Optimizing Adsense for Higher Earnings

By now you're familiar with the Adsense advertising program and understand how it can help you turn your website visitors into a little extra cash! Great, hopefully you also understand the basics about how to add Adsense ads to your web pages too right? Excellent, so now you're probably thinking, “that's all great, but how can I optimize my ads to get the highest number of clicks possible?” Good question! Luckily for you there has been tons of research done on Adsense click through rates and what can be done to optimize them.

A 'click through rate' or CTR, is simply the term given to the number of clicks your ad receives in relation to the number of people who visit a page. For example if 100 people visit your page and 10 of them click on your Adsense ad, that would mean your page has a 10% CTR (click through rate) See how that works?

So our aim is to push that click through rate as high as possible to make as much money from your pages as possible; in order to do this you need to seriously optimize your Adsense Ads. Lots of people have spent months researching and testing Adsense customizations to maximize click through, Thankfully for you I'm going to highlight the simplest and most effective ways you can implement these strategies today!

1) Ad Type – When you start down the path with Adsense one of your first steps to Optimizing your Adsense Ads will be to choose the Ad Type for your page. As we already know, google offers several different advertisement sizes to display on your site. Some are better than others at encouraging clicks and some just look better too. Historically the best ad size to use is the one called medium rectangle. This ad size fits approx 4 advertisements in and uses a nice clear layout.

2) Ad placement – This is the single biggest contributing factor for getting a high CTR on your web page. You will probably think you prefer to fit your ads in around your current page content, while this looks pretty and tidy, it is not the best placement for your ad. Using the above 'medium rectangle' ad layout, move your adsense block to the top left side of your page. This is the place that eye tracking studies have found we tend to look at first. You can put some text to the right of it if you wish, but be careful about placing images to close to adsense blocks as you are not allowed to mislead people into clicking.

3) Colour selection - The third step to Optimizing Adsense is all about the colours you choose to show your ads on the page. Many people get this completely wrong and throw away lots of clicks because they refuse to test this out. The key to choosing the right colours is to use the same colours as your site and try to blend the ads into your page as opposed to having them contrast with your content. If you have a orange header for example, use the same orange for your advertiser links. Keep the text the same grey or black as on your page and select a very light grey for the URL. This is an absolute must to encourage as many clicks as possible.

4)Target the high paying relevant keywords - As you probably know, different keywords will pay different amounts on the clicks and when you start optimizing Adsense you need to keep this in mind. Let's face it, some words are just worth more than others because of the simple fact that some words are much more searched for. With that in mind don't just go out and pick a word that is worth good coin and then place the it haphazardly on your webpage and hope that you get clicks. Keep it relevant.

Implement these crucial steps onto your Adsense pages today and you should begin to see an increased click through rate almost immediately; providing of course you already have the traffic to show these ads to.

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