Best Adsense Placement

[guy]

If you have been using Adsense for some time and have nothing but a few bucks to show for it, then you're more than likely doing something wrong. I'm not going to touch up on the number of things you're doing wrong in terms of earning through Adsense as one thing is for sure: you more than likely have poor Adsense placement.

Leave your ego at the end of this sentence and repeat after me: My sites Adsense placement sucks.

Now that we have confirmed one of your problems, lets fix it and start making some more money. First thing is first, let's address the most common mistakes site owners make when placing adsense.

• They stuff their adsense wherever it can fit
• Not researching on where the best ad placement is on the site
• Not thinking like a user and instead, simply thinking like a money hungry site owner (you animal you!)

Now the above list was not necessary but I wanted an excuse to use the (you animal you!) bit. Fact is, to solve all your adsense placements, you have to do one thing.

Figure out where your users are most likely to click, want to find links to click on, and are most willing to click.

A few months ago there was a survey done by Yahoo! and I, because I'm that kind of guy, spent that whole month studying those results and comparing them to my AdSense and YPN ads and the results Yahoo! came up with were freakishly accurate to my own. Comparing the numbers again from last month (as i do every month) and they're still on the dot.

Here are the results:
Placement--------Success Rate
Leaderboard----------27%
Right Gutter----------9%
Left Gutter-----------8%
Content -------------45%
Below Fold-----------2%
Rotating-------------5%

(content placement means adsense within your content - leaderboard is the section between your content and top navigation)

From that we can see that above the fold and embedded in content seems to be two of the best places for your ads to appear (I can confirm this is very much the case as many webmasters earning off their adsense will agree). Look at where you have your ads placed currently and take the time to decide if you've placed your ads in the best location. Yeah, if your ad is at the bottom of the page in the footer, or a rotating ad, then you're probably reading this in hopes of figuring out what it is you're doing wrong.

Now that you know where the best Adsense placement is, you're one step closer to really earning off Adsense. What? You thought that was it? great placement and *click* you'll be making thousands a month? No. The art of earning money through Adsense, while relatively easy, is part of an equation (there i go with that equation nonsense again). It's only one variable. I'll share more in later topics to best help you utilize Adsense as the powerful money making too it is.


In the mean time, if you have questions about 'adsense placement' feel free to ask!

Also, if you're using a successful adsense placement not mentioned above let us know, id be interested to hear about it!

[nightcrawler]

Just adding my few points, I am using adsense 468x60 Just above every post in start. It does not look odd to the user eyes, but as you mentioned I have to say My Adsense Placement Sucks.

The other placement is large rectangle just above the comments 336x280, This placement is working pretty good for me. I have never tried leader-board size ad because IMO that looks like the person is out there to just advertise.

Another thing is traffic that you didn't mention even if the ad placement is superb, without traffic you cannot earn a single dime. I also use heat-map for placing ad, it shows you the potential area of your blog or website where you can place the ads.

[guy]

Originally Posted by nightcrawler

Just adding my few points, I am using adsense 468x60 Just above every post in start. It does not look odd to the user eyes, but as you mentioned I have to say My Adsense Placement Sucks.

I checked out your sites and think I know which one you're refering to, that's pretty poor adsense placement yeah. Thing is it's not even picking up the keywords of those submission titles, there's one about pharmacy and the ads show web design. 0 convergence chance there.

Originally Posted by nightcrawler

The other placement is large rectangle just above the comments 336x280, This placement is working pretty good for me. I have never tried leader-board size ad because IMO that looks like the person is out there to just advertise.

You can't give your opinion on something you've never tried. Period.
Try it, see if it works, then give an educated evaluation. Without going into the I make this and I make that off Adsense, I can say, with confidence that I make enough off my sites with adsense on them to shell out around $5,000 (in adsense rev.) on adwords a month for a couple of my other product sites. This of course increases per month by a couple hundred bucks these days as I don't pocket the extra change instead I invest it right back into my ad stream to generate more income.

Originally Posted by nightcrawler

Another thing is traffic that you didn't mention even if the ad placement is superb, without traffic you cannot earn a single dime.

As I mentioned, at the end of my original post, Adsense placement isn't enough, the title clearly states 'adsense placement' meaning if I wanted to introduce the other factors in successful Adsense use, I would have changed that title and mentioned everything else in my post. It's obvious, that if you don't have people visiting your site, chances of getting any clicks are slim to none, that really doesn't need to be stated, though I will touch up on some more Adsense usage factors in later topics, one of which I'll post today.

Originally Posted by nightcrawler

I also use heat-map for placing ad, it shows you the potential area of your blog or website where you can place the ads.

That's great, or you could use common sense and stat stud. to figure it out for a more accurate result

[guy]

Originally Posted by turf

is it also advisable to insert ads in the blogpost itself?

Yes of course, read my post the whole way again, you must have missed parts.

Here are the results:
Placement--------Success Rate
Leaderboard----------27%
Right Gutter----------9%
Left Gutter-----------8%
Content -------------45%
Below Fold-----------2%
Rotating-------------5%

(content placement means adsense within your content - leaderboard is the section between your content and top navigation)

From that we can see that above the fold and embedded in content seems to be two of the best places for your ads to appear...

[theeventof]

Thanks for these stats I will look into optimizing my ad placement for better click rates.

[sfod_d223]

Adding within the content as a huge block or simply a 460x80 should work?

[heybro]

Well, today I learned that my adsense placement really sucks!

[RichestGirl]

I see statistic. Ya it seems useful.

but best option is experimental results for your site.
It totally depend on your site strucutre.

You can make experiments with Adsense Channel and measure which area is performing best for your site.

I am getting $1 for every day after 1 year for one of my personal site.
Daily revenue is increasing every month too.

Thanks

[MicroScriber]

The results you have listed for placement is good to know. I'm not surprised by what you've written as it makes plenty of sense.

The question I have is not in regards to placement but the quality of ads that I get from AdSense. I usually use the leaderboard at least at the top of the page and sometimes 1/2 way down the page. The ads I get from Google are less then desirable. Most of the time they appear as text; 6 lines of text across the ad with the text squeezed to 3 lines, and with just the tops of lines 2, 4, & 6 showing about 2mm. It looks horrible. Personally, I don't like the text ads. I specifically use the leaderboard so that I can receive preferably a video/movie type ad, or at least a picture. Sometimes the ads they show are so off topic of what the page is in reference to, it's almost not worth having the ads at all. Each ad is a channel, and is setup for targeting. I use SEO software and feel very confident with the title of the pages, meta tags, keywords, and content density; even so, the ads I get are less then desirable.

What do you recommend? I came on v7n for advice on getting ads from an alternate supplier. Yet, if you can lead me in the right direction with Google, then great. I'm also interested in traffic building. I am using a company to send traffic to my site, yet I don't believe it to be the best targeted traffic. Any ideas with traffic building would be great too. Thanks-

[lelooman]

so the top banners and the content ones are the most effective? great statistics! 2000 visitors and only 3$ earnings mean a bad ad placements?

[AsusReview]

Conversions for me are standard around 5%

Also, as the OP mentioned, placement and thinking like your users is important. Something else that is critical is to look over your stats, analyze them, try out different ads and placement, and see what effect that has. Around 5-7 days should give you enough of a sample to see if you made an improvement or not. Without doing this you will rarely improve is my experience.

[getcouponhere]

i tried to use 2 ads units close to each other but none worked for me

[itscolumn]

I think we need to experiment from time to time. Every site should be different although majority should be more or less the same. I think placing in the content help the most. As content is where user focus the most.

[getcouponhere]

yes content works but its a difficult job to adjust the alignment when placing the code between the post everytime you post something new

[snakeair]

Originally Posted by getcouponhere

yes content works but its a difficult job to adjust the alignment when placing the code between the post everytime you post something new

If you have a wordpress blog, you only need to add the adsense code into your template page 1 time. What type of website do you have?

[aprilhomer]

Hi, I just want to know your opinion about the adsense in my Blog.. I put it every below of my posts..

Thanks for you advice..

here's my blog http://seoph2.cafe24.com/wordpress

[snakeair]

The ads look great in that location. Why don't you create a thread in the website review section to get a full review of your blog and not just the adsense location part.

[SeoShop]

Thanks for sharing your research. Was wondering if you tested the click through rate between text ads and image ads. Which one performs better. Image ads tend to pay a high rate but do visitors in general prefer text or image.
The differance I noticed between text and image , is that text ads are more often targeted to your website content , while image adverts are more often unrelated to your website content. So while image ads may pay more per click , there seems less of a chance that a visitor might click on it , as they are often unrelated to the visitors interest , unless it is a good looking lady in the advert of course.

[trubuzz]

I think placing adsense is going to depend somewhat on your other design elements of your website. For instance if you have a black background on the sidebar then image ads seem to work better as they stand out better. I've been optimizing adsense on various websites over time and even though there are a few best practices each website seems to be a little different.

[site24xindia]

It was nice that you researched a lot about this... but for one thing, Google Adsense ads are nowhere success now a days because most of the visitors know what are ads meant for and they just escape to ads. The CTR has really dropped dramatically in few last months or year so.. earlier the CTR for a general website was around 3-4% but now days instead of experiments with placements we are unable to cross it by 1.50%.

However link units workk better in some conditions...

Thanks