Internet and Businesses Articles

Google's Adsense is one of the most powerful weapons in website publisher's
arsenal. It enables you to monetize your sites easily and if used properly can
generate a very healthy income. However, if you're not using it properly and
maximizing the income you squeeze from it, your leaving money on the table
– something we all hate doing.

Boosting your return from Adsense can be done very easily and quickly, and you'll
be amazed by the results.

I ran Adsense on my sites for over a year before I discovered these techniques, and
like many people, I though I was doing pretty well. My clickthrough rates and CPM
figures were very healthy, and I didn't honestly think that they could be improved a
great deal. How wrong I was. Immediately after I implemented a few quick changes
my clickthrough rate more than doubled, and by doing some fine tuning I manged
to get nearly three times as many people to click on the ads as had been previously
doing so.

The first technique is one that was 'discovered' by the amazingly helpful Debs, on
SiteSell's SBI! forums. When I read it originally, it made sense and I decided to goive
it a go, but I
wasn't prepared for the immediate impact it would have on my income. It involves
making only a few simple changes to the format and positioning of your Adsense
ads.

Firstly, forget about using banners or skyscrapers. These ad formats are almost
universally ignored by surfers. Why? Because we've all been conditioned to recognise
a skyscraper or banner as an advert and as these adverts are rarely of any interest,
we ignore them. What's needed is a way of integrating Adsense ads into the editorial
on your site as seamlessly as possible. To do this you need to do three things:

1. Use the 250 x 250 rectangle format
2. Make the background color of the ad the same as the background color of your
site, or as close to it as possible.
3. Make the ads borderless by setting the border color to be the same as the
background color of the ad.

These changes can be made by logging into your Adsense account and creating a
custom format. Just select the 250 x 250 ad format, and create a custom color
palette. Use the color picker to pick the coor you want. The Javascript is
automatically generated at the foot of the page, ready for you to copy and paste into
the pages on your site.

Now, you need to position your ads where surfers are most likely to click on them.
Research using retina scanning technology has shown that the place that surfers
tend to look at first and most often is the top left. I don't know the reasons for this,
perhaps it's because that's where we're used to seeing the most useful search
engine results (at the top of the rankings) and search engines are the sites we most
often visit, so we automatically look at the same place on other sites.

Whatever the reasoning, as soon as I made the above changes to my Adsense ads,
clickthrough rates doubled, immediately.

The second technique is much newer and one which is entirely based on my own
experience. Google has recently added a new type of Adsense format, called
Adlinks. This displays a series of links on your page in the same style of Ad unit as
regular Adsense ads. When a user clicks a link they are taken to a page of adverts
that resembles regular Google search results. As a publisher, you are paid every
time a user clicks one of those ads.

Adventurous soul that I am, I jumped in with both feet and started to trial Adlinks
on my most visited pages as soon as it was launched. I'm using the four links in a
square box format, positioned top left of my page content. After a few weeks of
running Adlinks alongside regular Adsense ads, it's clear that the return on Adlinks
is about a fifth to a quarter higher than regular ads. There's no clear reason for this
but one explanation may lie in the fact that clicking on an Adlink takes the user to
page of 'results'. When a user clicks on one of these, you are paid for the click. If the
user finds what they want, great, if not, it seems that they hit the Back button on
their browser and try again, just as you would for normal search engine results.
Then they click on another result, and you get paid again. So it's possible to be paid
more than once from the same Adlink click. Now, this reasoning is speculative, but
it does make perfect sense in the light of my Adlinks results.

Finally, Adsense has some excellent tracking statistics that allow you to track your
results across a number of sites on a site by site, page by page, or just about any
other basis you choose. This is a very powerful tool and you should use it to find
out which ads are performing best for you and fine tune your Adsense and Adlink
ads accordingly.

So you see, by spending an hour or so of your time making a few adjustments to the
Adsense ads on your sites, you can very quickly treble your Adsense income. Give it
a go, you'll be amazed by the results.

Kenny Hemphill is the editor and publisher of http://www.the-hdtv-tuner.com/about-this-site.html and has been making money from Adsense for two years.