Advertising Positioning

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Category: Content

There is no magic bullet  to improve your advertising earnings. The thought that experimenting on a live site while trying achieve the best results for advertising seems a bit scary at first, but the fact is you have to try as many setups as you can to find the solution that works.

Google has a "heat map" of where to place adds for statistical results but experimenting is still the best way you can find, what works for your site and moreover for your visitors.

Ads are often placed within the main content, generally right above it, but there are no rules and there are at times better places to have them.  News and blog sites can often get a better response by having ads placed between the content and comments area, as people may pause to reflect while staring at your ads.

Placing ads on the left of your page work better because text is generally written from left to right.

When people finish a sentence, they tend to return their eyes to the left position, which means they have a better chance of seeing your ads.

There's more to just having ads in the right place. If you have additional ads you should worry about where they're located in the code as well. Google creates the ads in the order it finds them in the source. That means if the first add in the code isn't generating the highest revenue, you may soon start to lose money, rather then earn more.

IF AdSense doesn't have enough ads relating to your content, it will fill your space with public service ads or just leave it blank altogether. That means you could end up with your most profitable locations not having any good ads at all.

If you have too many ads, rather then generate more income, you'll have a lower click rate, and visitors may leave your site altogether, never to come back.

You have to keep track of how the users view your site. Analyze your site to see where visitors are going to and coming from and adjust accordingly. Keeping ads limited on landing pages and then placing them in the proper locations on the favorite pages works very well.  Placing ads in annoying positions leave a bad taste in visitor's minds and can guarantee a lower click through rate.

Of course, you always need to have ads that fit with your content and don't make the visitor's presence on your site an unpleasant one. The key is providing an enjoyable experience for your visitor, provide them what they want and make a little money while doing so.

Check out AdSense's channels feature and watch how certain ads are doing while altering the positions to get better click throughs.

Is Google Adsense worth using?

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Category: Content

In order to use Google Adsense you must have a website.  If you are on some type of hosting service that is limited, such as a blog service or free hosting, there is a chance that you may be able to use Google Adsense and may need to check the faq's of your provider or contact them directly to see if Googles scripts may be run and if you can edit html.  With the costs of hosting and domains being as cheap as it is, not having a website due to financial concerns is a rather lame excuse.  If you can't afford a website, perhaps you should get off the internet and find some "real" work. Though many people make money and some even a living from the internet, there are countless others that will never (despite their great effort), make a substantial amount of money from their effort on the web. The use of Google Adsense can help offset the costs of hosting and if your site has many visitors you could even make some real money, so long as you have a large targeted audience. Google Adsense is not the only game in town, more on this in another story, another time.

Google's' concept is simple, if they can guess at what a viewer of thier ad wants to buy and present them with a snippet of information that can get that consumer to buy a product from one of their customers, then they will make money.  They do a little more that guess at what consumers want to buy.  You may notice that when you are at car review sites, the Google ads are about cars, if you go to a site about electronics you will see Google ads about electronics. The ads change in almost real-time and are seriously targeted based on the content of the exact page you are on.

Targeted ads are wonderful except a service or product you sell and have created pages for will also have Google ads right next to your content trying to lure your visitors off to another site so they can purchase an item or lose interest in your site completely.  Well at least you got a few cents from Google for the click through.  But wait, seems Google has thought about that and allows you to block ads by category or by url, so if you have a competitor that is constantly beating your price you could block their ads from your site.  Makes perfect sense which might be why it's called Google Adsense.

Gaming sites, personal blogs, basically any website can benefit from Google Adsense.  The webmaster of the sites gets some revenue for allowing advertisements and advertisers get a targeted audience for their advertisements.  It's a win-win.