Where you position your Adsense link boxes and banner ads is extremely important. Trying to make money from the bottom of your pages within your website just won't cut it. You need to add your Adsense links right in the heart of your template or right in the heart of your content. I would personally suggest both actually.
Adding Adsense in the heart of your template:
Link Units:
Since the introduction of Google Adsense "link units", we can now add what looks like a "menu system" to compliment our menu system within our website. This is HUGE. Have you ever just clicked on a website and kept clicking on the menu links? I know we all have. By adding a "Google link units" to your menu, you will get more clicks than you thought possible. Try adding the link units near the top for better performance and try creating your link units to match the color of your menu system in place. Once in a while I find myself clicking on a menu link unit without even realizing it which in turn gives more money to the website owner.
Leaderboards & Skyscrapers:
These may very well be your "bread & butter". I only say this because of the sheer size of these ads units. The best place to add these ad units is obvious; Straight across the very top of your website (leaderboards), and straight down the side of your template (skyscrapers). Anywhere else may not look proper within your template and may look unprofessional.
Square & Rectangle Ad Units:
These are great to compliment the mass amount of content within your website and also within your recommended resources. You want to compliment your content, you don't want Adsense to BE your content because this will look poor on your part. Adsense is very popular with webmasters; who doesn't want to make some extra money. However, don't forget that many of your visitors are also used to seeing Adsense within a website, and need a good reason to click on them.
Square and rectangular units are great to use within articles posted on your website or within your link resources. Try adding your Adsense boxes above your resource links within a page to give your Adsense account that added extra exposure.
Just remember that Google allows up to 3 ad units per page. Using these 3 strategies will help to better optimize Adsense for positioning! Let's now go onto targeting...
Optimizing Adsense: Taking out non-related ads!
Do you ever wonder how ads like "business card specials" ever get displayed on to your website when your company content is all about baby clothing? Since the introduction of "Adwords Site Targeting", we now have to keep an eye on the ads being displayed on our website(s). Companies may now specifically target your website for more exposure. There is no restriction whether the website is content related or not, just more marketing exposure for the advertiser.
Filtering Adsense Advertisers:
Within your Adsense manager, you have the option of using the "Competition Filter" which allows us to remove certain websites from the ads being displayed regularly. This is going to be an on-going optimization task in the future. Without filtering the ads being displayed within your website, you might find yourself with ads unrelated to your industry and possibly some ads that have a negative effect within your site.
If you don't remove all the unwanted ads being displayed on your website, you might end up hurting your Adsense performance online. The more targeted you can get your Google Adsense ads to display on each page, the better your chances at being able to make more money. Try to take a moment every week to study the ads being displayed on your website.
Open up a note pad, or word document and record all the websites you don't want to be displayed anymore. Add these sites to your "filter list" within your Adsense account.
Remember to add the website (within your filter list) like so.Adding anything after or before the url will only prevent the company from displaying one of their many ads like so .This way you stop anything from the entire website from showing up within your Adsense campaign online. The more you optimize your Adsense filter, the better your performance will pick up and the less non-related ads will be displayed on your website.
Does it even exist? It could be I have evidence.
A few months ago I saw a spike in traffic to a site of mine.
This site has real-time visitor stats available including the IP origin of all visitors on the site. It's easy to lookup the IP and see where the traffic originated. When I did this I discovered that the traffic was coming from Google Inc. At one point over a few days I had 20 visitors together on the site all from Google HQ.
This continued over a few weeks, although the number on site from Google simultaneously never matched the 20 again, I witnessed a steady hit rate throughout each day, some days reaching 10 or so Google HQ visitors at one time. But mostly they would pop up in 2's and 3's.
I still get these visitors... checking the site now and there is at least one Google employee on the site, there may be more. I recognize this one IP at least without checking.
It became obvious that my site was being watched and monitored by Google staff. I said hello via the sites broadcast system once or twice just for the fun of it. :)
Anyway, again a few months ago a trend began which involved placing images near your Adsense ads to catch the visitors' eye, in the hope that they would then read the ads nearby and click through. I believe I was one of the first to have these images up and running and this could be what got me spotted by Google.
The result of all this was two fold.
First of all, Google has been doing some serious 'messing' with the display format of my ads. With a few Adsense blocks on a page I find more often than not many are disabled in favor of the leaderboard only across the top of the pages. But then much of the time the leaderboard will display just 1 or 2 Adsense ads rather than the usual 4.
This is fine; they're optimizing my ads for better CTR(Click Through Rate), great. But that's not all they're doing, they're tweaking the display of my ads in an annoying way. Every single Adsense ad has a thin black border around it. This is not configurable in the code at my end but something that Google have added at their end.
This wouldn't be so bad but for the Adsense ads that they don't display still having this thin black border. Essentially I finish up with pages that have big black squares or rectangles of empty space where the Adsense ads should be. Which is obviously not good for the look of the site especially if this is on an empty square ad in the middle of the page copy.
I've been watching this happen now for around 6 weeks.
The other, much better, upshot of all this is that following the Jagger update Google have really got their teeth into this site and started to throw lots of traffic at it from across their world network. I see visitors from Google searches in India, Norway, Germany, Auz, Arabia etc. Which is great. The monitoring has definitely had a positive effect.
My conclusion is that I popped up on the Google radar; they monitored me, and continue to, but decided that the site wasn't breaking any TOS and more importantly it wasn't a spam site.
I hope to see them drop those black borders soon, surely it can't be helping the CTR on the Adsense?
Both Manita Pd & Sumit Nanda are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.