AdSense Optimization -Tips To Make More Money With Google Adsense
March 23, 2009 by Erich Mosier
Filed under Adsense Secrets
The most important thing is that you want your ads to be where they are looking. How do you know where your readers are looking? In short, you don’t. But we can make some educated guesses and use some tools to help us find out.
Heatmaps -The best places to put your ads
So what is a heat map? A heat map is a way to show the most likely places that people click on ads. Using data that Google gathers from all of the sites show their ads, they have been able to develop a map show the best places for your ads.
What the map shows is that the strongest performing ads are right in the middle (dark orange), while the weakest performing ads are shown in yellow. One thing you should notice is that the majority of the best performing ads are located above the fold. Also ads that are placed close to rich content (images, videos, etc.) and navigation tend to do better.
Keep in mind that this is just a recommendation, and does not guarantee that these places will improve your CTR ( click through rate). You will need to decide based on the layout of your site and other factors where the best place to put your ads is.
Usability Testing - Know where your readers are clicking
Similar to the concept of a heatmap, but these are direectly tested on your website to see where people are clicking.
There is a company name Crazy Egg that you can set up an account with and track your sites. As of this writing, their plans range from $9 per month to $99 per month depending on how many visits and how many pages you want to track.
Make sure they see it - Always have an ad unit showing above the fold
It’s a well-known fact that the majority of people that visit websites spend their time above the fold. What this means is that most of what they spend their time looking at is what they first see when a site comes up. Anything that they have to scroll to see is not considered above the fold. Unfortunately, what is considered above the fold varies depending on the individual’s screen resolution of their monitor.
So while a person with a 17 inch monitor with resolution set to 800 x 600 will see something like this:
A person with a 22 inch widescreen monitor with a resolution set to 1680 x 1050 will see something like this:
So it’s important to keep in mind that just because what you are seeing on the screen when you are setting up your site, is not necessarily what everybody will see. Most people will assume the lowest common denominator (800 x 600) and make sure everything is above that. But again, the choice is up to you and it will depend on how your site is laid out.
Here is a handy free tool that will let you test your site on various size screens:
Tips and Tricks - Sneaky but useful
- Put an image close to your ad unit. People will always look at an image on a page, no matter what the text is on the page.
- You can also put it next to a button, like a "submit" button, a "next page" button, or any other type a button and it works on your page.
- Next to a search box may also be a good place to put something like a link unit.
Eye Tracking - Find out where they are looking
Eye tracking can be a bit of an expense, but depending on your budget and your expected AdSense revenue, it may be worth it to invest in having some eye tracking done on your site.
Like heatmaps, eye tracking determines where people are actually looking at your site, as opposed just to where they are clicking.
What Eye Trackers Can Do
- Tell whether users are even looking at the screen.
- Tell whether users are reading or scanning.
- Learn the relative intensity of a user’s attention to various parts of a web page.
- Determine whether a user is searching for a specific item.
- Compare user scan patterns.
What Eye Trackers Can’t Do
- Let you know whether users actually "see" something.
- Prove that users didn’t see something.
- Determine why users are looking at something.
- Test everybody.
If you are ineretsted, here are some good sites related to eyetracking:
Remember to make sure you are not leaving any money on the table when it comes to your AdSense revenue, as with all things in internet marketing, you need to be constantly testing. Don’t be afraid to try new, or "out of the box" ideas. You never know what may work in your particular situation.
That is one of the reasons Google is such a successful company. They know that they don’t know everything and they are willing to try every idea. They don’t turn any idea down until they test it. And they don’t stop testing until they know it will absolutely won’t work.
Best of Luck
Erich Mosier
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How To Make Money With Adsense-Learn Google Adsense Tips & Tricks
March 23, 2009 by Erich Mosier
Filed under Adsense Secrets
Want to know how to make money with AdSense? If you are new to Internet marketing, one of the easiest and fastest ways to start making money online is with Google Adsense. The way that AdSense works is simple. By putting a little piece of code onto your webpage, Google will display ads on your site’s, and when somebody clicks on one of those ads you get paid. The amount you get paid will vary depending on a variety of factors, including the particular niche, the type of ad, and where the ad is located on the page. 
AdSense ad units comes in different flavors that you can use: 
AdSense for content: These are by far the most common types of Adsense on the internet. These come in a variety of shapes and sizes, most popular being medium rectangles, banners, and skyscrapers.
Adsense for Search: AdSense for search allows your users to search directly from your site to pull up relevant ads from Google.
Adsense For Feeds: By using AdSense for feeds, who will places targeted ads into the feeds of Web publishers. You can be paid two ways with this method, either by click, or by impression. You are able to control certain aspects of the ads in your feeds, such as frequency, appearance, and positioning. Google will automatically determine the size.
Adsense for Domains: With AdSense for domains, you can generate revenue from undeveloped domains. By placing relevant ads and information on an otherwise blank page, you can generate revenue with no extra work.
Adsense video units: By using AdSense video units you can add relevant video content to your site along with ads from Google Adsense. This helps to enrich your site by providing more interactive content for your viewers,
Adsense for Mobile: With the increase the popularity of mobile phones and other handheld devices, Google’s Adsense for mobile should continue to grow in popularity. These are intended for AdSense partners that have created websites specifically for mobile browsers.
There are certain policies that you need to follow while in the AdSense program. To find the most current list of do’s and don’ts, you can visit the Google Adsense policies page. Here are a few of the biggie DON’Ts that you need to be aware of :
- Do not try to modify the code. You are allowed to change certain elements such as colors, fonts, and some sizes through Google’s ad manager interface. Do not try to hack the code.
- You are not allowed to and sent to incentivize. Do not try to encourage people to click on your ads either by asking or by offering something. Your readers should click on the ads because they are actually interested.
- certain types of sites not allowed. Google does not want AdSense placed on sites that promote gambling, profanity, hatred, pornography, and a few others.
- Do not click on your own ads. This is probably the worst of all the offenses. Google is very diligent at paying attention to click fraud. If you get caught either clicking your own ads, or creating a program to do it for you, this will very likely earn you a lifetime ban.
Well those are the basics of the AdSense program. As I said before, using AdSense in Internet marketing is one of the easiest and fastest ways to start making money online. If you’re interested in learning more about AdSense and how to maximize the most money from it please see our other articles. Best of Luck Erich Mosier Please leave me a comment and let me know if this was useful.
Adsense Ad Units Explained - When, Where, and How To Use Them
March 21, 2009 by Erich Mosier
Filed under Adsense Secrets
The difference between making a little money with Adsense and a lot of money with AdSense is really a very small amount of difference in the amount of work. Most people just choose the default settings given to them by Google. By doing this they are leaving a lot of money on the table. By making just a few tweaks to the default settings, you can increase your income many times over.
One of the most important things you want to remember is that you don’t want to look like an ad. People have been trained to completely ignore ads on the page. Think about it, whenever you go to a website, how often do you actually pay attention to what the banner ads have to say. Most people will just ignore them completely. This is a relatively new phenomenon called “banner blindness”. This happened because so many sites, and so many advertisers, put so many banners on websites, but they just slowly trained the public to ignore them. Don’t get me wrong, there are certain instances where banners do still work, but you have to really know what you’re doing.
What you really want is for your ads to blend in with your content. For this purpose, text ads work the best. There are a few that work better than others, and those are the ones who will be talking about.
Leaderboard
The leaderboard is designed to stretch all the way across your page. It is most typically used at the very top,
just above the main text. You will typically want to place these directly underneath a top navigation bar
for best results. You will also want to make sure to blend your ads with your site. We will discuss this more later.
Note: with the popularity of blogs, leader boards are decreasing in popularity due
to the size restrictions of most blog templates. To replace these, you
can use banners or half banners.
Medium rectangle
If you spend any time on the web you have no doubt seen the medium rectangle.
The most popular place to put this is at the beginning of an article,
just below the title. This forces the reader to look at your ad before
they read the article. There are two tricks you can use to increase
your click through rate (CTR).
- Place an image near the ads. No matter what else is on the page people will always
look at images. By placing an image close to your ad unit you increase the
chance of them looking at your ads. - Text wrapping. This requires just a small bit of extra code, but it
helps make your ads look like they are supposed to be part of your site,
more than just a block of ads were placed on the page.
By doing this it this way, it will allow your text to flow around your ad unit like the one above. Here’s what the code looks like:
<div style=”float:left;”>
< Adsense code goes here>
</div>
If you want it to be on the other side of your text, just change “left” to “right”. If your ad looks to close to your text you can add some space between them. That would change the beginning tag to look like this:
<div style=”float:right;margin:5px 10px 5px 10px;”>
The “margin” is the amount of space around the “div”. The numbers after the colon (5px 10px 5px 10px) represent how much space (in pixels) there is around it on each side. Here is what the order of the numbers represents: Top, Right, Bottom, Left (just think clockwise). So if you want more or less space you can just adjust the numbers up or down until it looks right.
Skyscraper
Skyscraper units are the most popular on the sides of pages. I would recommend using the wide skyscraper over the regular skyscraper, just because that is what I have found works best. You may have size restrictions that prevent you from doing this, so always choose whatever will work best with your site.
With that in mind, there is a little bit of an adjustment that you can make this a wide skyscraper will “almost” work.
Again it involves working with a little bit of code. This time we will access the AdSense code directly. There has
been many times where I have wanted a wide skyscraper, but didn’t quite have 160 pixels. You can adjust the width
of your ads slightly to make them fit.
So what you will be looking for are these two lines in the code that google gives you:
google_ad_width =160;
google_ad_height = 600;
By adjusting these numbers, you can make your ads look more natural in your site.
For instance if you only had 150 pixels of space for your ad, you would just change the width to this:
google_ad_width =150;
You will probably have to play with this a little bit to get it to look right.
Be careful because this will cut off some of the text of the ads if you change it too much.
Link units
Link units can be very effective, mainly because they look more like actual links than the typical ad units because they only use one line.
They come in both horizontal and vertical alignments, with four or five links. The downside to links is that people have to click twice before you get paid. But the upside is, if they took time to click on it once, it’s probably pretty likely they will click again if they find something they are looking for.
Conclusion
There are other units that we could talk about such as images, but these are the most tried and most tested types. They’re the most popular for a reason… because they work. To find out how to increase your click through rate and other tricks for making more money on the Internet with AdSense, please read our other articles.
See the full list of Google AdSense Ad Formats Here
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