It's week four of our five-week educational series about speeding up your business in a slowdown, which we kicked off three weeks ago. Today, you'll hear tips from Mel Ann and Tim, two AdSense Optimization Specialists from our Sydney, Australia office as they take you through a complete optimization. The series will conclude next week with tips to attract more advertiser spend. Keep on commenting with your own suggestions for growing your business! You can also follow the series at www.google.com/ads/speedingup.Mel Ann and Tim are two AdSense Optimization Specialists from the Google office in Sydney, who work with publishers to help them improve the performance of their ads. Today, they'll walk you through a 5-step process to optimize the AdSense ads on your sites, and will also share tips that many publishers have found successful.
Step 1: Analyze your webpages
The first step to a successful optimization is to analyze your webpages. Ask yourself the following questions as you think about where to place ads on your site:
- What type of content do you have? People interact differently on articles, forum, and video sites, for example, so think about how people will be interacting on your site.
- Where is visitor attention likely to be focused? You should place ads where your users are most likely to look, but as Ricardo Prada mentioned in week two of this series, make sure that they won't get in the way of users trying to complete tasks on your site.
- How can you integrate ads into an area without getting in the way of your users? You can view a heat map we've put together showing where ads perform well, and keep in mind that above the fold ads and ads close to primary content tend perform better.
- Don't forget to think about how advertisers would like to appear. If you can make your site more appealing to advertisers, while keeping the above tips in mind, you're more likely to be able to attract advertisers and placement targeted ads.
Custom channels will help you figure out how different ad units are performing based on a number of variables you can choose, like placement, size, and color. Create a channel for individual ad units and categorize them to see how they're performing. For example, you can track your leaderboard and medium rectangle to see which performs better, and use this information in step four below. Custom channels will also allow you to track and measure results from your optimizations.
Step 3: Optimize your ad unit design and placement
The next step is to look at color, position, and size of your ad units and optimize these for user experience, advertiser experience, and performance. We've found that the medium rectangle (300 x 250), wide skyscraper (160 x 600), and the leaderboard (728 x 90) tend to perform best. You can also opt in to image ads to receive rich media and video ads, which tend to perform well too. It's important that you implement your ads in a consistent manner and in a way that is desirable to advertisers. Use colors effectively. Blend ads in, but not too much that users don't see them. Borderless ads tend to work well, as does highlighting the link and URL. Test different colors and placements, and then keep the changes that perform best.
Step 4: Maximize revenue from multiple units
We recommend adding multiple ad units to your pages, while still keeping the user experience in mind when deciding on placements. You can use custom channel reporting to determine which ad unit performs best, and structure your page to optimize performance based on that. The highest paying ad we have for your site will be shown in the first ad unit that shows up in your HTML code. If you have a leaderboard at the top, but learn with custom channel reporting that a medium rectangle halfway down the page is outperforming it in terms of CTR and eCPM, try putting the medium rectangle first in your HTML code. You can do this by switching the location in the HTML if you're comfortable editing the code, or by changing the actual location of the leaderboard on the page.
Step 5: Track and measure results
The last step is to understand whether your optimizations have made a difference. Here, use the custom channels you set up earlier to generate reports on your different ad units. Generate reports on your custom channels and group results by channel (remember, this depends on how you've set them up) to see how different sizes, colors, and placements are performing. You can also look at placement targeting reports to see which ad units are receiving placement-targeted ads, and if they've resulted in improved performance.
We hope these steps and tips are informative, and strongly encourage you to take the time to try an optimization on your own.
Additional Resources:
- We'll be re-hosting the optimization webinar from last month again on Thursday, July 23 at 11am PST. Sign up if you're interested in attending.
- You can also see valuable information in Analytics after linking your AdSense and Analytics accounts.
- For more advanced optimization, you can use Website Optimizer to run live experiments based on ad placement, format and more.
13 comments:
Optimizing is definitely worth it but sometimes in trying to position ads so that your visitors will click on them, you worry whether you might accidentally break a adsense rule.
Google drops you without letting you know what you might have done wrong, so it's kind of touch and go. I see many sites with adsense next to pictures, yet Google says that's a no-no.
It can sometimes get nerve wracking to try to increase clicks without breaking any rules. :-)
Thanks for the information and it is very useful to know about increase our revenue through optimize our ad placement and analyze our website pages. Whenever I read our adsense blog then I am getting more and more information to improve my knowledge about our money earning through Google ADsense. Thanks for once again.
getting search result is also useful for analysis but over all your steps are also good for increasing adsense income
We all know what happens when you increase your earning " Potential "
It usually resulting in a increase of very little " Pay Out Potential "
You have made this so difficult now its unbelievable.
If I can't break 2 bucks a day this system is absolutely 100 percent fraud.
I don't know what to say.
I have done what others have failed to do.
Brought real users to the advertising and it seems that what use to work is now being.....
Heavily filtered and clicks stolen and reassigned to your " Favorite " blogs.
People. Your truely made this a absolutely impossible task.
And very !@#$ time I rank for something and start getting hundreds of hits someone at google pulls the search result.
I have never in my life seen a people work so hard to see that one person fails when in reality I exceed every publisher that ever existed their.
I install the right ad format, blend it with site content, place it above the fold. I do anything and the best I can. But as far I have very little CTR.
I think the main reason why people don't click on ads these days is because they don't have any money to buy something online. Unemployment now seeking ways to get extra money online, not to spend it. Hope the world soon out of this crazy depression ...
The second reason is much people now install ad blocker extension on their browser. That's terrible. Even AdSense ads blocked by this damn addons. What AdSense team do to solve this problem?
PROBLEM: I am a new adsense user and am having trouble...I log in, then get sent to the User Agreement. I click "Yes, I agree" and Submit. It takes me to the sign in page, then kicks me back to the User Agreement. I click yes, go to sign in and a automatically kicked back to the agreement.
Two days ago, I could not get past the sign in - it kept blipping on the screen. I am using my friend's computer which never had any problems with her adsense account. ???
Nice to get more information about increase our traffic and get more income through this methods. Thanks for the information.
Optimising does work, but it takes patience, accuracy and relevence, without any of those things, its a huge waste of potential going a miss.
I have done all this but with little results and the ad blocker does block ads.
Took me a while to understand what "randy cons" were. She was trying to say "rounded corners."
nice info, I hope adsense make article for how to make mush visitor interest to visit our blog and clicks our adsense, but not fraud way, just we had may problem with this. Many visitor had known about adsense and they are didn't like about clicks ads. So, may be you can help me. Thank you..
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