Building Blog Revenue: Adsense Ad Relevance and Ad Placement

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Written by Brandon on December 25, 2007 – 11:55 pm -

There are two major topics have been haunting people since the beginning of Google Adsense: Adsense Ad Relevance and Adsense Ad Placement. These two factors will have the largest affect on your ability to produce revenue on your blog using this program. In this article, I will cover the fundamentals of making your ads relevant and the placement of your ads. Then, I will cover several quirks that are must needed knowledge when weaving through the Adsense riches minefield.

Have you ever made a blog post on bicycles, say, only to have the Adsense ads next to the bicycle post show up with ads for juicers? I have, and it stinks. No one is going to click on an ad for a juicer next to a post on bicycles. If you’ve had similar occurrences, then ask yourself these 5 basic questions:

How long ago did you write the post? If you wrote a post recently and the ads are showing up not relevant, it may still take some time for Adsense to crawl your site to get the correct content. According to Google, the Adsense Crawler (which is different than the Google Crawler) may take up to a week to crawl your content. If your post has been up less than one week then be patient before your freak. For more on the Adsense Crawler, check out this link.
Is your web page behind a restricted login page? There are ways to get around this with the latest version of Adsense, but this may be a problem that is not easy to fix. My only suggestion is to not have Adsense on pages that are not publicly accessible.
How much text-based content is in your post? For example, I use excerpts of posts on category pages, but I also show ads between the excerpts. How long should I make these excerpts? I’ve now tried several experiments, and I’ve found that if the title (between your title tags in the head of your web page) is relevant to the ads you want, then a 50 word excerpt from the article with at least a couple of keywords is adequate to get good ads. Anything less than a 50 word excerpt is pushing it.
Does your page have adult content? This won’t get through for ads even if you just use swear words a lot.
Is the Adsense code placed within an iFrame on your site? If so, then this could be a potential problem getting relevant ads for the adjacent content.

Let’s say you’ve gotten this far, you’ve reviewed all these questions, tweaked your website accordingly, and you still are not getting relevant content for your blog posts. Then there is one secret weapon that you will want to use which are the Google section targeting tags. These tags let you target particular sections of content on a web page while ignoring other content. The tags are:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>
<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

An example of its use might be:
 A paragraph about dogs   A paragraph about shoes 

This bit of code will give you ads on dogs but not on shoes. It’s just that simple. I recommend trying this out in your post templates of your blog, however, I warn you that it may again need a couple of weeks for the Adsense crawler to find the code. So, you won’t receive any instant gratification on this. By the way, you will still need a decent bit of text for Adsense to analyze. One word with these tags around it will not get the results you want.

Now, on to Ad Placement. Let’s start with Google official words on great ad placement, and then I’ll give you my personal experience. Google has created a handy diagram for the best ad placement which is linked here.

Blog ad placement

I highly suggest putting ads in the same manner shown above. You could write volumes about what to do to optimize Adsense ad placement, but here are five simple steps that you should follow:

Show ads just like the diagram above on your blog.
Assign each ad its own “channel”. A channel allows you to differentiate between one ad placement and another. put a different channel for your home page, single post pages, and archive pages, sidebar, and header.
Watch the performance of these ads for two weeks
Chose the top three performers in terms of click through rates
Get rid of all the other ads because the top three performers will probably do much better than the rest by many factors of magnitude. And, underperforming ads just make a cluttered and unreadable page.

I love to experiment, so I would try different ad sizes and colors, but if you’re not the experimenting type, then here are the top three performing placements, by far, for my blogs:

468×60 ad size on a single post below the post title and post information. Single posts are the most googled posts, not the home page. When people land on the home page they are just browsing. When people land on a single post, they are looking for something in particular. By the way, don’t use a big fat square in a post. It looks cheap and stupid, and I think it will hurt your overall brand even if you get better short term clickthrough. I get between 2% and 4% clickthrough. If I have 10,000 viewers each day that means potentially 400 ads clicked at $.25 per ad, say. That’s $100 for not having to do too terribly much but have good ad placement.
Search on the sidebar. Here’s the deal, I have very few people use my search bar, but the ones that do often click on an ad when they get search results. I’ve received upwards of 30%-40% clickthrough rate on my search, but it only accounts for a small percentage of the overall traffic to the site. If you can get your search to somehow be fun and attractive to users of the site, then you may be in store for some massive revenue potential. Google has created a clunky, ugly search form which you can completely modify to your needs. I suggest really thinking about how you make this search stand out and be attractive for people to use. You may even consider having a separate page devoted to search that people use on a daily basis.
5 keyword link unit in the sidebar near the top of the page. I don’t know why, but this link has amazing clickthrough rates for me. Maybe it’s because the ad looks like part of the categories links, I don’t know. But, the rates are in the 30% range. I really can’t believe that nearly one third of the people that visit would click on this. The only explanation I have is that this unit is located on one of my low traffic sites and when the traffic boosts less people will click. In other words, this may be the luck of the draw.

Finding these three placements has lead to my overall clickthrough rate to go up by a factor of five on most of my sites. These are the best ad placements for my Adsense ads, but this leaves a lot of free real estate. Do NOT clutter this real estate up with Adsense ads. In stead, I suggest finding a “premium” ad provider that will give you big, flashy ads that look better and pay better. If your traffic is over 1000 people per day then you should be able to find a better ad provider than Adsense. Or, you could get the advertisers yourself. This is by far the most lucrative yet most difficult route.

As a recap, I’ve covered two major factors for creating strong revenue in your adsense regime. There are literally dozens of techniques for making these ads work for your, but these factors are the baseline when using ads. In the future I’ll cover other adsense revenue generating angles including arbitrage, widgets, Adsense sharing among others. If this was helpful, drop me a note in the form of a comment. I’d love to hear your opinion.