Adsense Archives - My Multiple Streams

Adsense Tips and Tricks Part 2

January 19, 2012 by Jeff Davidson 5 Comments

Hey there and welcome to part 2 of Adsense Tips and Tricks Part 2. That would lead one to believe that there must be a part 1 somewhere, and in case you missed it you can check it out at Adsense Tips and Tricks Part 1. So lets get into a couple more tips here.

Images not always worth a thousand words.

With your ad blocks you also have the choice of test or image ads, or let google mix em up for you. This is kinda a mix bag and you’ll have to decide what’s best for you. You see the nice image ads (any size) are recognized as just that, ads. We all know how ads started as those 468×60 banner ads and we all tend to avoid them like the plague. I go with that theory with all image ads, they don’t get clicked that often. The other side of the coin is that image blocks typically are higher bid ads thus earning you more per click. Image ads can also earn you CPM income, a couple cents just for showing the ads with out clicks. I have on some sites kept a skyscraper ad or even a 250 block in the sidebar as text/image but for the most part have switched to all text ads and have seen income overall go up a bit since. Also since you are allowed 3 to a page perhaps one text only and one image only?

Text Links, the Other White Meat

With adsense you are allowed 3 ad blocks AND 3 text links per page but very few take advantage of these other ads. My most clicked on ad style is the 728×15 text links that I put under my menus (as seen above on this page). Another good one is the 200×90 stacked text links, place in your side bar in-between widgets such as recent posts and categories. If google’s contextual ads are working it will look just like your list and get clicks. I have been seeing that for the most part (not always the case) that these clicks are not worth as much as regular ad blocks, but they do seem to get lots of clicks so its another catch 22 and a judgement call. Having at least one some where is a good idea though.

I have wondered if I didn’t have those ad links on the sites, would it translate to the same amount of clicks on the higher paying ads? Part of me says no but Im am doing a test by removing the top text links on a site that was getting a decent amount of those clicks and will see how it pans out after a week.

Content is King

Of course if you have interest based ads switched off adsense serves ads based on your content and keywords. Now you most likely are not writing you blogs for adsense unless you are doing niche sites. But no mater your subject it doesnt hurt to structure your posts with adsense in mind, just like doing SEO. You can use free tools such as Google’s adwords keyword tool or paid programs such as Market Samurai to do keyword research for you posts. These tools will tell you how much a keyword or keyword phrase is searched as well as tell you what adsense ad bids that can be expected as well. Of these ad bids you would expect to see 60%-70% (but not always). So you may want to take some time to do keyword research so you can keep them in mind when writing your posts.

Little Word on Ad Networks

What we all should be doing is using channels (more on that later) and creating different ad blocks to test things like color, position, text, etc and when we find what performs well for us the we go with it. There is another area people look at and its the ad networks, but don’t treat this like the other testing. Some will look at the reports of ad networks and see that some networks don’t seem to be paying out much so in their mind if they block this ad network then google will choose ads from the other higher paying networks instead. This is a mistake!

With colors and positions once you find what works and eliminate the others it is not effecting the auction process for the highest paying ads to appear, you are working more on your CTR. If you block an ad network you are essentially limiting bidders for advertising on your site. If adsnese served an ad from a lesser paying network its because there were no other ads from the other networks that would pay more. Adsense is always going to serve the highest (or best) ads for your spots from among all the networks.

So do not block any ad networks! If you are looking to block specific content or ads there are better ways to do that.

Get Help From Adsense

Finally there is a way to get help from the adsense folks themselves. Its a slim chance but the have introduced a way that you can get personalized suggestions by email. In your account while you are on the home page go down and click on Account Settings. In the first section ‘Personal Settings’ click edit please 🙂 You’ll then see a check box titled ‘Customized help and performance suggestions’. If you check this box you get a chance at adsense sending you a personalized email with suggestions for better using adsense on your site or sites. Dont hold your breath though, haven’t seen one yet, but dosnet hurt to have it checked and perhaps get a little help. After all it is in their best interest that you do well.

Test, Test, Test

Of course every site is different so the best route is to test often to find what best works for your site. If you have a blog that you post regularly on you will do things different than if you are creating niche sites that you would build and park. Above all it takes time, adsense is not going to make you rich as soon as you put up a site. I have over a dozen blogs and niche sites that I work on. Some become instant hits and have generated adsense revenue right away others have taken months to get first click. Couple sites bring in the majority of the income while a others just trickle in a little once in awhile (it all ads up)

Don’t be discouraged as once you get it set up it is the easiest way to earn a bit of money with out doing much at all. Im not an expert like some of the big dogs out there that earn thousands off adsense each month, but with time I hope to be 🙂 Will the be a part 3? I am thinking about it, there are a couple more subject to consider but may make them posts on their own. I will continue to post tips as I discover new ideas that work for me, and there are other topics such as channels that I will cover. If you want an in depth guide to adsense, the e-book over in my sidebar was a great read and covers other ad sources as well.

Let me know what you think! What you would like to know more about! Do you have any tips?

Adsense Tips and Tricks Part 1

January 16, 2012 by Jeff Davidson 17 Comments

Decided to keep the adsense theme going in my posts as it is something I am working quite a bit on and my 20 readers (yep got a few more) seem to want to know what Im doing. So I will divulge some of the things I am currently doing to try an maximize my return with adsense. After working on this last night it became almost 1800 word so decided to do it in 2 parts.

I first would like to say that adsense is perhaps the best passive income source there is out there. Yes it may take some work to get it where you like but after that you don’t really have to do anything and you earn an income. May be small, couple bucks a month, or even hundreds a month but every little bit helps.

I will assume that you already have an adsense account and are looking to fine tune your ads. One of the first is inserting your ads into your site and if you use wordpress I recently wrote an article on the Quick Adsense plugin which is a great tool for inserting your ads. We have also discussed shutting off the Interest based Ads on your account as well so that the ads are based on your content.

Colors of Your Ad

Some like to make their ads stand out from the rest of their site. In studies though it is shown that if a visitor knows it’s an ad they tend to avoid it like its a zombie (just watched zombie land sorry) rather than click on it. So the best thing to do is have them blend in and look like part of your site, and even better part of your content.

Start off with the background and border of the ad, you should make this match your background color of your site. If you have some funky image or texture it will make this hard but do your best.
Next make the title link the same color as your sites hyperlinks
Again make the description text the same color as your general text. This is not always black.
Finally the url at the bottom of the ad, make it the faintest grey you can. So its still visible but not so much

All this makes the ads look like part of the content of your site. Some may say you are tricking people to click, but not really. As the ad will hopefully be related to your content, which they searched for in the first place. So they will want to click on it to find more information.

Type Font

I wrote recently about the change adsense made to the Default Font Family. If you leave the font to the ‘Default Font Family’ adsense will now select what they feel is the best performing font for your site. I haven’t done a lot of performance testing here but have discovered that any of my sites where default was selected it tended to pick ‘Times New Roman’ even though the preview in set up showed a Tahoma font. To keep your site looking nice and flowing its probably best that you select the font that best matches your text. Not a lot of choices but unless you have a really funky font one of them will work. Along with font you have the option to select font size. Again don’t leave this to default, set a size that matches your site best.

Size Does Mater (no mater what she says)

Sometimes you just can’t squeeze a square peg in a round hole, or a 336 wide ad block into your narrow sidebar. But it does seem that higher bid ads are attracted to the bigger blocks such as that 336×280 or the 160×600 skyscraper, or even that leader board. This of course results in higher payouts per click. So it may benefit you to make one of those 3 ad blocks per page a larger ad.

Location, Location, Location

Where you place your ad blocks can be equally important to your earnings as well. The number one location is above the fold, when your site first appears what ever is visible without scrolling. You also want to place ad blocks with in the normal reading course of your page. A common place is right at the top or your post. A lot of people just place a big ad block right at the top of the page and centered (and most don’t change the colors like above). This screams ad to me. So if you are going to place one up here (300 or 336 ad block recommended), left justify it so your post wraps around the ad and it looks more like your content.

You can also place these ads at the end of your post, again keep it left justified and be sure you do the colors as mentioned. This gives your visitors somewhere to go after reading your post. Done right it looks like follow up links to what they just read and it will be natural for them to click one. One of my best performers is to place a 468×60 text ad with in the middle of the post, looks like a nice referral link. Of course most of this depends on google serving up some good context ads and not interest based ads. Really screams ad if they are reading about hoe to get out of debt and a link pops up in the middle about weight loss.

Ok thats it for today, Part 2 will come later in the week so stay tuned! Cant wait? well grab the e-book over in my sidebar for lots of in depth strategies for adsense.

WordPress Fun #5: Adsense

January 9, 2012 by Jeff Davidson 5 Comments

With my recent posts on Adsense I though Id share my favorite plug-in for adding Adsense to your wordpress site. Adsense provides you with code snippets that you would normally add to your html of your page, but doing this each and every time can get tedious. What you need is an easy way to do it once and be done with it!

Quick Adsense

Quick Adsense is an easy to use plug-in for inserting ads into your posts automatically. It also creates widgets on the fly to drag to your sidebar or where ever else you have widgets located. The way they have it set up in settings seems a little backwards to me as they ask about ad placement first then asks you to input your ad codes. So Im going to show you in the order I think it should go.

Insert ads for posts and pages

Skip the begin gin section on go down to the adsense ads area you see here. This is where you paste in your different adsense ad codes, set its alignment and and margin you think you need. Now I keep saying adsense code but in reality you can enter any ad code that you wish. This is handy especially since adsense limits you to 3 of any type of ad on any given page.

Choose Locations

Now that you have all your ads entered you need to set where they will appear so scroll back up to the top of the page and you will see a list of ‘postitions’ for your ads. Its as simple as check which positions you want an ad to show then select which ad you wish to show there. You can even select random and let the plug in choose. I typically have a block add at the beginning of a post followed by a banner ad mid content or at the end.

The next section ‘appearance’ allows you to choose what type of content the ads will show on. I typically keep it to just posts, mainly as adsense does not like to see ads on pages like your privacy policy and contact page. You will also see after that section all the quick tags you can use to manually insert tags, but more important a quick tag to insert if you wish no ads to appear in a particular post.

Oh you will also notice a check box that will hide the ads from you in case you are prone to clicking your own ads!

Widgets and Sidebar

The plugin also creates widgets for you to drag to your sidebar for ad placement. Just like the first step above the last section provides you with 10 boxes to place ads into. Once you hit save you can then go to your widget panel and you will see the new ‘AdsWidget1’ (or whatever number you created) and you can simply drag it over to your sidebar location.

Now Im sure there are other plugins out there that do similar functions. I have a couple of them myself, but for what I need on my niche sites this has been by far the easiest to use and set up for me so far

If you do use another let me know about it, always looking to try new plugins to make my life easier 🙂

Adsense Change, How Does it Affect You?

January 6, 2012 by Jeff Davidson 5 Comments

Don’t let the title scare you it is a minor change and Im actually not quite sure how it will affect us.

When you create your ads you may have noticed, and hopefully used, ways to customize the look of your ads. This allows us to change colors of the fonts, background and border as well as changing the type of font we want to use and size. This allows you to make the ads look more a part of your site or make them really stand out. Most of us will use this to make the ads blend in more and this is recommend (more on this in a post to come). Changing the font to match your site along with the colors is one of the ways to do this and this is where the change comes in.

When you first start out you may not be changing these and leave it on ‘Adsense default font family’ , which looks like Veranda. If you leave it on this setting now Adsense will make a determination on what ‘ the best performing option’ will be. This will depend on things like the visitors browser and operating system as well as the ad unit itself. They didn’t mention things like your sites font. The goal is to have your ads perform at their best but my feeling is that this may not be the best option if you are concerned with the overall appearance of your site.

For the record I have not seen any effects of this on my sites, but for the most part I change the font to match my sites font (or close to it). So I am only speaking hypothetically here but if you have ads that are in your content you like them to blend in with your content (same font, color, hyperlink color) and wouldn’t want the font to be different or larger . Like I mentioned I select the font and size I want to match my site. Even though adsense says they will set it to give you’re the best performance, I’m just not ready to leave it totally up to them. Maybe it will make the ads perform a bit better but it may also mess up the look of your site which can effect other aspects such as bounce rates and retaining viewers

So what I’m I trying to tell ya? Not quite sure but to at least be aware of this new setting that took affect Dec 20th. It may be the best thing or it may hurt your overall site. I may try an experiment with one of my sites and see what it does.

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle!!