Improving Google AdSense Earnings on Your Website - Ten Tips to Get Higher Ad Revenue

If you're running a website and trying to earn money on Google AdSense, or you are already earning a decent amount from AdSense but want to do better, you should consider optimizing your Google ads.

Google already provides some optimization tips on its AdSense pages. The following ideas are an expansion on those tips, based on my experience optimizing AdSense ads for my own website, Green Energy Efficient Homes. I started with some of Google's own ideas, validated them with experimentation on my site, and added to them, in order to get clickthrough rates and earnings per thousand impressions that were significantly better than they had been when I started.

Here are some of the things I have learned about maximizing Google AdSense revenue:

TIP 1: Write for traffic. There is no point putting a page up with Google ads, or any other monetization option, if you are doomed to low traffic. This is one of the most common mistakes website writers make: they write pages on keywords that no one is searching for, or that many other sites already cover. You want to find keywords that are relevant to your site concept or theme, that are in demand, and that have low supply in terms of other sites offering information on those keywords. That way, people will be searching for your content, and not finding it anywhere else. Instant traffic for you!

The best tool, in my experience, for writing pages that get traffic, is Brainstorm It!, a web-based tool that comes as part of the Site Build It, or SBI, web hosting suite. Brainstorm It! helps you quickly find hundreds of keyword combinations that are in demand (many people searching) and with low supply (few pages showing up in search results) so you can climb quickly to the top of the search results for the keyword you're writing on. Brainstorm It uses the ratio of demand to supply to compute 'profitability'; the more profitable a page is, the easier it is to get search engine traffic to it.

When I started my site I signed up for SBI, and used Brainstorm It for about a week to research keywords on energy efficiency. I wound up with enough high profitability keywords to keep me busy for six months writing 4-5 web pages a week. And I've seen the results - the pages on my site with the highest profitability (the highest ratio of demand to supply) were the real traffic winners. There's one keyword, which I never would have thought of writing about without Brainstorm It, that has earned me more than 20% of my entire web traffic and income so far.

See the link at the bottom for my detailed review of Site Build It, including the Brainstorm It tool that comes as part of this excellent web hosting and online income building product.

TIP 2: Write for 'Buy' mode. Your Google AdSense ads need to be on pages that cover topics where people are preparing to buy something. You should try to write pages where people are looking for a product or service. I have pages on my site that cover particular types of products (energy efficient water heaters, or energy saving window coverings). These pages generate lots of AdSense clicks. Other pages that cover informational topics, such as energy saving checklists or energy saving ideas, get a fair amount of traffic but hardly any clicks, because the people who came to those pages weren't looking to buy anything.

Writing for 'Buy' mode helps in three ways. First off, people in 'Buy' mode (either ready to buy, or researching before a purchase) are more likely to respond to an ad that contains the type of product or service they are looking for. Second, advertisers are more likely to bid for ads on pages whose content targets the kinds of products or services they sell, so you'll get better targeted ads, and fewer non-paying public service announcements. And third, since advertisers are more likely to bid on these pages, the bids tend to be higher. I tend to get very low pay per click (PPC) payouts for my informational pages - perhaps a few cents per click - while my 'Buy' mode pages might get PPC rates of a dollar or more.

TIP 3: Use the right ad format. The ads that perform the best, according to the optimization tips Google provides, are the 336x280 text-and-graphics ads where the background matches the site background color. I have experimented with 250x250, 300x250, 338x280, skyscraper, banner, and link ads, and the 336x280 consistently outperform all the others.

TIP 4: Put the ads in the right place. Where you place the ads is as important as which format you choose. Google provides a heat map that shows that large, centered ads above the fold perform best, and my experiments confirm this. I have found that ads placed after the first one or two paragraphs of text perform best. If the paragraphs are long (more than 8 lines of text for the first two paragraphs combined) place the link after the first paragraph. If they are short (e.g. 2 2) place the ad after the second paragraph. The ads should be centered as well.

Never break up grammatically related content with an ad. You want to offer your visitor the opportunity to see the ad, as they take a breather in a logical place from the text copy. Putting your ad in the middle of a grammatically connected sequence (for example, between the clause introducing a bulleted list, and the list itself) means the reader jumps straight past the ad to continue the grammatical sequence. No one likes to stop halfway through an idea, or in the middle of an incomplete grammatical structure, to read an ad.

These factors (ad size, background, centering, and vertical placement) have a huge impact on click through rates. In one experiment, I tried 36 different combinations of factors: three horizontal placements (text flowing left around ad, text flowing right, or ad centered with no text around it); three vertical placements (after heading, after first paragraph, after second paragraph); two ad sizes (336x280, 300x250) and two palettes (background matching page background, or background not matching). The best performers by far were the 336x280 ads with blended background, centered below the first or second paragraph. The worst ads were left or right justified (allowing the user to just read around the ad without pausing to see what the ad had to offer); above the first paragraph (before you've caught the reader's attention with your page introduction); and with a non-matching ad background.

Finally, as far as ad placement goes, put another similar formatted ad near the bottom of each page (if the page is more than a screen or two of text) so that anyone who reads down to the end has an opportunity to click on an ad when they get down there. If they reach the bottom and all you offer them is a link to the home page or a site map, that's where they'll click (if they don't leave your site altogether). If there's an ad there, they might just click that! My click through rates on bottom-of-page ads are much lower than those for the top, but that little bit extra sure helps!

A side note to all of this: Make sure to apply appropriate custom AdSense channels to all of your ads when you create them, and create URL channels for all pages on your site that have AdSense ads. If you want to actually measure performance and adjust your AdSense strategy to focus on high-performing ad formats and pages, make sure to use both URL channels and custom channels in your AdSense setup.

URL channels let you track the performance of each page separately, so you can discover which pages are already highly profitable, and which ones are worth optimizing. Custom channels let you set different attributes to ads in different formats or positions; I used custom channels to track ad size, color, horizontal and vertical placement. When you look at detailed AdSense reports you can view the performance (impressions, clicks, CTR, eCPM, earnings) of each channel separately.

TIP 5: Target high bid keywords that relate to your page content. You should sign up with Google AdWords, create a campaign, and use the keyword tool to select appropriate keywords. By adding these keywords to your own AdWords campaign, you can get information on which keywords people are bidding highly on.

For instance, if you have a page on tradeshow booths, you may find that the maximum current bid for 'tradeshow booth' is $0.05. So you might not make much money from people clicking ads on such a page. But if you find another keyword, say 'tradeshow kiosk', that has a minimum bid of $1.50, then make sure this text occurs in your page (and belongs there - no keyword stuffing allowed!). You'll get more ads targeted for 'tradeshow kiosk' that earn somewhere in the range of $1.50 per click, and fewer ads targeted for 'tradeshow booth' that nickel and dime you. (These dollar amounts are fictitious and used only for illustration.)

For a single page, you might change your payouts from as little as 2 cents per click to as much as 2 dollars per click just by changing the focus of your page to address the high-bid keywords. Targeting your pages to contain the keywords with the highest bids will help maximize income. Of course, don't target keywords that are not relevant to your page. 'Tradeshow kiosk' might be worth $2 per click, but no one reading an article on tropical fishes is going to click on that ad, and you may be in violation of your agreement with Google if you try this (more on that below).

TIP 6: Consider using banner ads, but don't expect to make money on them directly. I suggest using graphic banner ads (for example, from advertisers using LinkShare or ShareASale) as part of your site masthead. You will probably get very few clicks on them, but I have found that they make a big difference to the click through rate of the other ads on the page. I had banner ads for several months, then found they didn't get clicked on, so I removed them and turned my site banner into a simple graphic. I later noticed that the click through rate on all my other ads went down by about 30%. I put the banner ads back, and lo and behold, people started clicking on the in-body ads again.

TIP 7: Don't overwhelm the user with ads. Stick to at most two Google ad units per page, and don't have any on your home page. You want your home page to lead people to pages on your site where you can earn a high PPC or sell a product. A home page full of ads is a turnoff; most people leave in a hurry without clicking any ads. An ad-free home page that leads you to other helpful pages on particular topics means the visitor is likely to click one of those links, and then may click the AdSense ad on the target page. Ads that are front and center on your home page are also likely to turn off potential link partners or others who might be inclined to send future traffic your way.

TIP 8: Rethink the Most Wanted Response (MWR) for low-paying pages. If you have a high traffic page that results in very low click throughs or very low pay per click (PPC), such as the informational pages that don't address visitors in 'Buy' mode, you may be better off to use that page to drive people to a Most Wanted Response that is also a More Likely Response than an ad click. A 0.5% click through rate that pays 8 cents a click isn't worth your while; if that's what you're getting on a particular page, and you haven't been able to improve on it, scrap the ads and use the copy to direct people to other actions that will help you monetize, either immediately or later. For example: lead them to a page where they will learn of the benefits of a product, that may lead them to either buy from your online store or your affiliates, or to click on an AdSense ad. Get them to sign up for your monthly e-zine, so that you can draw them back to your site another time, when they may be in buy mode. Or get them to contribute content to your Web 2.0 section, which can become further food for the search engines.

TIP 9: Don't sabotage your MWR with AdSense. Don't use AdSense on pages with a different MWR. If your pages generate higher revenue in some other way, don't have AdSense on them. You might have a MWR that users sign up for a course, or buy a trade show booth, or subscribe to a newsletter, because in the long run a user who does this will earn you $2 or $5 or $20 or $100. For pages like this that lead to big earnings, don't have any ads. It's not worth losing a potential big sale just to make a few cents on the occasional click. Stick to your MWR.

TIP 10: Experiment! The above ideas are based on what works on my home energy efficiency website. They may not be what works on a blog, a community forum, or some other type of website. Try different formats, placements, and so on, and see which works best for you. And remember to gather enough data to validate that you have a correct conclusion. For example, 100 impressions of two different ad formats, with one generating 3 clicks and the other 6, is not statistically significant. On the other hand, 300 impressions, with one generating 3 clicks and the other generating 20, probably is!

Remember, while experimenting is fine, you should never t violate your agreement with Google. Make sure you never violate the AdSense terms and conditions, for example:

* Never click on your own ads, or ask friends or family to do so, or otherwise artificially inflate your click through rate 
* Never include incentives on your pages for visitors to click ads 
* Never disclose your click through rate or other AdSense statistics to others (except for your gross payments from AdSense). 
* Never place excessive, repetitive, or irrelevant keywords on pages containing AdSense ads 
* Never show more AdSense units per page than allowed. The current limit is three ad units and three link units.

Also, set up your AdSense account so that only websites you authorize can host your ads. This can prevent some forms of abuse where a competitor, for example, throws your publisher ID on a page elsewhere, and then clicks on that ad repeatedly, which makes Google consider you to be in violation of your agreement, even if you didn't do it yourself.

If you follow the above guidelines, you should see much better click through rates and higher earnings per click for a little extra work. Just don't lose sight of the importance of providing quality, in demand content to your users. If you focus only on ad revenue, your content will suffer, and people will stop coming to your site. There's no point having a high click through rate if your traffic is plunging towards zero!
Robin Green is the owner of Green-Energy-Efficient-Homes.com, a website dedicated to helping people save energy on heating, cooling, lighting, and other energy uses in their homes. For more on how he used Site Build It!, and its Brainstorm It! tool to build a website from nothing to 25,000 pageviews a month in just 9 months
source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Improving-Google-AdSense-Earnings-on-Your-Website---Ten-Tips-to-Get-Higher-Ad-Revenue&id=2338842

This post was written by: Franklin Manuel

Franklin Manuel is a professional blogger, web designer and front end web developer. Follow him on Twitter