Thursday, July 21, 2011

20 Tips to earn more revenue from Google Adsense


There are tremendous opportunities to make money online. Currently Google Adsense is the best option for most of the publishers. Some basic optimization tips can double your Adsense revenue. Two sites having same traffic can have huge adsense revenue difference depending on the ad optimization.
Follow these simple Adsense optimization tips. Experiment for at least two weeks to see the results.Believe me I am not exaggerating because I am experimenting with Adsense on my different sites since long time and these are nothing but some practical and ethical tips to increase your Adsense revenue.
This is hard core material about increasing the Adsense revenue and not possible for anyone to double the income just overnight. I am not promoting or supporting any tricks to fool Adsense code.

Before beginning the tips story let’s have some Google policy recap:

According to Adsense policy don’t do these things:
1) Do not click on your own Adsense ads by any way.
2) Do not increase Adsense ad impressions with some automating tools.
3) Don’t ask others to click on your ads.
4) Don’t alter the Adsense code other than fonts and colors.
5) Don’t put Adsnese code on adult or prohibited content.
Now you know the things that are against the Google Adsense policy.
Here are some simple and “any one can follow” tips to optimize Adsense ads:
1) Blend your ads effectively with your site theme. Match your Adsense colors with your site colors.
2) Do not use borders to your text ads. Ads without border and matching background with site background color always perform well over other ad units.
3) Have some Ad color themes that perform best with your site. At least 2-3 well performing ad color formats should be ok. Rotate your ad units with these color themes. This is just to avoid Ad blindness.
4) Use link units in your site. Link units near site navigation links can perform well. Other advantages of link units are – you don’t need too much Ad space on your site and link units are not annoying to users.
5) Use Google site-specific search box with Adsense. This is the best option other than content targeted ads. You have option to select ad location on your site search result page. Put Adsense ads at the top and bottom of search result page. The best location of Google search box is – top right corner of your site.
6) Place 250×250 size Ad unit at the top of every page or post. If you are using WordPress hosting then 250×250 text or image ad option should perform best for every site. Don’t forget to align this ad unit at right or left side of the post content as shown in the image below.
Use the <DIV Style> tag to align this ad unit. See more details on how to align Adsense ad unit at left or right of post content.
Adsense ad optimization
(Image: Position of Ad units and Search box)
7) Prefer Text ads instead of image ads. This will increase probability of more user interested ads. I will to suggest keep the text and image ad formats for your site. Use text and image ad format for following type of ad formats:
250×250 Square
160×600 wide skyscraper
336×280 large rectangle
300×250 medium rectangle
These are best performing ad units and will also increase your ad inventory.
8 ) Use section targeting to target ads relevant to your site or page content. Section targeting code is nothing but code tag provided by Google to direct their crawler to show relevant ads to page content. Use section targeting code on each page.
Here is the sample section targeting code:
– google_ad_section_start –
Content you want to target.
– google_ad_section_end –
If you want irrelevant content to be ignored, then use following tag:
– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –
More details on section targeting can be found here.
Section targeting will increase ad relevancy and thus CTR.
9) Ad placement is important. Place the Adsense ads above the main fold, means user should see your top performing ad units without scrolling down on your site. This will increase Ad CTR.
10) High performing ad slots: Top of left sidebar and top of individual post. Try these ad slots on your site. Use link unit (obviously with blended color) at the top corner of left sidebar and 250×250 or 336×280 Text and image rectangle ad unit in your post content (Align at left or right side of post content).
11) Block low paying and irrelevant ads showing on your site. Use competitive ad filter Adsense feature for this. Do well study before blocking any ad unit. Some times one ad unit can give you $0.01 in one country and same ad unit might give you $1 in other country. So be careful while blocking the ads.
12) Use Google Adsense ad preview tool can help you to view all ads showing on your site and also helpful for blocking irrelevant ads.
13) Keep more white space around your ads. Do not burry your ads somewhere “out of focus” location. Site content should have enough breathing space so as your ad units.
14) Study your keywords. Target ads to these keywords. If you are not using section targeting Adsense feature then don’t forget to add your page-targeted keywords in the beginning of your post. Google Adsense crawler generally searches for first one or two paragraphs to target ads to that page.
15) You can increase number of ads to be displayed on your site’s main page and individual pages. But please not too many ads.
16) Placing images above or next to the ad units will increase ad visibility and more chances of click on such ads increasing your CTR.
17) Besides the top performers I mentioned in tip no 10, you can use following “heatmap” provided by Google to analyze other top performing ad placement slots. See the Image below. Ad slots with dark color are hot spots than the faint ones.
Adsense heatmap
(Image: Google Adsense heat map)
18) Track all ad performance using Channels. Channels are nothing but individual ad units, which you can track for performance. Study the Adsense revenue report in detail.  Don’t keep on changing ad formats, colors and placements every one or two days. Track the ad unit placement at least for 2 weeks to judge the ad slot performance.
19) Optimize your site for search engines. SEO is the key point for high traffic websites. Moreover traffic from search engines can convert well in case of Adsense ads. Users coming from search engines are clicking more on your Adsense ads than regular readers.
20) Ads placed in-between the content perform well. But keep in mind this can be annoying to your site readers. So avoid too much of blended ads in content.
If you have small posts then put ads at the top of the page content. If you have big post then ad units placed at the bottom or middle of the post can perform well. Do not use skyscraper ads in post content.