Posted by The New Webmaster in Google AdSense can be a great money making tool if you know how to use it and is definitely the highest paying and most popular PPC (Pay Per Click) network in existence. If you don’t have an AdSense account, it is worth signing up for one and getting approved even if you don’t plan to place any ads in the near future.
Anyway, to earn money from AdSense there obviously needs to be people looking at your adverts. So, this means that you will need two things; traffic and visible ads.
Placing your AdSense units in the best places can be key to getting more clicks – I have seen many high traffic sites getting less clicks than sites with lower traffic purely due to poor ad placement.
However, you need to be careful not to breach any of the AdSense Programme Policies, or you will risk your AdSense account getting banned. The AdSense policies related to ad placement are:
Google ads, search boxes or search results may not be:
- Integrated into a software application of any kind, including toolbars.
- Displayed in pop-ups or pop-unders.
- Placed in emails or in email programmes.
- Obscured by elements on a page.
- Placed on any non-content-based page.
- Placed on pages published specifically for the purpose of showing ads.
- Placed on pages whose content or URL could confuse users into thinking it is associated with Google due to the misuse of logos, trademarks or other brand features.
- Placed on, within or alongside other Google products or services in a manner that violates the policies of that product or service.
Obviously the key to successful placement is to experiment; place ads in certain places of your pages for a week at a time to find which placement results in the best CTR (Click Through Rate) and revenue.
Diagram of where AdSense units should perform best on a page
The image to the right shows, after many experiments, the places where AdSense adverts should perform best. Obviously some of the areas on certain sites are not possible – but you should try out roughly where the darkest colors are.
The darker the colors, the more visits are attracted to the area, hence they are more likely to see and click on adverts.
However, sometimes it is best not to always go with the darkest areas you can use – this may have a negative impact on the look of your website and put off people from returning or even reading your content in the first place. Personally, I think you are best off placing the content where it looks good, but using the chart to the right to avoid the completely white areas.
As I have said before though, the key to it is to experiment – try different ad placements to get the best for your site.
The next article related to AdSense will be about blending and making ads look like part of the site.
