Adsense Tip #5--Optimize Adsense For Search

I'm still toying around with Adsense for Search on some of my blogs, and have not made meaningful money yet---But the folks at Inside Adsense delivered a good case study on how VanGoghGallery.com managed to significantly increase their Adsense Revenues by optimizing the layout of their Adsense Search layout.

What VanGogh Gallery did was move the search feature from being a tiny part of the right hand menu bar, to being a much longer-center screen object. As a result, the number of queries grew almost 10 fold, and their Adsense for Search Revenues grew more than 10 fold to "Double-Digit" dollars per day. (I'm guessing that means at a minimum $4,000/year from search)

Now the VanGogh website is a great, nicely laid out website, and it has the benefit of a #1 First Page slot on the google search for the "Vincent Van Gogh" key word search---so I'm sure they get thousands of visits each day, but none the less---optimizing the Google Adsense for Search Feature for your website could lead to a few more dollars in your wallet.

Adsense Tip: Dress for Success
Adsense Tip: Go Above the Fold
Adsense Tip: Bigger is Better
Adsense Tip: Placement Matters
Adsense Tip: Keep Focused

Adsense Tip #4---Know what Keywords cost

One the key drivers to your Adsense revenue is having keywords that are in high demand from Adwords publishers. There are several online tool vendors that help you select Adsense/Adwords keywords, but fortunately for the beginner---Google provides a great free tool.

Step #1: Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
(See Screen Shot)


Step #2: Type in possible Keywords & Security Code

Step #3: Select Show CPC (Cost Per Click)---This is the amount that Adword advertisers are paying for clicks for a particular keyword... Your Adsense revenue is related to this figure. You can also see the approximate search volumes and how competitive various Adwords are.

Step #4: Find Higher Paying Keywords---Stretch your vocabulary and see what is getting more searches and what words are having higher CPC rates. For example, as of the time I am writing this, the keyword "Attorneys" has ~5 million searches per month, and a CPC of $10.66---This is noticably better than the keyword "Lawyers" which has ~3.4 million searches per month and a CPC of $8.22. So if you were writing a legal blog and wanted to maximize your Adsense revenue, I'd suggest to be sure to pepper your content with instances of "Attorneys" than "Lawyers"

Adsense Tip: Dress for Success
Adsense Tip: Go Above the Fold
Adsense Tip: Bigger is Better
Adsense Tip: Placement Matters
Adsense Tip: Keep Focused

Adsense Tip #3---Have a focused webpage

Another important thing to note, is that your Adsense revenue is positively correlated to the amount of traffic that your website gets. There are many ways to get more traffic, but one of the ways to drive traffic is to develop a niche and focus on it.

Google Queries can drive significant traffic to your website or blog, the higher the traffic, the higher the Adsense revenue. There is a big difference in the amount of traffic obtained if you're on page #1 of Google's results vs. page #2. You'll want to be sure that your site is focused on a key topic---This will cause your keyword density (around your specific topic) to be more focussed---resulting in more focussed Adsense advertiser spend on your page.
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Adsense Tip: Dress for Success
Adsense Tip: Go Above the Fold
Adsense Tip: Bigger is Better
Adsense Tip: Placement Matters
Adsense Tip: Keep Focused

Best Adsense Layouts for Blogs--A heatmap

Fortunately for content producers: the goals of Google, the goals of advertisers, and the goals for ourselves our aligned---We want to provide the reader only with pertinent Adsense ads that can make the advertiser money, causing higher bid rates for key words, causing higher adsense revenue for both Google and the publisher.

Realizing this, google has published a heatmap that shows where the best-bang-for the buck comes from for Adsense on your blog.

The Best Adsense Placements according to Google
You can see that Google recommends placing:

1. Banner Ads to the right of your blog content
2. Adsense units in between your blog posts
3. Link Units Above or below the fold
4. Search box near the top. (I've had search on my blogs for several months now, and have not generated any revenue from the few dozens of searches conducted---so I prefer to have my banner ads appear higher & above the fold.
   

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Adsense Tip: Dress for Success
Adsense Tip: Go Above the Fold
Adsense Tip: Bigger is Better
Adsense Tip: Placement Matters
Adsense Tip: Keep Focused

Adsense Ad Size---Bigger is Better

The folks at Adsense.com have another handy recommendation for increasing the performance of your Adsense ads on your sites---Bigger is Better.



This too is pretty easy to understand, the larger adsense ads take up more real estate and frequently contain ~4 ads... This gives the reader more opportunity and more options to click on an adsense ad and to drive more revenue to you, and more business to the advertisers.
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Adsense Tip: Dress for Success
Adsense Tip: Go Above the Fold
Adsense Tip: Bigger is Better
Adsense Tip: Placement Matters
Adsense Tip: Keep Focused

Adsense Ad Placement--Go above the fold

The folks at Adsense have another recommendation to help publishers get more bang from their adsense ads---Place them "above the fold." That essentially means, you shouldn't place adsense ads at the bottom of the page. (This is because not everybody scrolls down through all the content to get to the bottom---but everybody who loads your website sees the top part of the page.)



Another avenue to be sure that your adsense ads are seen is to place ads between your blog posts.
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Adsense Tip: Dress for Success
Adsense Tip: Go Above the Fold
Adsense Tip: Bigger is Better
Adsense Tip: Placement Matters
Adsense Tip: Keep Focused

Add Adsense between your blogger posts

One of the best tips I came across about a month ago was to add Adsense advertisements between blogger posts. There's some good information about how to do it here, but in summary:

1) Log into your blogger.com account and go into the "Template" of your blog.

2) Click on "Edit" in the "Blog Posts" section of your page.

3. Click on the "Show Ads between posts" button on the "Configure blog posts" menu (see image below)
4. You'll be able to select the Adsense format to appear in between ads--feel free to play around with the size and the font. Some of the thoughts that have worked best with others is to (1) Have your adsense font and format blend well with the rest your sites content (2) Consider using the larger rectangular banners.
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Adsense Tip: Dress for Success
Adsense Tip: Go Above the Fold
Adsense Tip: Bigger is Better
Adsense Tip: Placement Matters
Adsense Tip: Keep Focused

Adsense Video--Dress For Success

The Google Adsense team has put together this 1 minute video that emphasizes that Adsense users should make their Adsense advertisements blend in with the rest of their content.

So while you might think that super-bright font that clashes with your content will draw eye-balls to the advertisements---don't do it---You want the adds to blend well their surroundings

Step #2--Adding Adsense to your Blogger Blog

If you're a publisher on Google's popular Blogger platform, it is really easy to add Adsense to your blog.

1. Log into your blogger account
2. From your blogger dashboard, select "Layout"
3. Click on "add-a-gadget"
4. Select Adsense
   

5. There are various options as to what format your adsense ad should look like---Here is where you can experiment with your own blog for what works best---But I find that large banners and boxes work the best. It is also advisable to select "Text and Image"
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Adsense Tip: Dress for Success
Adsense Tip: Go Above the Fold
Adsense Tip: Bigger is Better
Adsense Tip: Placement Matters
Adsense Tip: Keep Focused

Step #1 --- Sign up for Adsense

First thing first, go to http://www.adsense.com
and sign up for an Adsense account. If you already have a gmail account, you can use your same user name and login credentials for your Adsense account.

The next step is to add Adsense to your existing blog or website. Fortunately, Google makes it very easy to add Adsense to a blogger site (which is also owned by Google).
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Adsense Tip: Dress for Success
Adsense Tip: Go Above the Fold
Adsense Tip: Bigger is Better
Adsense Tip: Placement Matters
Adsense Tip: Keep Focused

Welcome to Adsense to Add Dollars

After having used Google's Adsense program for the past 3 months, I've learned some bad things, and some good things. I'm hoping to help other content producers (1) Realize the benefits of using Adsense and (2) optimize the amount of money that adsense brings to them.

I realize that I still have more to learn about adsense, so I welcome your Adsense questions and comments.