The strategies that you’ll read about below have been discovered from my persistent optimization and analytic split testing over time, but also from my discussions with the Google Adsense team directly on strategies for this blog. My point is that these strategies are not gibberish that I’ve read off some cheesy “how to make money” blog.
Google Adsense is a powerful tool for publishers to earn revenue from their content. In fact, if you are willing to bust your butt to build your blog and put in hours of writing content, Google Adsense can generate a substantial amount of income that will grow continually over time.
I don’t want to get sidetracked with the benefits of Adsense right now, I want to quickly share with you 3 keys for success with Google Adsense.
Below are 3 keys that will help you attract higher paying advertisers, earn more clicks, and the bottom line… earn more revenue with Google Adsense:
1) Use the 300×250 banner ad
There is one thing that is indisputable when it comes to Google Adsense – the 300×250 banner ad is by far the most profitable ad unit in Google’s ad inventory.
Advertisers are willing to spend more money per click and impression for 300×250 ad units than any other size ad.
This means that you need to be using 300×250 ad units on your blog.
2) Use both image and text ads
People have this perception that if they use only the image ad format that they’ll be generating a higher eCPM, and in turn earning more revenue. That is absolutely not true.
When you use only image ad formats, you are cutting out a substantial portion of the advertisers who are bidding via text links. And when you cut out competition, your ad space becomes… well… less competitive – which means less valuable.
So make sure your ad units are selected for both the image and text link ad units – especially for your 300×250 ad units.
3) Get your 300×250 ad unit called first in your HTML
Ok, this might sound strange to some people, and some might not understand – just post your questions in the comments below.
When it comes to the Google Adsense auction system – the system that determines what ads to show on your site, and where the highest paying advertisers are to be displayed – you have to understand the Google Adsense system.
Google will always display the highest paying advertisers in the ad unit that is crawled first on any given page. And by being crawled first, I mean the ad unit that is the highest up in the HTML of your page.
So the highest paying advertisers will have their ads displayed at the top, then the next highest paying advertisers are second, and so on…
Since 300×250 ads are the highest paying ads, you’ll want to make sure the 300×250 ad unit is code is crawled first on your site.
As you can see with this blog, the 300×250 ad unit is NOT the top placed ad – the 728×15 text link ad along the top is.
But what you can’t see is that I have CSS code embedded in my header that is calling my 300×250 ad first – it is actually the first code period to be crawled first.
The CSS code is pretty straight forward – here it is:
Obviously, I used “xxxx” instead of the actually numbers from my Adsense code.
But this is the CSS code in my header.php
And then in the top sidebar widget I put the following:
<div id=”adsenseAddSidebar”>
</div>
And that’s it – now I have my 300×250 banner ad being called first at the top of my header.php, which ensures that the absolute highest paying advertisers ads are presented each and everytime my page loads.
And this strategy alone is worth its weight in gold – trust me…
Hope that helps, post questions in the comments if need be.