The adsense guide to profits

I’ve been experimenting on my other sites. Experimenting with adsense, blending and click through rates. What I’ve learned is, blending ads should not be regarded as a general rule, but as a guideline.

The problem with blending your ads too much, is your visitors miss them all-together. Duh? Ask anyone how to improve your clickthrough rate, you’ll get the same response : “Blend your ads, remove the border1”

Its false. Blending your ads, is a generic term, but shouldn’t be thought of as only one application. I’ve found that by matching the color of the backgrounds, and making the title of the ad standout, the ads are performing much… much better.

Don’t hide your ads, make them standout. When you read the newspaper, where are the ads located? How are they placed visually? Why aren’t you applying these techniques to your website?

Try it for a month, I think you’ll find your ad performance increase by 2-3% as I have.

Oh, and if you want to see an example of good adsense implementation, you may want to View this Website for a fantastic ad color / placement.

I’ve been emailed this question a lot, I’d like to touch briefly on it tonight, and elaborate on it much more in the upcoming weeks.

“Hello, what’s the best layout for adsense click-through rates? Thanks, Jeff.”

Well Jeff, the truth is.. you shouldn’t ever design around ad placements. You should always have a well laid out site, and neatly fit your ad code into your site best as possible.

However, there is one fact that remains, in my mind. I’ll always build a site so ads will fit in nicely, and I always allow for a 336×280 ad block, and a 160×600 ad block.

Why? Because, serious advertisers only want the 336×280 ad filled, with the 160×600 coming in a close second. Oddly enough, I get less clicks on my network ads since I went from 250×250 to the bigger ad placement, but my cpm’s have doubled.

But, by building sites around the above two formats, you’ll have the best of both worlds.

Tomorrow, I’ll publish my stats so you can see the big difference.