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Google AdSense Secrets 6.0: What Google Never Told You About Making Money with AdSense

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Google AdSense Secrets 6.0: What Google Never Told You About Making Money with AdSense

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For ads placed in Web pages, the company passes 68 percent of that revenue to the publisher, and keeps 32 percent for itself.

Putting the right ad type in the right place on the right platforms is the key to earning money with AdSense.

Overall, I’d say that leaderboards are most effective blended into the top of the page beneath the navigation bar and sometimes placed between forum entries.

Like leaderboards you can certainly put these sorts of ads at the top of the page, and lots of sites do it. Again, that’s something worth trying. You can put up a leaderboard for a week or so, swap it for a banner for another week or so, and compare the results. But at the top of the page, I’d expect the leaderboard to do better.

While a leaderboard will stretch over the sidebars of your site, just like the navigation bar, a 234 x 60 half-banner will fit neatly into the text space on most sites. This sort of ad should be your default

Everyone is familiar with the 468 x 60. And that’s exactly why the clickthrough rate on this size is very low, even among advertisers who use images on their banners. The 468 x 60 blocks screams, “Hey! I am an advertisement! Whatever you do, don’t click me. In fact, you should run from me as fast as you can!” In all but a few special cases, I have found the 468 x 60 ad block to be completely ineffective, and recommend ignoring it the same way your visitors do.

The most lucrative ad size, the 338 x 260 rectangle, brought in nearly four times as much: 159 cents for every thousand impressions.

You have to do everything you can to make sure that that ad unit looks absolutely nothing like a traditional banner ad.

Google also offers six different kinds of rectangular ads: buttons (125 x 125), small rectangles (180 x 150), medium rectangles (300 x 250), large rectangles (336 x 280), two sizes of squares (250 x 250 and 200 x 200) — as well as a new, super-sized 300 x 600 rectangle, also referred to as a halfpage unit. That new unit is one of the most popular with brand advertisers targeting publishers in news, sports and entertainment. Because of its premium size, Google limits usage to just one per page.

You can wrap the text around the ad, forcing the reader to look at it if he wants to read the article. That’s very effective.

If you’re wondering which size of ad would be best for the position you’ve got in mind, my advice is to start with the large rectangle, the 336 x 280.

Second best is the 300 x 250 rectangle. This ad block size is really useful when you want to have two sets of ads side by side. They fit on most web pages just perfectly.

Together, the 728 x 90 leaderboard, the 160 x 600 skyscraper and the 300 x 250 rectangle make up an incredible 95 percent of all ad impressions served on Google’s Ad Exchange. After the 336 x 280 rectangle, they’re also the most valuable with CPMs of 97 cents, 92 cents and 109 cents respectively.

For example, you might have a list of links to frequently-read articles or other sites on one side of your page. Putting a button ad at the end of a list like that could help it to blend in well.

would also recommend using the ‘wide skyscraper’, text-only ads on the right hand edge of the screen — in conjunction with the 3-Way Matching I discuss later in the book.

An ad format that has already proved its worth, when used correctly, is link units.

Text ads should always be your first pick when you start to load up your site. Link units are also worth taking, and they’ll be available when you come to pick a size of ad.

There are eight formats that offer static graphics instead of text — and you should avoid all of them.

For most app-makers, charging generates more revenue than ads; for publishers, it’s better to serve content on a website than through a dedicated app.

The most effective ad unit is likely to be one that you’ve matched to your site.

To turn Nessie off, open Allow & Block Ads > Ad Serving on the AdSense dashboard. You’ll find a long list of checkboxes that allow you to block certain kinds of ads. Uncheck the box marked Enhanced text ads - show performance-enhancing features on text ads and you’ll no longer receive any Nessie ads.

It is possible to deliberately mismatch your ad colors and styles, provided you put the ad unit at the top of your page.

Put ads where your content is most likely to interest and engage your visitors and you’ll get the best results.

When Google starts doling out the ads, it lists them according to a set order. The most expensive ads come first. The very first AdSense link that you see on your Web page then is usually the most valuable link on that page.

Google lets you place on each page of your Web site: 3 ad units 3 link units 2 AdSense for search boxes

One solution is to use a long home page with lots of ads but which offers only the headlines and the first paragraph or so from each article. To read more, the user has to click to a page with just that one article and fewer ad units.

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The most important factor is going to be your content. Google’s crawlers will check your site and serve up ads based on the keywords and the content on your pages.

But the Contextual Search Tool will only provide a list of options. It will help you to identify the most obvious keyword phrases related to your subject, but it won’t tell you which is the best or the most valuable. You can get a better idea of which of those phrases are better than others by comparing them on Google Insight.

Click the “Columns” button above the table of the Keywords Tool and you’ll be able to add the “Estimated Average CPC.” That shows that on average, advertisers are paying 1.93 for an ad on a page about “covered patios.”

putting keywords in particular places on the page can have an effect on the ads the site receives.

The words used in the page’s URL will help Google to identify the subject of the content. The titles and subtitles are important place-holders for keywords, too. And there’s some evidence that mentioning the keyword at the beginning of the article — in the first few words, ideally — and at the end of the article can also play a role.

The Google Ads Preview tool at googleadspreview.blogspot.com lets you see the ads your site is likely to receive right away.

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