AdSense: Making it Work for You

© Copyright 2006 Ian Feavearyear. All rights reserved.

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Before delving deeper into AdSense it is important that you have a good understanding of what AdSense actually is. AdSense is an advertising program operated by Google that allows you to earn money from your web site by people clicking on AdSense advertisements displayed on your site.

The vast majority of AdSense advertisements operate on a pay-per-click basis. That is, you only get paid when someone clicks on an ad displayed on your web site. AdSense also operates a CPM program (pay per impression) but very few sites ever get CPM ads. Many people seem to be under a false impression (no pun intended!) when signing up for AdSense that they will generate revenue simply from ad impressions. This is based on a misunderstanding of Google's AdSense blurb. So, let me repeat, the vast majority of AdSense publishers will only ever generate revenue from someone clicking on the ads displayed on their web site(s).

AdSense is also a contextual advertising program. That is, the advertisements that are displayed on your site are automatically generated by Google based on the content of your site. Thus, if your site is about skiing, you should get skiing-related ads; if it's about gardening, you should get gardening ads, and so on. The contextual nature of AdSense is of vital importance and is the very essence of AdSense, as I discuss below.

As already mentioned, the ads displayed on your site are automatically chosen by Google and you have (virtually) no control over the ads that Google selects. You can choose NOT to display certain ads that Google would otherwise display by using the Competitive Ad Filter but you cannot make Google display ads that it has not automatically chosen. However, as we shall see, even though you cannot make Google display certain ads, you can certainly influence the type of ads.

Just because you have a web site and there are relevant AdSense ads to display on it, that does not mean that AdSense is the right advertising program for you. The main factor at play here is the heart of AdSense--it's contextual nature.

I regularly read AdSense discussion forum posts where people are unhappy because the ads being displayed are competing against their own products and services, or because they simply want ads that are not directly related to their site's content. Such posts indicate a basic ignorance of the AdSense program.

For example, if your site is trying to sell electronic products, you are almost certainly going to get ads from other sites trying to sell electronic products. Similarly, if you are offering genealogy/family history services, the ads are likely to be from other providers of genealogical services that are possibly competing directly with your own.

Thus, in order to determine whether AdSense is the right advertising program for you, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Is my site primarily informational or is it offering products or services for sale?

If your answer is "informational," then AdSense is likely to work well for you.

2. What do I intend to be the primary source of revenue from my web site?

Even if you are selling products or services, if your main intent is to generate advertising revenue then, again, AdSense may work well for you. Otherwise you must recognize that, even if the advertisements themselves are not directly competing with your own products or services, the ads are links whose very purpose is to take people away from your own site. If you are trying to sell something to these people, why offer them a clear route to elsewhere?

3. Do I want or need a lot of control over the ads displayed on my site?

If "Yes," AdSense is clearly not for you.

Thus, as a rule of thumb, if your site is primarily informational or you intend to generate income primarily through advertising revenue, then AdSense may be the program for you. Indeed, AdSense is, in my experience, by far the best revenue-generator of its kind. Otherwise, you need to use the services of a non-contextual advertising program, such as cj.com, or decide that any advertising is actually against your own interests.

As a side note, if you have developed a site that is trying to sell products or services, don't allow yourself to be overly sidetracked by trying to generate advertising revenue unless your business is already well-established, you need to devote all of your time and efforts to your primary goal--don't allow yourself to lose sight of it.

So, after weighing the pros and cons, you've decided that you are going to run with AdSense. What should you do to maximize your earnings? Below are a few key considerations.

Again, this is where the contextual nature of AdSense comes into play. In order to get the type of ads you would like, your site's textual copy must contain the right keywords to trigger those ads. For example, if you would like ads concerning wills, probate, and other legal issues concerned with will-making, your site's copy must contain lots of will and probate-related keywords. If it just contains general legal blurb you will get general legal ads. However, if you have a mixture of general and specific subject matter, and you just want ads related to the specific stuff, you can use AdSense's section targeting to emphasize certain text and to ignore others.

The other thing to emphasize here is that you must have text on your site, otherwise there is nothing Google can use to determine the appropriate ads for your site.

There is no golden rule as to where your ads should be placed--I've read that there should be a skyscraper on the left because that's where visitors look first (if they're used to reading left-to-right) and I've also read that it should be on the right. Placement of ads also must be balanced with other considerations, such as blending. However, what is of key importance is that you experiment with ad placement in order to determine which positions work best for you. People have seem amazing increases in advertising revenue by nothing more than moving the position of their AdSense ads.

Despite there being no hard and fast rules, there are certainly a couple of general principles that may apply but that will depend on the nature and design of your own web site.

Ads Above the Fold: The best performing ads are generally "above the fold." That is, you can see them without having to scroll down the page.

Merged with Key Content: If you have a long section of text, the best place to put your ads is in the text--either with the text wrapping round a vertical, narrow, ad unit, or broken up by a horizontal ad unit that is roughly the width of your text.

The common thread here is, of course, visibility. In order to be effective revenue generators, your ads must be seen. However, the problem lies not only in being seen but also in being seen in such a way that the ads aren't ignored as a result of "ad blindness," which is where blending comes in.

One of the best sites I have seen with regard to blending of ads is the home page of SparkleBox. This site uses a minimal amount of AdSense ads but I just love the placement of the ad on the home page because it feels like such an intrinsic part of the site's design that you hardly notice it's an ad at all and it blends in so perfectly with the rest of the page. This site also highlights two key aspects of blending: color and layout.

As a general rule, ad groups work best that incorporate the same color scheme as the rest of the site, thereby reducing "ad blindness." Therefore, make use of the ability you have in AdSense to use the same color text, background and hyperlinks in your AdSense code as you use for the rest of your site. If you prefer, you can simply edit the color codes directly in the AdSense Javascript code (which is permitted, by they way!)

Similarly, your layout should work in such a way that the location of your ads within your design looks "natural" and not forced. SparkleBox does a great job of this. I particularly like the use of rounded boxes which give the ad code a natural place to reside. Try to make ad positioning an intrinsic aspect of your site's design process, don't just add them as an afterthought.

"The more ads you have displayed on your site, the more money you'll make, right??." WRONG!!! .... well, not necessarily.

It is important to remember that Google displays the highest paying ads first and the lowest paying ads last. This raises two key issues. First, the more ads you have displayed on your site the more lower-paying ads you have. Second, you need to ensure that the ad unit with the best placement on your web page is also the first one in your raw HTML source code, which is not necessarily the case when positioning techniques such as tables, positioned or floating div tags, etc. are used to control your page layout. As AdSense help states, putting your best-positioned ads first in your source code

help[s] ensure that your prime ad real estate is occupied by the ads that place highest in the auction and will generate the most revenue for you.

However, displaying multiple ad units on your pages may work well when your pages contain a lot of text or other content that requires users to scroll down to view the page's content. They may also work well when you are only using small ad units.

Your revenue can also be affected by Google's Smart Pricing methodology. This topic is discussed in full in Jonathan Leger's article, "Make more from AdSense by removing AdSense!" (now available on MoneyTies.net).

Whatever methods you are employing in an attempt to optimize your AdSense earnings, you are shooting in the dark if you are not using formal testing techniques. You must make use of AdSense's channels in order to determine which ad units on which pages are producing which results. Without this information any testing you do is pretty meaningless.

Make sure that you allow a reasonable period of time before making any changes, record your performance figures, make your changes, wait for a similar period, then compare results. Also, be sure that you only make one change per page at a time, otherwise it will be difficult to determine with accuracy which changes have actually produced any changes in your earnings. This scientific approach may be time consuming and even rather tedious, but it will be worth it in the long run, especially when you find that single change that increases your revenue by 500%!!

As I've discussed elsewhere, you can optimize and test your site "till the cows come home" but without traffic you won't make a penny. In order to make AdSense work for you, you must work at getting traffic to your site. This thought was encapsulated perfectly by a commentator online who wrote

. . . the pages, the sites, are just vacant real estate without tenants, without visitors - its like an empty mall - should they build more stores in the hopes of reaching a greater mass, or work on getting more traffic, so the property they ALREADY have is much more valuable?

For more information on this topic, read Jonathan Leger's article, Content Is NOT King.