[This is part of the Blogger's Guide to Earning More with Google Adsense.]
Now that your website is consistently growing and you have a great amount and percent of organic traffic to your blog (which you know is necessary to convert Adsense well) then it’s time to start thinking about the particular Adsense units that you want to use so that you can maximize your profit via CTR.
The most important factors for choosing the best and highest performing units are simply these elements:
- Size
- Design
- Content and User Experience (Flow)
- Testing
I’ve bolded because that the most important part of discovering what the best combination is for your blog and optimization efforts. The simple fact is that you won’t know what is going to work the best unless you spend the time to not only execute on Adsense monetization but that you dedicate time for optimization testing as well.
Most bloggers never get beyond just copy and pasting a few lines of code into their blog and that’s unfortunate because there’s nearly a 100% chance that they aren’t optimizing their blog’s design, content, layout, and ad units for maximum impact and financial gain. If they were to only spend a few hours a month looking through some of the detailed reporting then they could double their earnings month over month – perhaps even see an increase three-fold or higher!
It’s really up to you. But, thankfully you don’t have to start from complete scratch as Google has recommended that you start with a few of these units:
- 300 x 250 Medium Rectangle
- 336 x 280 Large Rectangle
- 728 x 90 Leaderboard
- 160 x 600 Skyscraper
They look like this:
300 x 250 Medium Rectangle
336 x 280 Large Rectangle
728 x 90 Leaderboard
160 x 600 Skyscraper
These are good places to start with your optimization efforts but don’t go crazy with them!
We’ll discuss design, optimizing for content, location, and blending techniques in the next few posts so stay tuned!
[This is part of the Blogger's Guide to Earning More with Google Adsense.]
Great article , John. But my question is: what happened with your pagerank in google? any interesting experience to share with us?
not sure what you mean.
Which is the best plugin/method to integrate Google ads into a WordPress powered blog?
there are tons. google them and then test them out. i’ll have some i’ll share (and I’m share the one i’ve built as well).
A good point. Do you think there is any danger in using Goolge AdSense? Besides the fact that Google can unplug you at any time, it can be difficult to control what kind of ads your readers are clicking on.
Does that worry you at all, or have they changed thing enough where you can have a stronger say?
i’m not too worried because i diversify… not because of any particular channel of income.
At your recommendation from a few posts ago, I have placed a test ad below the post, right before the comments.
I will admit that it has only been two days (not much of a test), but so far, I am seeing just what you predicted… double the CTR I was seeing before.
I hope this trend continues, and I am looking forward to what you say about other top ad spots.
AWESOME! i love to hear that.
sure, you can “copy” what i’m doing but i guarantee it’s not the best. optimize for your content focus and design.
I’m glad to see you bold testing. Your series is the first one I’ve read on Adsense over the last few years that didn’t try the “one-size-fits-all” approach and try to tell you what is best for your blog.
I’ll admit, for now I’ve cheated as I like the two spots your using and have so copied them on my own site. So far I’m pleasantly impressed with the results. If things hold I’ll meet my currently goal of making the site self-sufficient.
….! awesome! not cheating… it’s part of your “testing”.
Thanks so much for that great introduction. Can’t wait to more posts about this, since I’m just getting into Adsense myself
Keep rocking!
i will… as long as I can!
Hi John,
I’ve been reading since I saw your post on ProBlogger – today seems like a good day to come out from lurkdom to say “hi!” and to say I’d definitely like to know more about testing… I’ve been using adsense for a few months now and have played around with different ad sizes and locations (and inadvertently figured out that only three google ads will display on one page at any one time!) but I’d still love to hear more about making “sense” (har har) of the performance reports – i.e., is it possible tell which ad was the one that was clicked? I can’t seem to find that info… but I’ll also admit that I haven’t put a ton of effort into trying to determine that info yet either.
After reading the comments here I’m about to go move one ad below the post and above the comments! Thanks for mentioning that Jeremy!
Back to respond to my own reply comment to say that with just a little poking around I was able to determine which ad was clicked (Performance Reports -> ad units/ad size/ad types) and much like the previous commenter, I too have seen results in just a matter of days from an ad below the post but before the comments.
My most clicked ad is the 250 x 250 image (only) above the fold, in the right hand side bar.
Thanks for these posts and lighting a fire under me to start paying closer attention and making the most of adsense!
sure thing alison! glad you’re here!
It is a nice article. It would have been more informative if you would have discussed by Adsense Heat map, it was published by Google on their official webmasters blog.