Earn Money Resources

Here is the google adsense optimization tips, that’s come from P-Ho’s presentation on “Google Adsense Optimization Webinar” on June 30, 2005. P-Ho is Optimizer Extraordinaire on the Google AdSense Optimization Team .
P-Ho’s presentation (original)

…… So with the agenda, we’re basically going to focus on a few different optimization tips ranging from ad position, format, color, the placement and some additional features that you may or may not be aware of. And then after the specific optimization tips, we’re going to go into a few of our case studies from three of our experienced and successful AdSense publishers and that would be Brad Berman from HybridCars.com; Mauricio Freitas of GeekZone.Co.NZ; and Tim Carter of AskTheBuilder.com. So we’re very grateful that they’re able to share their experience with us.

Before going into specifics, I want to explain where our research comes from. We’ve done a lot of tests with various publishers and these tips come from those tests. But, since every site is different, every industry is different; you still want to make sure that you’re experimenting on your site. So take some of these tips and maybe vary the optimization tips just a little bit to see what works the best for your site. Not all of these implementations will work for every site, so we want to make sure that you are implementing the best solutions for yourself.

Going into the exact optimization tips, we’re going to start with ad position. What you see here is a heat map of the best ad positions. As you can see, the middle, above the fold location performs the bets, and that kind of makes sense. The idea is to think about what your user is looking at. Since most of the content is in the middle of most pages, the ads that are in the middle, near the content and towards the top of the page is the location that gets most of the attention.

However, make sure that you take a look at what users are doing on your site. You want to make sure that you’re addressing how the users are actually looking at your pages. For example, if you have an article page with a long body of text, the bottom of that article is actually pretty successful because they’re reading the text and when they want more resources, they can take a look and see, oh, look. There are some ads. I can find out some more information about this particular topic. So definitely make sure that you keep in mind how your users are looking at your site.
The next optimization tip that I’d like to focus on is ad format. … You see our best performing ad format. It’s the large rectangle, 336×280. So the wider ad formats are doing better than the other ones and the reason is that they actually take up fewer lines. And so with every additional line, you have a chance of losing that interested user.

So the wider formats do best so specifically, the top three formats are the 336×280 that you see on the page; the 300×250 medium rectangle; and then the 160×600 wide skyscraper.
As I had mentioned before, because there’s a lot of variety with different sites, you want to make sure that you’re using the best format for your site. Don’t try to squeeze in a format that doesn’t fit your site just because we said so here today. I want to make sure that you fit in the right format that would fit into your site. But just to let you know that wider formats do tend to perform better.
Another important feature that I want to talk about is making sure that you are using the best colors for your site. Here you’ll see a snapshot of Topics.net with the ads by Google. You can see with the colors that they’ve chosen that it blends well with their site. It matches the background and it looks like it provides additional content and compliments the site rather than contrasts against the site.
The reason the color palette is so important is because it adds to the content and not separate from the content and what happens is, something that we call ad blindness; so the more you blend in with the site, the less chance that ad blindness will occur.

Another thing to decrease ad blindness is rotating your color palette. We have a feature in the AdSense account where you are able to multi-select different color palettes that blend with your site to add some variety and freshness to the ads. And that also will help decrease ad blindness.
Another important tip is what pages you might want to place your ads on. And what’s important is placing your ads throughout your site. As you can see here, Spine…com placed their ads on forum pages, reference pages and articles pages. And if you look closely, they actually chose different formats for different pages. So don’t be afraid to try out placing the ads on different pages and seeing how it will do for you. As long as they fit into our program policy, you can place the ads on any page of your site, any domain that you have. So I would definitely recommend that to you to kind of give you another boost into your revenue.

Now that I’ve talked about all of these various different optimization tips, how do you find out what exactly will work for you? The best way is to use channels. Here is your account view, and by selecting the channels link, you will be able to get to the channels page where you can manage your channels. And what channels will allow you to do is to track all the experiments that you’re doing.

For example, if you want to track how one location is doing versus another position, you can use channels to track that or track different colors or different formats. Basically, this is the best way to figure out which test and which experiment is the most successful for your sites. So I highly recommend, for any optimization and any experiment that you do, to use channels so that you are informed about any decision and any change that you make with your ads on your site.
There are a few other ads and features that I want to make sure that you’re aware of. And here you see image ads, link units and AdSense for Search. And next to the link units, there’s a little example of one of the formats that we have available for link units.

So I want to talk into a little bit more detail about each of these. Image ads are an alternative to the text-based ads and you want to make sure that in your account, you’re opted in to image ads. And the reason for that is that you basically have the image ads competing with the text-based ads. So if you have more advertisers competing on your site, it basically means more opportunities for you to maximize your revenue. Especially since, in the last few weeks, we’ve launched CPM-based ads for images; we want to make sure that your ads will be able to support those images. So if advertisers want to select to show ads on your site, you will be able to take advantage of that additional CPM-based revenue.

Another feature that also provides an additional stream of revenue is the link units. And they’re great because it actually compliments some of our existing ads. What the link units do is it allows the user to refine what they’re interested in. So if they may not be interested in specific ads on your page, they might be interested in a particular topic, and by clicking on a link unit and a link in the link unit, they’ll be able to specify that they’re interested in that specific topic and get a lot more options and variety on the ads that might appear.
Another great thing about link units that publishers love is the little space that it takes. So a lot of publishers place it in their menu bars, their navigation bars and it blends in well with the site. And the great thing is that you can place these link units in addition to the three ad units you can have on a page.

Another feature that we have that would be great for your users is AdSense for Search. It provides a service for your users and gives you an extra, a little additional stream of revenue as well. And what it does is, imagine the regular Google search, but instead of having your users go to Google.com, they can access all the results and the technology directly from your sites. And not only search Google.com but specify it to search directly within your site. And then, you also make a little bit of money whenever they click on the ads that come up on the search results. So this is definitely something that you’d want to consider; AdSense for Search.

So now that I’ve had a chance to show you some of the best practices that we’ve learned here at Google, I want to spend some time focusing on a few publishers who’ve come to these conclusions on their own. So here you see Brad Berman from HybridCars.com.
Just a little bit of background on Brad. He launched HybridCars.com in 2003. And he has a background in technology marketing and has a long-standing interest in alternative energy sources and sustainable mobility. So because of his interest, his site began mostly as a hobby but it started to grow when he joined AdSense. Right now he gets about 25,000 page readers a day.
Here are some of the pages of HybridCars.com. As you can see, Brad has placed the ads on his homepage, the articles and the forum. But it wasn’t always this way. Most publishers, or some publishers might be concerned that their users would reject the ads based on the content or that they would clutter the page.
But Brad has found that it actually worked very well. He started just by placing the ads on a handful of pages, and with just a few ads, he didn’t really have very many impressions to earn a lot of revenue. However, when he put ads on over 90% of his bytes, his revenue shot up. It went from $80 and $90 days to $250 and $300 days. So imagine what that can do for your site. As he says, on the first day, the ads tallied up $80 in revenue. I haven’t looked back since.

So here you see a little snapshot of the ads on one of the pages on Brad’s site. Like I said, some publishers might think that the ads make the pages a little bit busier or distract users from the content. But this hasn’t been a problem for Brad. In fact, he’s noticed that the ads are really relevant to the content of the page they appear on and they’re actually useful to the users.
And we actually pride ourselves on that here at Google so we’re showing content-targeted ads that actually are relevant to the users and compliment your site instead of compete with it. As he said, the targeting alleviates my concerns that the ads clutter the site.

Not only are targeted ads more effective as a business model, but they’re actually a service for people. So I’m glad that Brad has found that.
Here are some of the tips that Brad has for new publishers. The first thing is to put content first. Focus on making your site’s content and your user experience the best on the Web for your content niche. If you are only interested in making money, visitors will know and they’ll flee.
His other tip is to experiment. So experiment with the different formats and different colors as well as positions and what he says is, it’s very easy to add the code to a few pages and see what happens. Put the code on a few pages or every page and see if it works. You have nothing to lose.

So our next case study is Mauricio Freitas from GeekZone.Co.NZ. And he’s actually joining us today from Wellington, New Zealand. So thank you, Mauricio, for calling in early in the morning.
He’s a long-term expert in mobile products and software and he launched the site in 2003 and actually, most of his readers are here in the US. And he ended up leaving his job to focus on GeekZone full-time. And so he’s had the time to run a lot of the experiments with AdSense since he started with us.
His first tip is to experiment with ad position. As you can see on the left, his original ad position was up on top of the page. It’s great above the fold, but it’s not perfect. So on the right-hand side, you see him placing the ads a little bit closer to the content. Just by making those simple changes, he increased his revenue to about $20-$30 a day.

Another tip that he has, or because of his experiments is his experiments with color. So here you see a couple of his other pages and he originally had ads like the ones on the left; where the ads are contrasting with his site. Then he made the change to the ones on the right, and as you can see, the ads blend much better into his site. And so he went from $30 and $40 days to $90 and $100 days. So double the revenue by just a simple, little change like blending the colors.
So Mauricio’s tips for new publishers are similar to Brad’s. Focus on content. Content is probably the most important thing to pay attention to and manage. With good content, traffic will come. Try not to change the site’s layout to fit ads, but the other way around; making the ads fit the content.
Another tip that Mauricio has is, keep users on your site. You need to make it easy to get around the site and make sure the visitors see the ads as a viable exit route without asking them to click on the ads. You need to make sure that links within the site are clearly visible and that if people want more information about the same topic, they can find it. So basically we want to make sure we’re not competing with your site, but that we are complimenting your site.
So the last case study that we have today is AskTheBuilder.com by Tim Carter. Just a little background on Tim, he’s a longtime lover of building and writing so he started his Website in 1995 and he’s been running ad since on his site for more than a year.

AdSense has allowed him to spend less time selling ads to support the site and much more time on focusing what he loves to do, which is trading the content.
So one of the things that he did was experimenting with ad positions. Here you see his site, AskTheBuilder.com, and on the left-hand side, he has the ads in the middle of the page originally. But just by making a little change like the screen shot on the right, his click-through rate jumped by almost 60%. Just by that little change of position.
So as he says, as soon as I moved them, it was like turning on a water faucet. And it makes sense if you think about the way we read through pages.
Of course, another important thing to keep in mind is that some experiments don’t work out so well, but you can always learn from them and figure out what works the best. Some experiments, like this one, may decrease your performance and decrease your revenue. So here on AskTheBuilder, you can see some ads on the left and some ads on the right.

He started out with the ads on the left where it blended in with the site. Then he wanted to experiment a little bit and tried to make the ads a light yellow color as you can see on the right. His click-troughs dropped off 65% just by that little change. So little changes can also be negative, so you also want to make sure that you’re tracking all of these experiments and see what works and what doesn’t. Because now he knows that blending with the site is better for his site.
So then he returned it back to the original site and here are a couple of tips that he has for new publishers. Like you’ve already heard today, focus on content. If you want more ads, create more content. If you want AdSense to rock, create a Website that has 500-600 pages, not 20-30. And, as he learned, experimenting is very important. As he said, not all sites are the same. You have to experiment to figure out what works on your site.