Your Best AdSense Site Tips Changes

What did you change that made the most improvement?

[WolfLover]

What change did you make to your site and/or ads that made the biggest difference for you in terms of CTR and money earned?

Was it changing where you placed the ads? the colors? the size of the ad blocks? adlinks make more than skyscrapers?

I've learned so much from the webmasters in this forum and I would like to thank all of you for the education, the knowledge, the experience that you come here with and are willing to share.

_______________________________

To start off, in my case, it made a large difference when I went from my first contrasting color ads, to blending in the colors. The left column gets more clicks than ads in the right column and the 728x90 adlinks at the top blending with your navigation does well also. Most of these things were learned right here at WW. Thanks again!

[WolfLover]

I knew the webmasters posting to this forum would give some great advice! Thank you, I am sure you have helped many and given ideas to those who were trying to figure it all out.

Anyone else care to contribute your experience on what helped your income grow due to changes you made to your site and/or ads to get better CTR?

[Ladan Lashkari]

The best change I made was blending AdSense into my articles and also putting a human face picture next to it to attract attention. It really worked!

[Hubbard]

Wow, Ladan. What was the difference when you put a face next to your ads? Nice idea btw

[WolfLover]

The best change I made was blending AdSense into my articles and also putting a human face picture next to it to attract attention. It really worked!

Ladan, not sure what you mean by putting a face next to the ads. Make sure you are not calling undue attention to your ads so that G does not ban you. I wish you much success!

[Gusgsm]

Smart idea, Ladan. Could get wearisome if everybody starts doing it, but very nice indeed. A very classic notion (people are interested in people. Always).

[kartiksh]

heatmap and block mfas

[John Carpenter]

One of the best pieces of advice would be: Keep experimenting.

What works for someone does not have to work for you, and vice versa.

For instance, we tried AdLinks and Google toolbar referrals -- they did not earn us a cent. But many people say AdLinks and referrals work for them really well.

The bottom line, keep experimenting and trying various things to find out what works for you.

[MichaelEng]

Thanks for the advice everyone, I just have a couple questions:
1. How do you track individual page performance, is their some software you use?
2. When you block MFA's, do you just use the competitive filter.

[John Carpenter]

1. How do you track individual page performance

[google.com...]

[robzilla]

Adsense 'only' allows you to have 200 channels, so how does one keep track of individual page performance when you have more than 200 pages you want to monitor? Rotation, perhaps? Optimizing them one by one, then, when a page is performing at its best, forget about it and remove the channel to make room for a new one? Any other ideas?

[abbeyvet]

Personally I mainly use 2 things - ad blocks and site sections rather than pages. So I might have a channels called "250X250 SectionName" "Adlinks SectionName"

Then sometimes I set up temporary channel to track individual pages for a time.

[Thez]

I would have to say, even though in the past removing low performing pages and reducing from 2-3 ad blocks to one resulted in a lot higher earnings for a time (read: 1-2 months), eventually the overall earnings dropped below what they were.

I have to agree with what john_carpenter wrote. I'm now using 3 ad blocks per page, and keep ads on low performing pages too, and my earnings are going up all the time. I even was encouraged by my AdSense rep to put all 3 blocks on my pages when I was invited to the premium publisher's program. If using multiple blocks would hurt you I doubt he'd endorse using that much.

[net_rambler]

>Optimizing them one by one, then, when a page is performing at its best, forget about it and remove the channel to make room for a new one? Any other ideas?

Not one by one, but best one by worse one :-)

To increase earnings:
I take log analysing SW and look at most visited pages and starting from most visited one...
Here changes give most fast result and statistic accumulates fast also

To increase traffic:
look at least visited pages and try to find what is wrong with them, optimise them to get more traffic,...
Until you get visited some page at least 100 times per month, there is no way to make any meaniningful conclusion. If statistics base is low, fluctuations will bring much "noise" which will hide results..
Make pages more visited first and then work to increase earnings ..

[jchampliaud]

Going from a banner to a leaderboard.

Same for me. I put my leaderboard between my letterhead and content. That really made a difference.

[Nicke]

My best move was to remove the skyscraper on the right and insert adsense into the content window, leaderboard at top (below navigation) and at the end of my forum pages.

[lobo235]

1. Inserted adsense into content areas instead of just in the header, footer, and sides.
2. Made ads more prominent (used bigger ad units)
3. Blended ads. Styled all the regular links on my site to be the same font/color/weight as the adsense links.

[beavis]

Some newbie questions:

1. What does MFA stand for?
2. How do I determine which ads are low paying so that I can put them on my list of ads not to show?

[zCat]

Just redesigned my high traffic, low performing site going from wide skyscraper right + 468 banner in the classic title-bar position to a large square adblock in the content, and I'm asking myself why I didn't do this much much earlier. Just hope it keeps going how it's started out.

[europeforvisitors]

Just redesigned my high traffic, low performing site going from wide skyscraper right + 468 banner in the classic title-bar position to a large square adblock in the content, and I'm asking myself why I didn't do this much much earlier.

Maybe because you didn't want the tail wagging the dog?

[zCat]

Just redesigned my high traffic, low performing site going from wide skyscraper right + 468 banner in the classic title-bar position to a large square adblock in the content, and I'm asking myself why I didn't do this much much earlier.

Maybe because you didn't want the tail wagging the dog?

Not quite sure what you mean by that, but I do subscribe to a old-fashioned philosophy of making sites user-friendly first and optimizing ads'n'stuff later.

[funandgames]

beavis

1. Affiliate Ads
2. Channels

[Eazygoin]

Beavis >

1. What does MFA stand for?

It stands for 'Made for AdSense', which basically means sites which have little relevance or content, other than to make money from adverts placed on the site.

edit+ spelling errors! I write too fast!

[ann]

adlinks and a banner in content/leftside sky.

Try to keep intrusion down to 2.

Ann
<edit>:) I will share a secret from one of the big hitters I personally know who got this from the horses mouth: Blend in colors but make them stand out slightly.

For example:

If your page color, say, begins with a D and ends with an A, change the D to a B, if nothing happens then ALSO change the last letter to a C. The goal is to have it slightly pop out but ALMOST unnoticable...just enough to catch and hold the eye. I have it on just one page and it appears to be working.
enjoy.

[CainIV]

Removing ads on poor performing pages

Reducing ads to one per page.

All ads above the fold

[WolfLover]

Ann
<edit>:) I will share a secret from one of the big hitters I personally know who got this from the horses mouth: Blend in colors but make them stand out slightly.

For example:

If your page color, say, begins with a D and ends with an A, change the D to a B, if nothing happens then ALSO change the last letter to a C. The goal is to have it slightly pop out but ALMOST unnoticable...just enough to catch and hold the eye. I have it on just one page and it appears to be working.
enjoy.

Ann, just to clarify, are you saying that for instance, if your background is white, then you would want the background of your ads to be say just a touch offwhite? In other words just a shade different for the background of the ads as opposed to the background of your page?

Did this person say that it is still a good idea to make the ads links or titles to be the same color as the links on your site?

Thanks for sharing, that was great, I'm going to try it out and see what happens. Currently, I have my left skyscraper the same color as my background, and my adlinks background just under the navigation and the same color as the navigation background.

I'll let you know what happens.

Ann, did you just try this out today for the first time?

[SEOidiot]

Reducing my ad count in general - three aint the magic number

[ann]

Yes on both questions and I have this on one page (read attack of the lazies) and that channel has shown an overall increase. had it on for about 3 or 4 days.

Got to get over lazy. :)

Ann

[Aircut]

For example:

If your page color, say, begins with a D and ends with an A, change the D to a B, if nothing happens then ALSO change the last letter to a C. The goal is to have it slightly pop out but ALMOST unnoticable...just enough to catch and hold the eye. I have it on just one page and it appears to be working.
enjoy.

what will be your popout color for #ffffff?

[ann]

I'm talking border and background color for the ads.

BTW:

Just on a hunch I just tried something that I got immediate results with.

I was checking my stats and channels and decided to delete a URL to one of my sites that no longer have adsense on it as well as one unused page on the main site. I had left them in there 'just in case'.

I went back to the reports page as soon as I deleted and found a 28 cent upward change in epcm! I believe ctr MAY have went up but not sure about that as I was focusing on ecpm. Wow, that was fast! Nothing else changed, income or clicks, impressions, etc. I hope I have hit on something else to help me and maybe help others as well. :)

Ann

[kidd]

Hello:

The change I made that had a greater impact was eliminating ads from very poor perfoming pages, this helped with SmartPricing.

I also made some tweaks on my forum to show ads only to my guests, since my users never clicked on the ads and only made the ads impressions to skyrocket.

Also I use rectangle ads on my articles, after trying out different ad displays that one worked the best to me, I position it at the beginning of the article with the text around.

Cheers!