Adsense is one of the most popular monetisation methods on the internet today. The reason for this is that it’s simple to install on your site and once installed you do not need to worry about what happens. Yeah right! If only it were that simple. The truth of the matter is that you will be earning pittance. To truly earn money you need to optimise the ad layout, colours and filter the unwanted ads out. By doing this you can truly realise the earning potential of your site.
Ads on your site can be fine tuned to maximise the earning potential of your site. A simple change in ad size, ad position and colours can easily double your earnings. If you follow these three steps you can be sure to find what works best for your site and your users.
Optimise your Ad Positions
The position of ads on your sites is crucial to seeing success. A simple move from above a title to below a title can easily increase the click through ratio of the ad, thus earning you more money. You can go one step further and wrap text around the right of the image while displaying the ad to the left side of your text.
What works well for me is having a large adsense square in the top left of the content with an image floating around the ad and text flowing around it. This position has been the most successful for me so far and more then doubled my revenue from adsense on one particular site I run.
What has not worked for me is leaderboards in the header as they just do not get clicked and sidebars unless you have a left column and use it where a menu is. Play around, test and make sure you use channels to track all you do.
Choose different sized Adsense Unit’s
Although the position of your ad on the page has been optimised this does not guarantee you are getting the best payouts for your ads. After testing a number of ad formats I found the large square worked best for me. This seemed to yield the higher payouts and best CTR. This may not be the case for your site though. It would be best that you run split test where you test two ad sizes alternating on each page load for a large number of impressions. This way you can compare numbers and see which ad unit size pays out the most. When you work that out, move on to the next step.
Changing Colours of your Adsense Ads
Google Adsense ads can be further optimised by changing the colours of the ads. I have found that the regular blue link colour works best which is found in the “Open Air” selection. I have also had some success with matching the link colour to my site (which is a red colour). From a lot of testing it seems like Open Air performs best for me though. This colour scheme fits well with my site design.
To test what works best for you I recommend split testing again and running ads for a day or so with various colours and then track and compare the results.
What to do now
These three steps have helped turn my site around and more then double the revenue. It’s amazing what a few hours of testing can do to your site.
Of course Adsense is not the best money maker around for websites. But if you are starting out or are not ready for affiliate marketing then spending a few hours can get you some far better results and often some quick results.