENTER, ABOVE THE FOLD, TO ADVERTISING. If you’ve worked with print media at all you will know the middle of the right hand page is the most desirable spot inside of a magazine (excluding the cover pages). I’ve sat through meetings where people have said ” … you know we need more right hand pages …”. If you want people to click on your ads, you will need put them where they can see them, above the fold in the center of the screen, in a prominent location. Yes I can almost here the keys typing for the flame comments and emails now. Before you hit that send button though, ask yourself this, are you building a space sough after by advertisers, or are you working on Aunt Millie’s Newsletter? No I don’t think your pages should be filled with ads, in fact quite the opposite, there should always be more content than advertising, ALWAYS! Web Business is your main target.

Next thing, lose the fancy graphics and eye-candy from your template. Yes I know you may have paid for a fancy template, maybe you had your niece who’s a graphic artist design something for you, or you really like the way that spinning flaming platypus looks in your page header. Here’s the thing, it’s detracting from your content. Graphics should be simple, understated, and support the content, not overpower or compete with it. Now before some art student wearing a beret, corduroy jacket with elbow patches, and smoking a pipe or French cigarette, writes and calls me a Philistine, stop and think. Are you designing a commercially attractive and viable space, or are you designing an intricate macrame border for Aunt Millie’s Newsletter? Remember keep it simple and to the point.

Yes I know you feel like I just ripped off the band-aid, and now it hurts. Sorry but someone had to do it. I know some of you are still out there reading saying ‘but can’t I still have this … do we have to get rid of this … I really like that …’. Well I’m not your second grade teacher who’s going to tell you everything’s all right, that you don’t have to change a thing, and put a scooby-doo sticker on your shirt to make you feel better. If you want a blog that makes you more money than you spend at Starbucks every Tuesday, you will need to get serious about what you’re doing.

If none of this sounds incredibly fun, and really sounds pretty close to actual work, here’s the way I see it, getting an Adsense check for $5 is fun, getting an Adsense check for $500 or $5000 is work as part of web business.

Disclaimers:
I don’t actually have an Aunt Millie, she’s a fictional character. But like you, I do have relatives who send out holiday newsletters.

Yes I know the minimum Adsense payment is $100, so you never could get a $5 check, but I was just making a point, mmkay? Adsense as Web Business Main Target.

Adsense Tools

Adsense Script Tools

These are the tiny little programs you install on your server (blech!) or locally on your machine that help you analyze your adsense clicks, CTR and earnings. Yeah.!! Web business like adsense also have some great tools. Some of them are easy, some of them are difficult, and some of them help you make pretty graphs. To be honest none of them are worth recommending. You could do just as good a job by setting up your channels properly and dumping a CSV file into excel. If someone has a specific one or wants to send me a review copy of thier software, I will look at it. DO NOT send me anything that has to be installed on a server. I run multiple websites on multiple hosting companies, so I don’t need something that requires more maintenance thank you very much.

Adsense Preview Tools

The Adsense Sandbox comes via Digital Point. You put in a URL and it lets you preview what ads are most likely to appear on a URL. Pretty handy IMHO.

Adsense Tracking

While not set up to be an Adsense tracking tool per se, the free log analyzer from AddFreeStats is actually pretty good. You put a small graphic tracking bug on the bottom of each of your pages and it gives you standard logging reports. You can also activate adsense tracking to find out what ads are being clicked on what pages. Combine this with an excel spreadsheet and channels and you are good to go. You can upgrade to a paid version and get an invisible tracking bug. TIP: Lock down your stats under a password, I’m fascinated how many people leave that open.

Adsense in Action

Probably one of the best things you can do to increase your adsense earnings is to go and look how other people are doing things. The adsense case studies are one place. While these are Google approved you really don’t have an idea how successful they are. So you’d be much better off finding someone you know is in the UPS Club. Jason Calacanis who runs Weblogs Inc is on a quest to make 1 Million dollars a year from Adsense. While I do give Jason a hard time sometimes, I do actually admire what he’s built, and think there are some very valuable lessons to be learned from looking at the websites owns. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger also has two sites I really like the Digital Camera Review and Camera Phone Review. Don’t be a wanker and copy exactly what they’ve done, it’s bad form. Instead look at them, learn from them, and use it as inspiration. Web Business is great.

Build an Empire?

When you’re deciding to become a website publisher as part as web business program you will fall into one of two broad categories:

• Publish 100 websites that each earn $1 a day profit
• Publish 1 website that earns $100 a day profit

The reality of it is, most people end up somewhere in between. Having 100 websites leaves you with maintenance, management and content issues. Having one website leaves you open to all sort of fluctuations (search engines algorithm’s, market trends, etc). You can adapt your plan on the way, but you’ll have an easier time if you start out going in the direction of where you want to end up.

General or Niche

You can build your website or web business around general topics or niche ones. Generally speaking niche websites work better with adsense. First off the ad targeting is much better. Secondly as you have a narrow focus your writing naturally becomes more expert in nature. Hopefully this makes you more authority in your field.

If this is your first try at building an adsense website (web business), make it about something you enjoy. It will make the process much easier and less painful to accomplish. You should however make sure that your topic has enough of an ad inventory and the payout is at a level you are comfortable with. You may love medieval folk dancing, but the pool of advertisers for that subject is very small (in fact it’s currently zero).

Once you’ve gotten the hang of how Adsense works on a website, you are going to want to dabble in some high paying keywords, you may even be tempted to buy a high paying keyword list. This does come with some dangers. First off the level of fraud is much higher on the big money terms. Secondly there is a distortion of the supply and demand relationship for these terms. Everyone wants ads on their website that make $35 or more a click, however the number of advertisers who are willing to pay that much is pretty limited. Additionally the competition for that traffic is going to be stiff. So, don’t try to run with the big dogs if you can’t keep up. If you have to ask if you’re a big dog, then chances are, you’re not. I have used a high dollar keywords report from cashkeywords.com and was pleased with my results (see cash keywords free offer recap).

New Sites, Files and Maintenance

When you’re building a new site don’t put adsense on it until it’s finished. In fact I’d go even farther and say don’t put adsense on it until you have built inbound links and started getting traffic. If you put up a website with “lorem ipsum” dummy or placeholder text, your adsense ads will almost certainly be off topic. This is often true for new files on existing websites, especially if the topic is new or different. It may take days or weeks for google’s media bot to come back to your page and get the ads properly targeted. TIP: If you start getting lots of traffic from a variety of IP’s you will speed this process up dramatically.

I like to build my sites using include files. I put the header, footer and navigation in common files. It makes it much easier to maintain and manage. I also like to put my adsense code in include files. If I want/need to change my adsense code, it’s only one file I have to work with. TIP: I also use programming to turn the adsense on or off. I can change one global variable to true or false and my adsense ads will appear or disappear.Web Business

Managing URL’s and channels

Adsense channels is one area where it’s really easy to go overboard with stats. You can set up URL channels to compare how one website is doing to another. You can also set up sub channels for each URL. If you wanted to you do something channels like this:

• domain1.com - 728 banner
• domain1.com - 336 block
• domain1.com - text link
• domain2.com - 728 banner
• domain2.com - image banner
• domain2.com - 336 block
• domain3.com - 300 block

While this is great for testing and knowing who clicks where and why, it makes your reporting a little wonky. Your total number will always be correct but when you look at your reports with a channel break down things will get displayed multiple times and not add up to correct total. Makes things pretty confusing, so decide if you really need/want that level of reporting detail. TIP: At the very least you want to know what URL is generating the income so be sure to enter distinct URL channels.

Site Design and Integration

Once you know you are going to put adsense on your website you’re going to have to consider where to put it. If this is new site it’s easier, if it’s an existing site it’s more difficult. While there are some people who will be able to do it, in most cases I’d say if you just slap the adsense code in, you’ll end up with a frankensite monster (props to Tedster of WMW for the buzzword). While every website is different, Google has published some heat maps showing the optimal locations. No surprise that the best spots are middle of the page and left hand side. Now I’ve done really well by placing it on the right, but you should know why you’re doing it that way before hand, and be prepared to change it if it doesn’t work out.

Google has also has published a list of the highest performing ad sizes:

• 336×280 large rectangle
• 300×250 inline rectangle
• 160×600 wide skyscraper

From the sites that I run, I do really well with the 336 rectangle and 160 skyscraper. My next best performing ad size is the 728 leaderboard, I don’t really use the 300 inline rectangle too often. So really it depends on how well you integrate these into your site. Placement can have a dramatic effect on performance. TIP: When working on a new site or new layout you may want to give each location it’s own channel for a little while until you understand the users behavior.

Another ‘trick’ that can increase your CTR is by blending your adsense into your body copy. For example if your body copy is black, remove the adsense border and make the title, text, and URL black.TIP: Try changing all of your page hyperlinks to a high contrast color (like dark red or a bold blue) then change the adsense title to the same color.

The one area where I’ve found blended ads don’t perform as well is forums, especially ones with a high volume of repeat members. Regular visitors develop banner blindness pretty quickly. One ‘trick’ to keep the ads from being ignored is to randomize the color and even the placement. As with any of the decisions about location, placement and color it’s a trade off. How much do you emphasize the ads without annoying your visitors. Remember it’s better to have a 1% CTR with 500 regular visitors as opposed to a 5% CTR with 50 visitors. TIP: For forums try placing the adsense ads directly above or below the the first forum thread.

Using Images

Using Images

One of the latest ’secrets’ to make the rounds is using images placed directly above or below an adsense leaderboard. This has been used for a while but came out in a digital point forum thread where a member talked about quadrupling their CTR. Basically you set up the adsense code in a table with four images that line up directly with the ads. Whether or not this is deceptive is fuzzy and very subjective. Obviously four blinking arrows would be ‘enticing people to click’ and be against the adsense TOS. However placing pictures of 4 laptops over laptops ads isn’t, so use your best judgment here and look at it from the advertiser or Google’s perspective. If you have a question as to your implementation being ‘over the line’ write to adsense and ask them to take a look.

As far as using the images, I’ve done it and can tell you it definitely works. You get the best results when the images ‘complete the story the ads are telling’. For example if you have ads about apple pies, use pictures of freshly baked apple pies, instead of granny smith, Macintosh, pink lady, and braeburn apples. TIP: Don’t limit yourself to using images only on that size ad unit, it works just as well with the other sizes, like the 336 rectangle.

Multiple Ad Units

Another way to increase ad revenue is to use multiple ad units. According to Google’s TOS you are allowed to post up to three ad units per page. Similar to standard search results the highest paying ad units will be served first and the lowest being served last. If there is enough of an ad inventory, place all three ad units. However you should pay attention to the payouts. Current assumption is you get 60% of the revenue (on a $0.05 click you get $0.03). So if a click from the third ad unit is only paying between 3 to 5 cents you may want to omit it from your page. This is one are where giving your ad units channels does have value. If one ad unit is getting a higher percentage of click throughs you’ll want to make sure the highest paying ads are being served there. TIP:Use CSS positioning to get your highest paying ads serving in the location with the highest CTR.

PPC Arbitrage

This is a dicey subject so I’m going to steer clear of precise examples. Basically you bid on low volume uber niche terms at a very low cost. You set up landing page that contains high payout ads for the related general topic. You are looking for terms with a large gap between the price you are bidding on adwords and the price you are getting on Adsense. If you pay $0.10 a click and get $1.00 a click you make $0.90 each click. To get your adsense ad approved you will need to ‘add some value’ along the way. You can make a killing or get taken to the cleaners with this one, so make sure you know what you are doing before you try it.

Have any other adsense tips, tricks or secrets? Drop me an email and let me know, I’ll give you credit.

Added
728 leaderboard works very well if it is just above the end of the
“above the fold” area on what would be considered your viewers average
resolution/browser window size if there are few other enticing links
above the fold. Makes for an interesting layout but if you’re building
a site for AdSense it may be worth it. We consistently receive very
high CTRs from doing this.

Try to build sites that allow you to quickly try any and all of
those locations outlined in the heatmap guide or at least allow you a
wide degree of freedom to easily change ad/content locations.

Affiliate Sites

Placing Adsense on affiliate sites is tricky. Are you giving up a $10, $20, or $30 sale for a $1 click? This is something you have to test on your own to figure out. If you aren’t converting now it’s definitely worth a try. I like to use adsense on my article pages. For example let’s say you had an affiliate website where you sold shoes. You’re going to need some related articles to ‘flesh out’ the site. Things like ‘getting a shoe shine’ or ‘finding a shoe repair shop’ these are excellent spots for adsense. While you won’t get rich, they will usually provide a small steady income and cover things like hosting costs.TIP: If you find you have pages getting more than 50 clicks per month add more pages about this topic, and link the pages together. Mine you logs for the search terms used.

Adsense in RSS

With the growth of blogs and RSS feeds you’re starting to see adsense included in the feeds now. IMHO this doesn’t work, and here’s why:

• You only get to place one ad unit.
• You have no control over finding the ’sweet spot’ for the ad unit.
• The ads are usually poorly targeted (this is getting better).
• People develop ‘banner blindness’.

I know people like being able to read full postings in their feed reader, and there are at least a dozen other reasons for full posts from pleasing your users to mobile offline computing, all of which are completely valid. However if your website depends on generating adsense revenue to survive, then bring them to the site and show them the ads there.