Adsense secret ebooks
June 27, 2006
There seem to be a lot of Adsense “secret” books around. I have a secret for you - there are no secrets!
In general people get higher click throughs when they blend their ads in the surrounding text, using colours of the main site.
Some gurus also suggest placing the ads next to pictures. This again may lead to higher click throughs, but does it increase your overall income?
Google has a unique conversion and tracking system, where they can track an ads success as to whether a click through actually generates a sale or some other conversion, like an email sign up.
So, I doubt that over the long term, making ads too much like navigation will result in higher income.
If you are looking for ideas on good ad placement, take a look at Steve Pavlina’s blog.
What does result in higher income, is higher traffic to your site. More visitors, more people buying. I would suggest to people to spend time (and money if necessary) thinking how to increase traffic, by either providing useful content or a unique web service, rather than worrying about whether the ads should be on the left or the right hand side of a page.
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4 Responses to “Adsense secret ebooks”
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You mention that Google may track the number of conversions (sales, sign-ups, etc) from AdSense clicks. However, I believe that this does not directly affect your CPC. It may of course affect how much AdWords publishers are willing to spend in the long-run.
Also, I agree that publishers should spend most of their time creating content and thus generating traffic. However, do not discount the benefits of ad optimization. Doubling your CPM will double your revenue. As the AdSense blog frequently points out, experiment with your sites and see what ad placement and style works best for you.
Thanks for the comment. I agree experimenting with layout, colors and so forth is important but it is not something to get carried away by.
People move the ads from the left to the right and then make a claim, I just had an increase in X% of clicks. It is not necessarily better on the right, it is more that the ads are in a different location to where people are use to seeing them and thus this could result in higher clickthroughs.
It doesn’t take long for regular readers of a site to become ad-blind, which is why I believe even Google is experimenting with images and videos.
The main point I wanted to make though, is that there is no “secret”, it is more about experimenting and optimization. Not all sites will have the same success.
Yeah, sounds like we’re both in agreement. Optimizing advertising is certainly an art/science without any magic secret.
Although I imagine SEO could have a magic secret as it’s based on strict algorithms compared to advertising optimization which is based on human visitors’ actions.
I think the general rule is test, test, test! Even a 0.5% increase can make a big difference to Adsense income if you’ve got loads of traffic.
My own experience is that what works for one site doesn’t necessarily work for another - you have to be sensitive to the subject/niche.