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Treble
Your Adsense Income in 60 Minutes
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by:
Kenny Hemphill
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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.
About the author:
Kenny Hemphill is the owner and publisher of The
HDTV Tuner and has been using Adsense for two years.
Circulated by Article Emporium
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