Category: AdSense

It’s a little quiet in the forum since I upgraded the website, so I thought I’d try and get a few more visitors there.

So, if you’re keen to see a photo of my latest cheque from Google, visit this page:

My Google AdSense Cheque (or Check for Americans)

Hopefully people will be keen to share their success stories as well.

Until next time…

Ok, this will go round the internet MANY times. But, I’d like to give you a heads up on a little photo that will give a lot of people inspiration.

If you haven’t heard of plentyoffish.com (that’s Plenty Of Fish), it’s a dating site run by 1 person. This person, (Markus Frind I believe) also runs AdSense on his site. Ok, so he gets millions of visitors a day, but there’s no reason why any normal person can’t make something close to this. Personally, I’m aiming to make his DAILY amount, my MONTHLY amount.

And, that amount is…. $10,000. A DAY.

Feel inspired. Click here.

This is no AdSense Secret. It’s been said many, many, many, MANY times: Fewer Ads means higher earnings.

I’ve read this in so many places. But it always gets said by people claiming to make thousands of dollars a month. What about for the people just starting out? Well, even for the little guys, putting fewer AdSense ads on a site will increase the Cost per Click (CPC) of an ad.

Here’s my theory on that.

Google is out to make money. If you have 12 ads on your site, of course Google will try to put the high-paying ads on your page, but if it runs out of those, it will put what it can onto your page. Now you have to hope your visitors are clicking on a high-paying ad. BUT, if you put 3 WELL PLACED ads on your site, Google still tries to serve the high paying ads, and if a visitor clicks the ad, voila, you earn more (and GOOGLE earns more).

– Do I honestly think this works? DEFINITELY!
– How well? It increased the CPC of ads on one of my blogs by 10 to 20 times. Fair enough, this was from a VERY few cents, to NOT very few cents…

So, remember, you now have an AdSense Secret to success. But I think that if everybody followed this theory, EVERYBODY who uses AdSense would benefit. I mean, if you are only showing 3 high-paying ads, this would mean that those people bidding low amounts would have to “up” their bid to get viewed, meaning still more high-paying ads…

So, spread the word… This could be quite a secret to success for everybody.

Beware of Click Fraud. Even the tiniest appearance of click fraud can get you banned from the AdSense program. Reading this article titled “The nonsense about AdSense” from the TimesOnline website is enough to make any AdSense publisher nervous.

Benjamin Cohen, the former teenaged dot.com millionaire, has run into a problem as he tries to make his next million: Google won’t pay him for ads run on his website

He has signed up a couple of times, even after being told he won’t be allowed to sign up again, and each time he has been banned due to click fraud. The fact that Google won’t tell him why they believe he (or someone else) is committing click fraud on his site is quite frustrating:

After a number of e-mails to Google without replies and no response from their press office, I decided to cut my losses and concentrate on selling advertising direct to clients, thereby bypassing Google’s system.

So, what do you do in a situation like this, when Google doesn’t respond to your queries, or, if your duspute is not resolved in your favour (which, I believe, does actually happen)? You could always do what this author and EX-AdSense-Publisher did:

In the end, I decided not to bother chasing Google any more for the couple of hundred pounds they owed my company or the cheques (totalling a further £1,500) I received well after the six-month deadline for banking a cheque. Instead, I decided to sign PinkNews up to Yahoo!’s pay per click programme, carefully noting the right to speak to a real human being, 24/7, if we were unhappy with the figures they provided

According to the ProBlogger post “AdSense updates AdSense Help Center“, AdSense have updated their help pages. It would appear that Google is trying to get as many people up and running as possible, with demos and more in depth help. Of course, considering they get a percentage of each click’s revenue, the more AdSensers, the merrier.

On a side note, if you’re like me and like as much info on one screen at once as possible, there’s a little link tucked away on the side of the AdSense help page called “Print entire Google AdSense FAQ“. What this does is give you 1 page containing the whole of the Google AdSense FAQ. Very helpful if you don’t mind waiting for a large page to download. I’ve often wanted to be able to see what info is in the FAQ without having to use the search feature.

When you created your ads in the AdSense setup procedure, there was a section that said “More options” on the 2nd step of the process where you can choose your channel. Below is a screenshot of this section:

At the bottom, you can see a choice for “Alternate ads or colors”. This is in case there are no relevant ads for your site. I normally leave the setting on “Show public service ads”. This means that Google will show ads that are for charities, for example, and you will not receive anything if any users click these ads. (I tended to see a lof of Hurricane Katrina relief request.

You will probably find your site generating these sorts of ads a lot at the beginning. This is attributed to the fact that Google doesn’t quite know what ads to serve just yet. Don’t worry, they will disappear, and relevant ads will start to show. If you see these ads for a long time after you start using AdSense, it would be advisable to send off a “request for help” to the Google AdSense team. They might be able to respond and tell you if there’s a specific reason you are seeing these sorts of ads.

In a previous post, you saw how to choose the colors for the different parts of your Google Ads. I mentioned that I chose certain colors because they blended in with the theme of my site. Choosing colors for your AdSense ads is another major part of ad optimization. This is mainly because, the color can make or break the blending factor. Here are a few questions to ask yourself when deciding what colors you want to make your ads:

1. Must the ad blend in with my site?
2. Can I make an ad a “shocking” color?
3. Do I need to rotate my colors?

Some of these questions might seem strange, but consider these answers:

1 – Most people recommend that the ads blend in with the site. Even Google says that “Ad color palette should blend in to the colors of the page” (Taken from their Optimization webinar). I think blending in works well in helping a reader overcome the “advert aversion” problem. I’m sure a lot of people out there hate ads. I mean, when I listen to the radio, I want music, not ads. If I record a TV show, I definitely skip over the ads. But thanks to Google’s “relevant ads”, if you blend them into your website, it almost looks like it’s a PART of your site.

2 – I’ve been told MANY a time that ads that match the color of your site are best. I tend to agree, but this is not always the case. On another site of mine, I decided to change the ads from a “blended in grey” to a “shocking green” to see if this would help people notice them. The results? My CTR practically doubled. So, I think it is always feasible to put your ads in strange colors.

3 – In a later post I will talk about a tip for rotating ad colors automatically. But for now, let me introduce a term “Ad Blindness”. This is when visitors start to skip over the ads with ease, possibly because of familiarity with the ads. Rotating the colors of your ads will help prevent this.

There is only 1 REAL answer to these questions, and this is found via testing. Use channels to test different ad formats and colors, and see what works best. It might be a slower approach, but change an ad color for a week or 3, and see what happens.

If you have any ideas or results you’d like to share, PLEASE leave a comment…

Placing AdSense ads on a web page is easy enough. The question most often asked, though, is WHERE on the page must you place the Ads? This question does not have an easy answer as every web site has it’s own differences. But Google was kind enough to release a “heat map” showing which positions on a web page were optimal for placing AdSense ads. Take a look at the Google AdSense heatmap below. The darker the color, the better the Click Through Ratio (CTR):

There are a few things to note from this image:

• The closer the ad is to the content, the better
• Ads on the left do better than ads on the right
• Ads at the top do better than ads at the bottom

This picture is especially relevant for westerners, as they read from left to right and from top to bottom. You HAVE to remember where the readers eyes are or will be. If they are looking at the ads, there is more chance that they will see something relevant, and click on it.

This is just an introduction to Google AdSense ad placement. There are MANY, MANY more things to consider about the placement and optimization of ads. I will try to touch on as many of them as possible in the coming articles.

Now that you’ve created the Ad Unit of your dreams, you need to actually add it to your site. This will differ slightly depending on MANY variations in blogging platforms and the platform templates/themes. Once again, I will give you an example of how to do this using my environment, i.e. WordPress 2.0.2 and this WordPress theme, “Aesthetic Azure“.

So, in the previous post, “Creating AdSense Ads“, the last step you did was get the code generated by Google AdSense that will display your Ad Unit chosen.

1 – Find the file that needs to be modified:

Because I have placed this ad on the right side of this page, I know that I have to look for the file that contains this section of the page. In WordPress templates, generally there are files that contain the “instructions” for the page layout and contents in different files per section of the page. Occasionally, if you have 2 side-bars (left AND right), they are contained in 1 file, something like “sidebar.php”. Other times, like with this theme, they are split up into 2 files, for example, “left.php” and “right.php”. Not all WordPress themes are the same, and they can be named anything the author wants to name them.

So, in my theme, the file I need to modify is “right.php”

2 – Find the section in the file that needs to be modified:

As you can see, my Ads appear after a section called “Links”. So, editing the file “right.php”, I look for this section in the file by scanning for the phrase “Links:”, and I see that it appears like this:

<li class=”menustyle” id=”links”><?php _e(‘Links:’); ?>
<ul>
<?php get_links(-1, ‘<li>’, ‘</li>’, ‘<br />’, TRUE, ‘id’, FALSE, TRUE, -1, TRUE); ?>
</ul>
</li>

So, to keep my ads in the same theme as the menu structure, I’ve just replaced the middle 3 lines, which LISTS my links, and placed my AdSense code. Like this:

<li class=”menustyle” id=”links”><?php _e(‘Sponsors:’); ?>
— all my adsense code here —
</li>

Obviously, instead of “all my adsense code here”, you would place the code that you got from the last post’s instructions.

3 – Upload your new Template:

Having modified your blog’s template, you will need to modify the live version of this template. In most cases, this is really simple, especially so in WordPress. It is just a case of going into the WordPress Admin console, clicking “Presentation”, clicking on “Theme Editor” and selecting your file on the right. Then, just overwrite the current file by pasting into the Text Area, and click “Update File” and you’re done.

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So, now that you have placed your AdSense ad on your site, you should be able to monitor it’s progress. Don’t worry, the dollars don’t just start flooding in. There are a whole lot of other customisations and improvements to the ads and your site that can be done to optimize your site. For example, there is Ad Placement, and blending… We’ll discuss these in a later post.

Now that you have set up your channels and decided what colors you want to use for your Google AdSense, it’s time to actually create the Ads. We’re going to base the next few steps on the ads on the bottom right of this page: The 120×600 Sky Scraper Ad Unit

1 – Once again, log into Google AdSense, and click “AdSense Setup” at the top of the page

2 – Select the “AdSense for Content” link

3 – Select the “Ad Unit” option, and in the Drop Down box, select “Text ads only”

4 – Under “Format”, select “120 x 600 Skyscraper”

5 – Under “Colors”, enter the colors that you decided on in the previous post: “Choosing colors for AdSense Ads“. Check the example on the left to see if the colors look right

6 – Under “More options“, next to “Channel“, select the Channel you created (if suitable) in this post: “Create Good AdSense Channels”

7 – For now you can leave the rest of the options as default

8 – After clicking “continue”, you will get to the page containing the code you will need to put on your web page to show the ads. Just putting your mouse in the text box will select the code. Copy and paste this somewhere where you will remember where it is. This will make it easier to paste the AdSense code into your page at a later stage.

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And that is it. You have the code, and are ready to make money using AdSense. Maybe you’ll even catch up to those Rich Jerks out there 😉

In this post I will describe the process I went through to choose the colors of the AdSense Ad Unit at the bottom right of this page. To get it exactly the way I want, it involved looking at the CSS for WordPress theme I’m using. I will discuss the Style Sheet for WordPress templates/themes in a later post, so hopefully this won’t be too complex. It is still possible to get what you need without looking at the CSS for the exact colors, and I will try and exaplain them in a later post.

Deciding what the Ad must look like:
If you take a look on the left of this page, you should see 2 boxes containing a title and a list of links, namely “Pages” and “Categories”. This is the standard menu structure for my blog, so I’ve decided that, to enable my ads to blend in a little better with my site, I want them to look similar to this. According to Google’s T&C, visitors must be able to distinguish the ads from the rest of my site’s content, and you’ll see that this is still done because of the “title” “Ads by Goooogle” at the top of the Ads. So I have chosen the SkyScraper ad unit.

Deciding on the Ad’s Colors:

Once again, if you look at the menus on the left, you will see that the Heading of the menu is Blue, and the links underneath are Red (or Orange, I can’t really tell :-D). In an ad unit, there are generally 5 parts that you can change the colors of, and you will see what colors I have chosen for each part:

1. Border – White, because I will be using my own border as the rest of my menu structure does
2. Title – Blue, like the titles of my other menus
3. Background – White
4. Text – Red
5. Url – Red, so that it falls as part of the Text section

Finding the Ad’s Colors:

In my style sheet, if I find where the menu’s formatting is defined, I can see the colors being used are:

• Red = #FF3300
• Blue = #008CD2

The other color I will need is White, which is #FFFFFF.

This all makes life really easy, because, if you see the picture below, when designing the ads in my AdSense account, it’s just a case of entering the colors in the correct Boxes.

In my previous post I highlight why you need good AdSense Channels, namely, to easily see how your Google ads perform when you view the AdSense reports. Here is how to use that information to actually create a good Channel (with examples).

Name your Channel:

Info you will need (see previous blog for more details):

• What is your Website name?: Space Blog
• Is it a Google search box or Ad?: Ad
• What type of Ad?: Link Unit
• Where will you place it?: On the Left
• Will this be site-wide or only on Post Pages?: Post Pages

So, using the above info, we can create the name “SB_Ad_Link_Left_Posts“. If you were to test a specific color and wanted to compare it to other colors, you could add that parameter into the name as well.

Now, let’s see how to create the Ad Channel in Google.

1 – Log into your Google AdSense account

2 – Click “Channels” near the top to go to the Channels section

3 – Make sure you’re in the “AdSense for Content” section

4 – Go down the page to “Manage Custom Channels”
5 – Type the name of your Channel (in this case: SB_Ad_Link_Left_Posts) into the text box and click the button “Create New Channel”

6 – Make sure it appears in your list of “Active Custom Channels”.

7 – If you have any typo errors that you need to fix, there is the option to do so at the bottom next to “Rename:”

And there you have it. Now it’s just a case of creating the Ad for this Channel.