AdMoolah News and Views

I found an AdSense Click Tracking technique on the web today.

It looks pretty simple to implement, so I want to give it a try. The author claims it is Google TOS friendly, but I don’t want to take any chances so I emailed AdSense support about it. I’ll update this post once I hear back from them.

I have also started a forum post on this subject where I will talk about my experiences with setting up and running the script, assuming Google gives the OK.

Update: I heard back from Google and they told me the don’t “endorse or encourage the use of any third-party tools for this purpose”. They basically said just make sure they don’t violate the Google Terms and Conditions, so I decided I will try to implement this. Tune to the forum posting if you are interested.

We have launched AdMoolah Forums. We have forums
for AdSense Tips and Tricks,
General AdSense Discussion,
Earnings Spam, and
Site Comments and Suggestions.

Please feel free to start or join in the discussions!

So far we’ve looked at choosing ad formats and ad colors. Today we are going to look at ad positioning. Where on the page you place your ads can dramatically affect your earnings.

Above the Fold

“Above the Fold” is a term from the newspaper industry. When folded newspapers are on the newsstand, only the top half of the page is displayed. The most important headlines are put “above the fold” so that they can be seen without turning the newspaper over. The Web industry has adopted this term to refer to anything on the page that can be seen without scrolling down. Anything you want visitors to your web site to see should go above the fold.

If your ads are currently at the bottom of the page, and users need to scroll down to see the ads, you can see dramatic improvements by moving the ads to the top of the page. This is probably the best thing you can do if you want to increase your AdSense revenue. In a comment to an earlier post in this blog, John Henshaw reported a 500% increase by moving his ads up to the top part of the page.

Where do users focus?

Another way to get users to see your ads is by placing them where the users focus naturally on the page. The trick is to find out where that is. Some help may come from studies such as the Stanford Poynter Project on eyetracking. This study gives details of where users look on a page and what order they look at them. Another similar but simpler form of this is the Google Heat Map that I blogged about earlier. The key thing to realize is that different areas of the page are viewed more often than others, and can lead to more clicks on your ads.

How your ads are placed on the page in relation to other elements on the page also have an effect on how often they are noticed. AdSense publishers have reported good results by placing ads beside key elements such as navigation elements or graphics. A useful forum thread at Digital Point discusses the technique of using images beside ads. Another common technique is to place ads in the middle of content blocks.

Of course, each web site is unique so what works on one site may not work on another. As I’ve mentioned in the past, these tips should be used as starting points for your own experimentation.

It’s time to submit your May earnings. Currently we have 199 registered users and only 179 earnings entries, so we need more people to submit! I hope it was a profitable month for you.

AdSense allows you to customize the color palette of the ads that are placed on your site. There are five different color elements on each ad: Border, Background, Title, Text and URL. The colors that you choose can affect how often the ads are clicked, which directly effects your earnings.

There are two main schools of thought when it comes to the color palette of ads: 1) make them blend in with your site, or 2) make them stand out.

Blending In

The thought behind blending in ads with your site is that people will not be able to identify them as ads right away and have a tendency to look at them more often. To make your ads blend in, make the borders of the ad and the background color of the ad the same color as your web page’s background. Then make the Title and URL of the ad the same color as links on your page. Finally, make the text of the ad the same color as the text on your page. Doing this will give the ads a very natural appearance on your page.

Standing Out

The other school of thought contends that ads that stand out from the rest of the page will get noticed more often, and therefore they will be clicked more often. There are many ways to choose a color palette that stands out, but it’s usually best to stick with something that is complementary to your overall website design. You don’t want to have an ugly site just for a few extra clicks per day!

I have experimented with ads that blend in versus ads that stand out and found that the ads that blend in had a click through rate of about 30% higher than those that don’t. Not a huge amount, but definitely worth trying out. I encourage you to experiment to see what works best on your site. Use the comments feature of this blog to tell us the results of your own experiments.

I recently discovered (via the JenSense Blog) that Google has a blog for AdWords advertisers at adwords.blogspot.com. It made me wonder why they didn’t have a blog for AdSense publishers. So, I tried typing in adsense.blogspot.com, and I got a username/password dialog box. So something is there, we just can’t see it. I wonder if this means there will be a Google blog for us AdSense users soon? I hope so!

AdSense has many different ad formats to select from. See Google’s list of ad formats for a current selection.

Different ad formats work better than others. Some people may report getting high click through rates with leaderboards, while others may report getting good results with skyscrapers. Which one is best for your site? Unfortunately, the answer is: it depends. There is no way to determine which one will perform best on your site unless you try out different ad formats. You have to experiment to find out which is best for you (there will be a separate tip on experimentation later in this series).

There are some general rules that may help though. When it comes to ad formats, the old adage “bigger is better” seems to be true. People seem to consistently report that the larger ad formats work better than smaller ones. The 336×280 Large Rectangle generally outperforms the 300×250 Medium Rectangle. The 160×600 Wide Skyscraper generally outperforms the 120×600 Skyscraper.

Balance Ads with Design

Of course, when choosing ad formats it is also important to remember to choose ads that fit in well with your site. If you compromise the design of your site, the user experience will be worse and you may lose visitors. When going to a site, nobody likes to be confronted with a barrage of large ads at the top of the page with content that can only be seen by scrolling down. Keeping a balance between ads and content is important.

Figuring out which ad formats are best takes a lot of experimintation, but finding the right combination of ads on you site will pay off with higher earnings from the AdSense program.

Google can and will kick you out of the AdSense program if they find out
that you have been violating the terms of the agreement with them. The rules are outlined
in policies of the AdSense program.

Not only will they kick you out of AdSense and ban you for life, they will
keep any money that you have earned in the program. It’s worth the effort to
play by the rules!’

Some of the things you need to make sure you avoid are:

• Clicking on you own links. This is known-as click fraud and is probably the
  fastest way to get banned from AdSense.
• Encouraging other to click on you links. You can’t say ‘Please click my links so
  I can buy a beer today’. Google even frowns upon having an arrow pointing to
  your ads.
• Displaying ads on an error page, registration page or thank you page.
  The page must be a real content page.

These are just a few of the ways to get onto Google’s bad side. I strongly encourage
you to read the policy yourself, and re-read them whenever you make major changes
to your site.

The best way to not make any money using AdSense is to get kicked out of the program,
so be careful. If you have any doubts, email Google with your questions, they
are always very helpful.

Google has announced a beta program for their Google AdSense for Feeds Program. People have been talking about this coming for some time now. It seems like a great new revenue stream for AdSense publishers. I’d love to join but there is a requirement of 100 active subscribers, which I don’t think I have yet.

(Found via John Battelle’s Searchblog)

I have added a feature where you can now edit any of your earnings records. When you are signed in, a new “Edit My Earnings” option is available on the left side navigation bar. Click it and you will see a list of all of your earnings submissions, each with an “edit” link. You can change any of the fields in the record you choose.