My Experiments with Adsense

I started blogging as a hobby and writing on things that I have learnt on my job. I know that the things I learnt was useful for many who had similar job as mine as I shared those learnings with my team and received and positive feedback.

After having written about 50 blog posts, I was introduced to Adsense by a reddit post. I decided to signup and added the standard adsense widget on blogger.com. Those adsense units barely seemed to get noticed triggering my experiments with Adsense.

Redesign Template

My blog was in English and most of my visitors came from English speaking countries. This means that the readers vision is likely to first look at the left side of the page rather than at the right where my ad was placed. My visitors were unlikely to look at the ad itself once they get hold of the relevant text.

The first thing I did was to redesign the design of my blog. I didn't like the ready made templates with a column on the left, so I made my own design. I got my first click after this change.

Ads within the Post

The standard widgets, that blogger provided, placed the ads between the posts or at the sidebar. There was no option to include the ad within the post. My readers would probably look at the post's heading and start reading whatever is below the heading. Blogger won't let me copy the adsense code and place it anywhere I wish. This can be worked-around by converting the code using http://www.hacktrix.com/adsense-code-converter/ and pasting it above <data:post.body/> in the template.

My experiment to place the ad at the end of the post did not yield as good results as the ad placed at the beginning of the post. A general suggestion is to place your ad above the fold; your ad should be visible without having to scroll.

Google provides a heat map which can help you judge where to place the ads http://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=17954

Blending with the Post

I used to have ads with the google-provided color combination. I changed the colors to blend with my post. I tried Contrasting ad (with a yellow background and red border) and found that blending the ad with the content to be more successful. Most people associate blue color text with links, so my blog template was designed to contain links in blue.

Getting Traffic That is Likely to Increase CTR

I learn through problems and my posts reflect on what problem I faced at the job and how I fixed it. This means that most of my visitors are people who are in the middle of the problem and they are visiting my site with an objective to fix their problem. They are unlikely to click on an ad that does anything other than giving them a quick solution and that doesn't seem to be the case with my ads.

I made sure that I get traffic from casual readers by promoting my blog on facebook, twitter and google pages. Now I have visitors who have their mind in a peaceful state and do not mind looking at a discount offer.

Increase Visibility of the Ads

My blog posts receive occasional comments. The comments section was way down from the ads that were set at the beginning of the post. Google allows you to publish about 3 ad units per page and my third ad unit (after one at sidebar and one below post title) was at the comments section.

This ad unit would be easily noticed by anyone intending to leave a comment, but not to others. Instead of blending the ad, I decided to increase its visibility. I did this by putting the ad unit inside a post-it note.

Block Irrelevant Ads

Adsense allows you to block 100 publishers from showing ads on your ad units. The intention of this facility is meant to let you block ads belonging to your competitors, but this facility can also be used to block publishers whose ads are unrelated to your content/niche.

Choosing a Good Ad Unit

From my experiments, Large Rectangle and the Medium Rectangle were found to be performing better than any other ad format. A list of ad formats is available here: https://support.google.com/adsense/bin/answer.py?hl=en&sourceid=aso&answer=185665&medium=link&subid=ww-ww-et-asui

When experimenting I use the AB testing method suggested on google's adsense blog (http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/08/abcs-of-ab-testing.html).

Choose the two ad units you are about to test and place the following javascript to see which one is performing well. You have to experiment for a few weeks to conclude what works best.

<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>

When using this template, remember to replace “//your first ad unit goes here” with your ad code inside the first set of <script></script> tags.

The experiments have not stopped. I don't earn thousands of dollars yet. My next test would be with section targeting. This is a way to tell the adsense program ti serve an ad based on a selected text in my blog post. Along with that I will also be testing placement ads.