Covert Adsense Secrets

Posted by Miles Evans

Cruising the usual marketing forums and websites I see quite a few tips and tricks for increasing your Adsene earnings. I know you do too, but how much of it actually works? I run Adsense across some 50 domains and will never be done tweaking my ads. Here are the techniques I have used that have actually worked well - in many cases drastically increasing my monthly earnings.

Most ‘experts’ say to make your ads blend into your content. This is not always the case as most of my best results were achieved by making my ads stick out. Now that does not mean you should sacrifice style and throw up Adsense blocks with bright neon green backgrounds. Not so surprisingly, the style that really seems to really pull is the default blue link color. You can see that I have used this method right here at ProfitPapers and other sites like http://www.lockergnome.com for instance.

Another simple and effective trick that has proven to work well for me and others is to place images directly above your ad squares. This really works! Think about it - when a page is loaded the eye is naturally drawn to the images on the page. By placing ads in close proximity to these ads you increase your chance of getting a click-through. In fact many people are reporting tripling their results by simply adding some images near their ads. If you implemented some server side code to randomize these images you could improve on this technique even more.

Weave your ads into your content. Yeah I know you have heard this a million times but it really works. You also need to be clever about how you do it. Tooting my own horn again - take a look at how I weave my Adsense into my online marketing directory. Another good example for blending into articles can be seen here at my spyware review website.

Place link units in the top left-hand corner. This part of the website has shown to be clicked on more than any other part of the page. You can see an example at http://www.lockergnome.com.

I should probably mention that across all my sites with adsense I use a PHP include for my Adsense code so that I can make tweaks and changes across multiple pages with only 1 file edit. Similarly you can use SSI (Server Side Include) if you are using .html files. If you are not doing things this way you really should be as it will speed up testing the changes you make.

Take advantage of the alternate URL feature of Adsense to avoid displaying PSA ads. Not doing this is just lazy and you more than likely are leaving money on the table. A quick solution is to build a simple html file with an ad the same size as the Adsense block containing one of your more successful ads. Now link to this file as your Alternate URL. A banner ad, text links, or even inner site promotion, it’s better than nothing at all.

Honestly the best thing you can do to increase your Adsense revenue is just to add a lot of content or new pages to your site. A website with thousands of pages and tons of content often does very well in the search engines. Look into free articles or providing content from the public domain. There are literally hundreds or article databases offering free content. This has become even easier recently as Yahoo and others have created a search engine specifically for content in the creative commons.

Not all of these tips will work for every website. You need to take a close look at how you lay out your content and make some decisions on how best to add your ad spots. I would be very surprised if you could not significantly increase your CTR with some minor changes. Be sure to carefully measure your results at every change you make. Testing and tracking are the key to Adsense profits.

Also be sure and take a look at Google’s own guide to optimizing Adsense.

Posted Nov 27, 2005 at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Trackback URL | Del.icio.us | DIGG!