ISEdb.COM

It is by no means a secret that, in the past few years, Google has
almost monopolized the online advertising industry, which also
constitute the main source of income for the Montain View giant.

Clearly, there is a lot of money to be made from Adsense ads,
provided that you know how to draw and retain a large amount of
visitors to your website. But if attracting visitors and making your
site engine friendly is somewhat a science with well-defined rules to
follow and relatively certain results, that of strategically placing
ads in the right spot to maximize your revenue is really more of an art
that takes a lot of time and practise to master.

Choosing the right ad format

Google lets you choose among a wide variety of ad formats, which you
can place pretty much anywhere in the layout of your page with a limit
of three groups per page. One of the most common is the ‘skyscraper’
format, which you typically want to place in your sidebar; other widely
used formats are the small 125×125 pixels and many other different
formats of horizontal banners that you can put in the header or footer
of your pages.

According to Phoebe Ho, the “Optimizing Extraordinaire” for the
Google AdSense team, the best performing format of all is statistically
the so-called “large rectangle”, 336×280 pixels in size, and the wider
formats generally tend to outperform the narrow and smaller ones.

Color scheme: blending vs contrast

When
it comes to choosing the right colors to customize the ads, there are
essentially two main schools of thought. The first common solution is
bleding the ads with the rest of the site, as to emphasize the fact
that they are part of the site content and add value to the site; the
second solution goes in the opposite direction and aims at making them
as easy to detect as possible.

Note that one of these two “schools of thought” does not necessarily
exclude the other, but the two are rather complementary. You can see a
good example of how both techniques are being applied effectively on
the very same page at the Linux.com homepage:
notice how the rotating banners in the header are most of the times in
contrast with the bluish background, and how that makes them very easy
to notice. On the other hand, the ads at the bottom of the page — and,
from time to time, even those at the top right hand corner — are
easier on the eyes and use the same color scheme as the rest of the
site.

How much will I make per click?

While there is no way of directly determining how much you will make
from every single click, there is a lot you can do to make sure you
will at least tend to display the highest paying ads on your site, especially if you are creating a website from scratch.

In fact, Google provides AdWords clients you with a tool that ends
up being extremely useful to AdSense users too. The tool is simply
named “Keyword Tool”, and can be found at this address.

Complete the form by writing a few keywords, maybe the ones your
site is optimized for, and you will be presented with a list of similar
keywords, each with its advertiser competition (which, since AdWords is
essentially an auction, is proportional to the click value for that
particular keyword) and search volume during the previous month.

As you might have already figured out, a good index for the
potential revenue of a keyword is the product of these two factors. Try
and experiment new keywords, and you might find out that optimizing for
one keyword instead of another could bring you five times as much
revenue with very little effort.

Finding the right spot

Finding the right place for your ad is possibly the single most
important factor of all: the casual reader might see poorly positioned
ads like a webmaster’s greedy attempt at making money without regards
to content, and if this is the case, you will see your visitors exiting
your site as fast as they came in.

Many
webmasters will simply place their ads in the sidebar, and this is
generally a good solution. Others — including many highly ranked news
sites — will use them to break an article into smaller chunks:
although effective, this technique can be even disappointing for the
reader, especially if the ‘chunks’ are very small and the ads take most
of the page.

What you want to look for when deciding where to put your ads is a
spot that is highly visible, but that at the same time gives the reader
the impression they can easily ignore them to focus on the content if
they wish to do so.

Consider for instance using a sidebar with a double column layout,
the external one providing the usual navigational links, and the
second, internal one containing ads in a narrow skyscraper format: the
visitor’s eyes will have to cross the ads section twice (back and
forth) every time they want to navigate your site, but they will also
be able to focus on the content whenever they wish to do so, thus
having a better user experience and browsing your site more and more.

Putting it all together

That you believe it or not, by reading this article you already know
all you need to know to successfully use AdSense on your site. What you
may lack now is time and practise to experiment new solutions and see
what works for your site depending on your layout, color scheme, niche,
format, and so on.

Try to experiment different solutions for an extended period of time
until you find the setup that works best for you, and remember that
positioning your ads correctly is a delicate kind of art — even the
tiniest, meaningless particular can have huge repercussions on your
results.

You can find out more about optimizing Google ads for your website by reading the “Adsense Webinar“. It contains a number of real life examples from AdSense users and many tips from expert web designers and Google employees.