Today (years later) AdSense have announced what we’ve all been suspecting would happen for ages - they’re integrating AdSense with Google Analytics stats.

It isn’t available to all publishers yet (they’re rolling it out gradually) but if it is you’ll see an invitation in your AdSense admin area. Here’s how AdSense describe it:

“you’ll now have access to granular reports that break down AdSense performance both by page and by referring site. Armed with this new data about user behavior, you’ll be able to make more informed decisions on how to improve the user experience on your site and optimize your AdSense units to increase your revenue potential.”

Being able to know which specific pages on your blog are earning a lot (or not much) and which sites traffic earns you the most is going to open our eyes as publishers to many possibilities and hopefully more profitable blogging.

Here’s a video from AdSense that hopefully sheds some more light on this new feature for those of us not yet able to access it.

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Since activating them I’ve had around 1 email a day from readers telling me that they are seeing ’strange’ ads. The feedback is that some readers are seeing ads for scammy ‘make money online’ products (relevant but not really what I’d want to associate my brand with) or irrelevant ads.

Last night a reader (Pawel from SEOblogr) emailed to tell me that he was seeing ads for a Gay Chubby Dating service. He sent me this screenshot (click to enlarge).

Now I’m sure ProBlogger has its fair share of Gay Chubby reader who are looking for dates - but it’s not the most relevant ad in the world - certainly not ‘contextual’ as the post it appeared under was about the names that people leave comments under on blogs.

I’m wondering if this ‘irrelevant’ AdSense for RSS feeds is impacting others? I do know that irrelevant ads impact normal AdSense ad units from time to time but it seems I’ve had a lot more complaints about them in my feed than any other ad unit.

PS: I took a few minutes to scan through other b5media blogs to see how relevant the AdSense ads are on them. In most cases they are pretty good. The only other explanation I can think of is that perhaps because the ads are geotargetted that in some parts of the world there are less ads in the system and that relevancy suffers in these places.

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Well it seems that the time is coming soon where you’ll be able to read AdSense stats in your Analytics reports. The kinds of stuff you’ll be able to see:

• Which pages on your blog get the most AdSense clicks
• Which pages have the highest CPM
• Which pages have the highest CTR
• AdSense graphs/trends
• Which traffic sources generate the highest income

Digital Inspiration has just published some screenshots of the new reports that we’ll hopefully be able to find in Google Analytics soon.

For example this ‘Top AdSense Content’ page looks at your different pages of content and how they perform (click to enlarge):

This is the ‘AdSense Overview’ page:

The AdSense Revenue Page (which gives a graph of AdSense earnings over time)

‘AdSense Content’ Page

AdSense Referring Sites Page:

This kind of reporting is something that AdSense publishers have been asking for years. It is going to open up some amazing possibilities for optimizing your content for AdSense. The only question is - when will it become available???

Interestingly the AdSense blog is saying that AdSense will be down for maintenance this Saturday (13th) between 10am to 2pm PDT. Perhaps what they’re doing is getting this new launch ready?

Update

I’ve asked Google for comment on this and they responded with a ‘no comment’. However I’ve been hearing from a number of services that the maintenance this weekend is NOT to put this new functionality in place and that it’s probably a couple of weeks away before we’ll see this released.

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AdSense for feeds is similar to most AdSense ads in that the ads served in your feeds are a mixture of CPM and CPC ads.

Publishers setting up AdSense for feeds have a number of options when it comes to ad formats (text alone, text and image and just image ads), design (colors) and how often ads are displayed (you can have ads appear every 1,2,3 posts or only on posts over a certain amount of words).

If you’re a Feedburner Ad Network publisher you now need to set up AdSense for feeds to keep monetizing your feeds.

For more information see the AdSense Blog announcement.

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Long time readers of ProBlogger know that Darren is a big fan of split testing ads to improve your earnings. I took this advice to heart, and wanted to show you some real world results that I got on my own blog.

Feel free to take these results and apply them to your own site. Or better yet, do some of our own testing and improve on them even more!

I split tested 3 separate regions of my site and looked mostly at eCPM to compare them. If you aren’t sure what eCPM is click here. I think it’s better to use eCPM than click through rate (CTR) because it incorporates not just how often it’s clicked, but also how much you make per click.

Right Aligned vs. Left Aligned Ad In Post Body

This ad region makes the most money for me, and was smack dab at the top of each individual post page (but not on the homepage).

• The right aligned ad got a 0.78% CTR and $1.41 eCPM
• The left aligned ad got a 1.30% CTR and $5.31 eCPM

Clear winner: left aligned (276% improvement)

It’s hard to say why this is exactly. Maybe the left aligned ad looks more like it’s actual content instead of an ad. Whatever the reason, the difference was substantial.

Top Right: image vs. text

This ad resides at the very top right of every page. I had been running it with image ads for a while and decided to test it against text ads (with some appropriate color choices).

• The image ads got a 0.35% CTR and $1.74 eCPM
• The text ads got a 0.33% CTR and $2.15 eCPM

Interesting to note here that although the CTR went down slightly, the eCPM went up. This seems to indicate that the text ads were paying more per click. So even though it was clicked slightly less often it still made more money overall.

Winner: text ads (narrowly)

Under Posts: image vs. text

This ad was placed at the bottom of each post page and also on the homepage under the excerpts. I again decided to test some text ads against the incumbent image ads.

• The image ads got a 0.58% CTR and $1.86 eCPM
• The text ads got a 0.43% CTR and $2.27 eCPM

Again here the CTR went down and the eCPM went up. Also worth noting is that the color scheme I used on the text ad block is consistent with my site. “Blockquote” tags on my site use a similar color scheme.

Winner: text ads

Conclusions & Next Steps

For those who are curious, here is the actual data from an excel spreadsheet. You can pull this out of Adsense under the “reports” tab if you use different channels to compare different ads.

Overall these results were impressive. The site-wide eCPM from these three ads went up overall from $5.01 to $9.73 which is a 94% improvement.

I could just convert all ads to the better performing version and call it a day, but what I’ll do instead is continue testing….forever.

There are plenty of other things to test, such as…

• Trying text ads in the post body (since they performed better elsewhere)
• Left aligning ads under the posts
• Trying different color schemes
• Trying other types of ads (Amazon, Performancing Ads, Text-Link-Ads, etc)

Most people focus on growing their blog’s readership to boost earnings. This is a critical component, but don’t forget about the other major tool in your arsenal: split testing.

What ad formats and placements have worked best for you? Leave us a comment below.

To get more tips like these, check out my blog at StartBreakingFree.com. It’s is a blog for people who’d like to quit their 9-to-5 jobs, start their own business, and achieve financial freedom. I’ll even give you 3 of the top 10 books on building wealth for FREE when you subscribe, instantly delivered to your inbox! Check it out.

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These changes largely revolve around new features that they’ve added to AdWords to let advertisers target websites differently (more control).

One of the big changes is the introduction of ‘Ad Planner’ (currently in an invite only beta test) which allows advertisers to search for sites with certain demographics and interests. Advertisers can now also target sites with a combination of both contextual targeting (having their ads appear on pages with certain keywords) as well as placement targeting (targeting specific sites and ad positions on them).

Really there are no changes in terms of features for us as publishers - but it will be interesting to see how these changes impact the bottom line. It should advantage bloggers targeting specific niches and lucrative demographics (what those demographics are we’re yet to see). It’s also incentive to develop blog posts that target popular keywords to advertisers. It could hurt sites with more mixed topics and demographics.

Here’s the email from AdSense.



As one of our AdSense partners, we’d like to keep you updated on changes and improvements to the Google ads ecosystem. We’re writing to let you know about some recent developments in how advertisers can find and target your sites, which are intended to bring more advertisers to the AdSense content network. We hope that this will result in increased revenue for publishers like you while also benefiting your users with even more relevant ads.

The Google AdSense Team

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This is news that many of us expected - particularly since Google bought DoubleClick earlier in the year. It’s also not surprising as most publishers that I know have had very little success with the Referrals program within AdSense. In fact I’m one of the only people that I know who made much from it - and that almost dried up when they changed the referrals program for AdSense.

If You Promote AdSense Referrals Products…

If you’re a blogger promoting some kind of AdSense Referrals product it’s time to remove the ad and replace it with something else. You can still run the ads but they’ll stop working in the last week of August.

It is not clear whether the referrals that you’ve made that have not converted will also become void in the last week of August also. This is something I’d like to see AdSense clarify as some of their programs have quite long lead times for those that you refer to ‘convert’ and therefore to earn you money.

Google Affiliate Network

The new Google Affiliate Network does not something that everyone will be able to use. They say that they are targeting sites with largely US based traffic - I’m yet to see any clarification on how they’ll be filtering publishers, whether there is a traffic based minimum to get in etc. Time will tell as publishers start applying. At present I know that Performics has accepted me as a publisher (I was previously using it) so it’s not too hard to get into I hope!

No More Google Affiliate Products

Those of you promoting ‘Google Products’ through the current ‘Referrals’ system should know that there are no plans at this point to have these products available to promote through the new affiliate network. They may come later but my sources at Google say that these programs are coming to an end and there will be no immediate way to make money by sending them new AdSense publishers, AdWords advertisers etc.

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It’s not advanced but if you’re just starting out with AdSense it’s worth a watch.

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What are video units?

“video units are embedded, customizable video players which both enrich sites with relevant video content and enable publishers to earn extra revenue. Relevant and non-intrusive companion and text ads accompany the video content.” Read more about AdSense video units.

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Since then I’ve chatted to one of the team at Google about the integration and asked if I could see them in the wild somewhere. They shot me a link to this RSS feed where you can view them in Google Reader on each post.

Interestingly in this feed I’m seeing a real variety of ads (both in terms of advertisers and types of as) including:

So we’re seeing text ads, image ads and at least two sizes.

A little concerning is that the relevancy of the ads are not that contextual as far as I can see. The feed is from a music blog. Some ads are matching - others don’t at all.

He also told me that they’re rolling these out to both existing Feedburner Ad Network publishers and AdSense publishers - a small group initially but it won’t take long for it to be opened up further.

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Google bought Feedburner last year and so this has been talked about for a while now - but in the coming weeks they’ll begin to run AdSense in the feeds of those publishers who are a part of the Feedburner Ad Network. Initially it’ll be with a small group of publishers with a full launch for all Feedburner publishers ’soon’.

They write:

“Publishers already in the FeedBurner Ad Network will continue to see premium CPM ads directly sold onto their content, but with the added bonus of contextually targeted ads that will fill up the remainder of their inventory.”

“For publishers who are not yet placing ads in their feeds, any publisher who meets the requirements to join the AdSense program will also be able to use AdSense for feeds. You will be able to manage your feed ad units directly from AdSense Setup tab, and track performance right on the AdSense Report tab.”

To be a part of AdSense for Feeds you’ll need to be signed up for AdSense and set up your channels for ‘placement targeting’.

If you’re not an AdSense publishers sign up here:

This is great news because to this point AdSense did have an option for advertising in feeds that was a closed beta test (something that has been closed and not really developed for years) and the Feedburner Ad Network was also not available for all publishers.

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Today I want to talk readers through how to do this - it’s not as complicated as you might think!

What is Split Testing?

Also sometimes called A/B testing, split testing means that you run two different versions of an AdSense ad unit on your blog so that you can see which one performs best. You serve one version of the ad to one visitor, and then another version to the next visitor.

If you do this over a large number of visitors you’ll get a bit enough sample to be able to draw some conclusions about which ad design works best in that particular ad position.

How to Run a Split Test on Your AdSense Ads

Split testing sounds complicated but it is relatively simple to set up. In short, all it really involves is setting up a couple of channels within your AdSense account so that you can track the results and then inserting a little extra code around the AdSense code in your blog’s templates. Here’s how:

1. set up two different custom channels in your AdSense account. They might be called something like ‘test A’ and ‘test B’.

2. generate two different ad units in the back end of your AdSense account. Make them identical sized formats but give them two different color palettes. Copy the codes AdSense gives you and put them into a text document - you’ll need them in a minute.

3. take the following code insert the two ad units codes that you just generated into it were it indicates:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
    var random_number = Math.random();
    if (random_number < .5){
        //your first ad unit code goes here
    } else {
        //your second ad unit code goes here
    }
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”     src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”></script>

ie - you need to replace the bolded lines with your two different AdSense codes.

4. Insert everything into your blog’s template in the appropriate spot for the ad to make it position where you want it to show.

With the above code you should now see the two different color palettes rotating on your blog. It will show one 50% of the time and the other the other 50% of impressions.

You can then log into your AdSense reports area after the script has been rotating for a while to see which one is performing best. Give it a day or two to run before you make too many changes as it can take a little while to get the ad having shown enough times to draw any solid conclusions.

Variations on the Test

You can do the same split test to work out what Ad Unit Size is converting best. The process is identical but instead of having your two ad units with different colors make the only variation their sizes (ie keep the colors the same).

You could also test any other element that you have control over. For example the different corner options, image ads vs text ads etc.

Lastly - you don’t have to make the split test a 50/50 one. You could specify for one ad unit to show up 95% of the time and the other only 5%. This means only a small number of your readers see the new ad unit (good if you’re testing something bold). To do this simply vary the “.5″ to another number. For example .9 would show one ad 90% of the time.

Final Tips

• Backup your templates before experimenting. If you mess it up somehow you can then quickly revert to your original setup.
• Make one of the ads you rotate one that you’ve been testing for a while so as to give a good baseline result to compare to.
• Don’t experiment with multiple changes at once. For example if you test ad size and colors at once you won’t be able to identify the specific element that cases the changes in ad performance.
• Once you’ve worked out which of your two ad units performs best keep testing with other options. Take your best performing one and test that against other designs to see if you can find one to better it. Once you do use that one as your baseline!

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Today I want to talk about AdSense Ad Design - another key factor in the performance of AdSense ads.

In my previous posts I’ve talked about how changing the positioning and numbers of ads has seen significant changes in my own AdSense earnings at different times - ad design can have a similar impact.

AdSense give quite a bit of control over how text ads can display on your site. You can change the color of a number of elements in ad units by changing the ‘color palettes’ that you choose.

As you can see above in the ‘default’ color palette there is the option to change the color of ad borders, the title, background, text and URL. There are rumors floating around at the moment that we might have more control over the font of ads too in the future (I’ve been seeing a variety of fonts in my own ads lately which is a signal that Google is experimenting).

Unfortunately there’s not a single color palette that works best on every blog. As with everything - testing different color schemes is the only way to work out what works best for you.

There are a number of different AdSense ad design strategies that bloggers have used over the years. Lets look at three of them:

1. Contrasting AdSense Ads

When I first started experimenting with AdSense the trend among publishers was to do everything possible to make the ads be seen. The theory is that if people see the ads they’ll be more likely to click them.

The result was some of the most horrendous color combinations that you’ll ever see put together in an AdSense unit.

Warning - what you see below might induce headaches….

I’m not sure why anyone would select this kind of combination but it was commonplace a few years ago. I saw a number of publishers back in that day saying that a Red/Yellow combination worked best.

The Pros of this design where that they were eye catching - the Cons were that they didn’t do a lot for creating a great first impression of your site.

2. Blended AdSense Ads

As a result the trend moved from ‘clashing’ ads to what was known as a ‘blended’ approach.

The keys to this approach were to set the background and borders of ad units to match the background of the site that they were going. In doing so you removed any border/boundary between the ad an your content.

The Title was then made to be the same color as links on the site. Text was made to match the color of text on the site and the URL field either was made to match the title OR to be as light a color as possible (a light grey) so as to blend into the background as much as possible.

The attempt was to make the ads blend into the site as much as possible and look like an integrated part into the site. So ads here at ProBlogger with a blended design might look like this:

The pros of this approach was that ads didn’t clash with the site and as a result didn’t scream ‘CHEAP AND NASTY MONEY GRABBING WEBSITE’. The ads also performed better in most cases than a ‘clashing’ ad. The Cons were that sometimes the ads could blend too much into the site, particularly those sites which had a loyal readership which became blind to the ads.

3. Complementary AdSense Ads

Over the last couple of years another term has crept into AdSense publisher circles to describe ads - ads that ‘complement’ a site.

These ads are similar to blended ads but they don’t completely blend in. They complement the colors of the site but aim to also stand out a little by adding a different background and border color. The color you use might be unique to the ads but still ‘match’ the overall colors on the site.

This type of ad is what Google recommend if you’re putting an ad in your sidebar or some slightly out of the way part of your blog as it draws the eye to it. However if you’re putting an ad in or close to content they suggest a blended ad.

4. Designer AdSense Ads

Most publishers still use a blended or complementary approach (I do) but over the last few years a number of AdSense publishers have played with incorporating different design elements around their ads to integrate them even more fully into the site.

There was a period where publishers got away with aligning images directly beside, above or below ads - AdSense cracked down on this and now don’t allow it at all - however there are ways to incorporate the ads into the design of your site.

I first wrote about this in a post called Designer AdSense Ads where I highlighted these two ads from Karen Cheng’s blog:

You can see the ads themselves are placed inside frames that integrate the ads into the design of the site.

Interestingly Karen no longer uses these ads on her blog. I’ve seen a number of publishers attempt to do this with mixed success. It’s something to experiment with.

So Which AdSense Ad Design is Best?

The choice of which AdSense ad design to choose for your blog is a decision that you need to weigh up on a number of fronts including:

• Performance - test different designs to see which converts best in terms of click through rate
• Aesthetics - each of us have a different preference on what does and doesn’t look good and on how willing we are to allow ads that ’stick out’ a little.
• Other Competing Design Elements - if your blog’s design is ‘busy’ and has a lot of competing points of visual interest for readers you might need to increase the ‘loudness’ of the ads in order to compete.

When it comes down to purely financial considerations - the fact is that sometimes blending works best and on other occasions it can be better to go with a more contrasting approach.

Check out the official advice from AdSense:

“The color strategy you should use on your site varies depending on the ad placement and the color of the background where the ads are placed. Review the table below for a quick reference about which strategies we suggest will work well on your site.”

You can see the overall design of your site comes into question quite a bit in the eyes of AdSense.

Other Design Choices

There are a few other choices that publishers have when it comes to the way that their ads look.

Curved Corners

One somewhat recent chose that AdSense have given us is the ability to round the corners of our ads. As publishers we now have the ability to have three formats - Square ads, Slightly Rounded ads and Very Rounded ads:

Your choice with the corners of your ads only comes into play if you go for a complementary or contrasting approach (ie blended ads effectively don’t have borders that can be seen). The choice will will depend upon the design of your blog. If you have curves on other design elements this will help to integrate the ads better.

Rotate ads

If your blog has a lot of repeat readers who come back day after day you will want to consider changing the design of your ads from time to time so as to overcome ad blindness.

You can manually do this on a regular basis or use the built in mechanism that AdSense offers for you to choose up to 4 different color palettes for your ads to automatically rotate through.

Test Test Test

The key to finding the right AdSense Ad Design for your blog is to test different options and see what works best for you.

One way to do this is to try Split Testing (sometimes called A/B testing). I’ll write up how to do this tomorrow - stay tuned!

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Today I want to look at another simple way to increase what AdSense (and other ad networks) can earn you. It’s the most simple and obvious thing to do - but it’s amazing how few bloggers actually do it.

Put more Ads on your Page!

It’s not rocket science - but one of the quickest ways to increase your blog’s earnings is to add more advertising to your blog. Of course it’s not just a matter of slapping as many ads as possible on your blog - but more on that later in this post.

Let me continue the story I started yesterday on my own journey to higher AdSense earnings.

Remember, yesterday I told the story of how I moved my ads from one position to another like this:

That move led to an increase in earnings of around 50%. Not bad for 10 minutes work.

A few days after making this change I had calmed down after the initial rush of excitement and decided to take things to the next level. I decided that if one ad unit on a page could earn as much as it did that more ad unit might increase the overall earnings.

Why I’d not considered it earlier I’m not sure (from memory there was a time where you were quite limited in how many AdSense units you could use per page - these days the limit is 3) - but I decided to see what impact it would have.

I moved from the above layout to this one with two additional ad units:

What I discovered is that on a blog the positions above comments (at the end of an article) and below them are good positions because they are places that readers ‘pause’.

A reader reads your post and then pauses while they decide what to do next. Web users are wired to ‘click’ in pauses so it’s a logical spot to put an advertisement that pays on a per click basis.

Adding two extra ad units didn’t triple my earnings (the ads were further down the page and got less attention than the top one) but they did significantly increase my earnings virtually immediately.

Try Link Units

Another way to add an AdSense unit on a page is to use the ‘link unit’. These ad units come in two varieties (although numerous sizes). You can see the full variety of units here but here’s how they look.

Here’s one in a horizontal configuration:

Here’s one in a vertical configuration:

Link Units tend to perform best when they are placed in and around navigational areas as they can quite look like ‘menus’. Here’s a couple of logical spots to put them (highlighted in green). You can currently put up to 3 link units on a page.

Link Units convert well on some blogs but not others. Some publishers swear by them others don’t like them at all - it’s worth testing to see if yours is one that they work on.

Mix and Match Ad Networks

The other way to add more ad units on a page is to look at other ad networks than AdSense. AdSense allows you to place other ad networks ads on the same page as theirs as long as the other ads don’t ‘mimic’ the AdSense units. This means you can’t use YPN on the same page but you can use Chitika (I use them very successfully with AdSense), ShoppingAds, WidgetBucks, Shopzilla and others.

A Word of Warning

Keep in mind that more ads might mean more earnings - BUT there comes a point where more ads makes your site look cheap and nasty and can begin to put off readers. It also can get to a point where the ads get in the way of your content. Some bloggers stuff so many ads on their blogs that the content ends up being below the fold on a page - something that might increase earnings per visitor but that doesn’t really encourage those visitors to keep coming back for more.

Different blogs will have a different threshold for how many ads are too many. It’s something to listen to your readers on and to keep a careful eye on.

The other problem with too many ads on a page is that the more ads you have per page the less likely your readers are of clicking any single one of them. More outbound links means the click through rate on any one of them will be lower. While you might increase the overall number of clicks on ads (which in a CPC program like Adsense can be good) if you also run private ad sales on your blog (ie you sell ads directly to advertisers) you’ll be providing those advertisers with less value.

The same thing goes with affiliate programs. If you’re running them on your blog the more ads you have the less CTR you’ll have on the affiliate links.

So do experiment with more ads on your blog as it will generally increase earnings - but keep in mind that sometimes less is more and it can be worth resisting the temptation to have too many!

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Today I want to talk about positioning your AdSense ads - something that has a very significant impact upon the amount of money that they are able to earn.

I learned this lesson after I’d been using AdSense for some time - I often wish I’d discovered it earlier - because not thinking it through earlier cost me a significant amount of money!

My Story of Learning about AdSense Positioning

I remember clearly the time that my AdSense earnings almost doubled over night through me simply moving them from one part of my blog to another.

Up until the point where I made this discovery my AdSense ads had been largely in a banner position on my blog. I don’t remember my exact reasoning for putting it there but it was probably because that’s where I saw all the big sites doing. My blog’s post pages looked like the diagram to the right.

Performance with this positioning was OK - but then again, I didn’t know any different so while I was earning enough on my blog at this point to make a day or two a week of earnings I was blissfully unaware of the potential that my blog had to take me a step closer to going full time as a blogger.

I’m not sure of why I decided to experiment with my ad positioning but after a while of positioning my AdSense ads this way I decided to have a ‘play’ with other positions. I began to think about where on my page my readers would give their full attention and decided at the top left hand side of the content area would probably be the most logical position for people to look at a web page (as that’s where they start reading). This was at a time before AdSense brought out their ‘heatmap’ which confirmed that this was a wise move.

So late one afternoon I decided to move my ad unit from the banner position to this spot at the top left hand side of my post area.

My ads now looked like the diagram to the left.

I was actually a little nervous about making this move. What if my earnings went down and I started going backwards?

I decided to give the new position a couple of days testing. I could afford to lose earnings for two days but if they didn’t at least match the previous positioning I’d switch it back.

That night just before I went to bed I decided to log into AdSense to see what the results were like after a few hours.

Imagine my surprise when I saw my CTR 40%!

40% more readers were clicking my ads and this was obviously already impacting my overall earnings!

I didn’t sleep too well that night as I realized the power of what I’d discovered. I could potentially see a 40% increase in my earnings with a simple move of my ads.

The next morning I awoke earlier and logged into AdSense and found that the CTR was now up by just under 50%.

That day I’d increased my earnings enough to dedicate at least another day a week to blogging by simply changing the position of an ad unit!

Tips on Ad Positioning

Ad positioning is vitally important to the performance of ad units like AdSense.

In general - the positions that are ‘hot’ can be seen on the heatmap to the right (this is the official AdSense heatmap which they put together from their own research and observations of where ads work best. You can see how anywhere at the top of content can work best (the brightest orange area) but that in general above the fold and to the left seems to be the ‘hotter areas’.

This does vary from blog to blog and there are some specific spots that work best on blogs (I’ll show them below). The key is to try different things and to find what works best on your blog.

Further Reading on Ad Positioning:

• Previously on ProBlogger - Introduction to Advertising Optimization - Ad Position
• AdSense Help Page - Where should I place Google ads on my pages?

Next week I’ll continue this series of tips for increasing your AdSense earnings overnight with the continuation of my own story of learning to use AdSense and some more tactics that took my earnings to even higher levels!

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What would you say if I told you that there are things that many bloggers could do on their blogs that could bring about large increases in their AdSense earnings in 24 hours or less?

One of the misconceptions about making money from blogging that is out there is that the best way to increase your blog’s earnings is to increase the traffic to your blog.

“Double your traffic and you’ll double your income” I heard one speaker say at a conference earlier in the year.

Well that speaker is right…. increased traffic generally does lead to increased advertising income…. but doubling your traffic can be a massive task one that could take months or even years to achieve.

Growing readership is something every entrepreneurial blogger needs to be working on as it does help with income levels but…

What if there’s a faster way to grow your AdSense earnings?

Over the next week I want to look at a few methods of increasing the revenue from AdSense on your blog that can have immediate impact upon earnings.

Before We Begin:

I should say before I go any further that these won’t work on every blog - if you’ve already optimized your blog well they’ll have less impact - but if you have a blog like I did a few years ago you could see some significant improvements. These tips will be more basic for some readers than others - so if you consider yourself to be at an advanced level you might want to just scan over the posts (although a refresher can’t hurt).

I also should say that these principles don’t just apply to Adsense. The same can be said about Chitika, ShoppingAds, WidgetBucks, Shopzilla and other ad networks.

Lastly - I want to say that I’m not usually one to use claims like ‘increase your earnings overnight’ - as we all know, blogging for money is a long term thing. However these lessons did have immediate impact upon my own earnings. I had already been blogging for some time - but together what I share increased my own earnings by over 100% very quickly.

The Series So Far

1. Ad Positioning Tactics for AdSense
2. Putting More AdSense Ads on Your Page
3. Ad Design Tactics for AdSense

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This means that those using AdSense for Search get access to a few new features including:

• Site Search
• Improved indexing of your pages
• Vertical search
• Tuning search results and ads with keywords
• Selecting ad location
• Quick and easy updates

You can see a full explanation of each one at the announcement on the AdSense blog.

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This ad was seen on the feed of Inhabitat (found via Digital Inspiration). The images are served as image maps not JavaScript.

Here’s hoping that this will perform better than the previous AdSense for RSS program that has been in beta for a couple of years now!

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The idea behind the Ad Review Center is that when advertisers target your specific blog you now can see that they’re targeting it and can approve or ban and ad depending on whether you want it to appear on your site or not. This gives you more control over the ads that appear on your site.

Note - this is only for ads targeted to your site (ie general AdSense ads that are contextually placed on your site are not included).

Also keep in mind that when you remove an ad you could be decreasing the profitability of your site as it removes the ad from the ‘auction’ that happens between Advertisers to have their ad appear on your blog.

To find the Ad Review Center log into the ‘Setup’ area of AdSense, then click the ‘Competitive Ad Filter’ area and opt into the Ad Review Center program (it should be highlighted in a little green box).

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