Site Design and Integration

Birth Announcement: It’s A Business!

Congratulations you’ve just given birth to a brand new bouncing baby, your web business. You’ve spent agonizing months or years waiting for this very moment. You’re beaming with pride and you can’t wait to nurture your new baby into a healthy, mature and successful web business. But first, what are you going to name your new baby? You want something that reflects your own personality while representing your business properly.

I came across some great advice to consider when initially naming your new web business. Consider these Five Tips For Naming Your Business from Web Business | Adsense Tips author Xell™. Just like with a living and breathing human baby, the name is an important decision. It’s pretty much permanent and is the first impression of your web business that customers will get. So go ahead and choose your baby’s name wisely. Soon you’ll be able to show off your labor of love to everyone around.

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.

Web Business | Adsense

Birth Announcement: It’s A Business!