How To Optimize My Adsense Ads (Lesson-1)

Remember the magic formula?

Focused Content + Optimized Adsense Ads + Traffic = $$$

I've shown you how to create focused content quickly. The next thing I want to show you is how to optimize your Adsense ads.

The click-thru rate for my Adsense ads is about 20%, i.e. every 10 visitors, 2 of them will click an ad. I would consider it as high because many people I know only have a click-thru rate of only 5%. So how do I do it?

First, I make sure that all my ads follow the following rules:
- Use the same color scheme as your website.
- Do not add a border to the ad, unless it matches your overall design.
- Do not purposely use a different color background for the ad.
- Blend the ads into your other links and use the same color for all the links in your page.

To better illustrate what I mean, let's go through some example.

Take a look at the website below. Notice that the webmaster has removed the frame for the google ad in the middle (see note 1 in red)? And the webmaster has used the same color scheme for the link (see note 2). This makes the ad blend into the whole page. For the side ad on the right hand side (note 3), although the webmaster frame up the ad, the frame blend in with the frame left hand side. So it looks ok. But my comments would be the webmaster should change the color of the link to match the rest of the links (note 4).

In this website, there are 3 Google ads (and that's the maximum you can place), two horizontal ads, called Banners, in the middle and one tower ad, called Skycraper, at the right hand side. If I were the webmaster, I will not place the two horizontal ads because visitors are too used to Banner ads. The gurus call it banner blind. The moment they see such banner-sized ad, they know it's an ad and they tend to skip it. Also, I wouldn't use a different color to differentiate the ad from the rest of the page. As I've discussed, try to blend your ads into your overall layout.

This is a better one. See that the author has cleverly placed the ad on the left hand side, with the links in the same color as all the other links in the page? Notice that when you first enter the site, you can't really differentiate which links are ad links and which links are internal links? Now, I'm not trying to cheat visitors into clicking ads. As we've covered earlier, the ads are closely linked to the topic of the content, which means the visitors are interested in the content of the ad too. By blending the ads into your page, you are giving your visitors more choices and more info. After all, they are here to look for the info they want, and your job is to help them to get it.

And here’s something interesting. The ads are placed in a frame together with other links, which is ok. The author never purposely frames up the ad itself. Imagine if the author has framed up the ad and used a different color, such as pink, as the background, like our second example, how would you as a visitor feel? Another thing that is commendable is that the color of the links matches the color of other links, which is good. Looks like this author knows what he is doing! :)

Getting interesting isn't it?
Have you developed the laser eye that can scan through websites and see which ones are optimized for Adsense and which ones are not?
Go surf some article websites on the net and see if you can find some ways that you can help the webmasters to improve their Adsense campaign.