Adsense Tips & Tricks

We all want to receive large cheques from Google Adsense, but without taking into consideration certain important factors this is unlikely to happen. Throughout this article I will discuss six tips which shall help to increase your Adsense revenue. These include: ad placement, blending, targeted traffic, general traffic, ad formats and keyword based ad targeting.

Where you place your ads directly effects whether people will see your ads or not. If people don't see your ads, they won't click on them. One very useful tool released by Google is the Google Heatmap. The areas coloured darker are areas in which people look and click most frequently. Based on this map we can see that if you place an ad beneath your footer you will receive almost no clicks while placing your ads above or within your content will receive a lot more clicks. Remember that revenue is directly proportional to clicks so good ad placement will increase your clicks and revenue.

Ads which stand out are much less likely to be clicked than ads that blend in.
Google gives you the option to modify Border, Title, Background, Text and URL colours. I recommend you make the border and background colours the same as your content area background so there's no border around your ads, make the title the same colour as your links, the text the same colour as your text and the URL a suitable colour. There is, however, a balance which has to be found where the ads are blended enough to fit your content while not making the user feel tricked when they click your ad.

Make sure your traffic is genuinely interested in your website.
As Google targets your Adsense to fit your content, if your visitors are interested in your content they will also be interested in your ads increasing the chance that they'll click them. This means that you should make sure you have inward links displayed on relevant websites, do not advertise on irrelevant websites.

High traffic is the most important step in making money through Adsense.
Your Adsense revenue is directly proportional to your traffic. Although the rest of the steps will increase your CTR (Click Through Rate), without traffic you won't receive any clicks. The most important thing to note when building traffic is to have high quality content. If you have high quality content, people will return to your website and other websites will link to yours. (Although you will still have to advertise even with high quality content.)

Your choice of ad format will drastically effect your CTR (Click Through Rate)
There is no one ad format which works best on all websites, I do however recommend an ad format that is roughly as wide as an article title (or whatever else you offer). To test ad formats on your website, you could switch formats once per day then record the CTR at the end of the day.

Once you have high traffic and blended, well placed ads, you may want to increase your CPC (Cost Per Click).
As you may know, each ad pays a different CPC and your ads are based on your content. This means that if your content is related to something expensive (e.g. Photoshop CS2) your ads will pay more per click. Some strategically placed keywords throughout your articles may help you to display more expensive ads.

Now that you have maximized your Adsense revenue, go out there and build traffic, stay within the Adsense TOS and enjoy your money.