dear reader,
This article on ecommerce will help you to make more money with Google AdSense and Yahoo Publishing Network. All of the information below does not violate any terms of service for the respective service, of course.
First of all, PPC ads like those offered by AdSense or YPN are great ways to make money online. Especially if you have an established and content rich website. AdSense ads are targeted ads, which means they fit the content of the site. So it is likely to meet the interests of visitors. This usually results in a higher CTR on AdSense ads compared to the CTR of regular, untargeted banner ads.
Now, how can you increase your AdSense earnings just by placing ads on your site? Don’t worry, there is a lot you can do.
First, let’s look at the factors that directly affect ad performance:
* Unique visitors and page impressions
* CTR
* Targeting
* CPC
You will increase your revenue by optimizing one or more of the above factors.
1. Improve website traffic
By getting more visitors to your site, you can potentially increase the number of ad clicks, since there are more people who see ads. In addition, if you can get more page impressions on your website, you will also have more ad impressions which can increase your ppc earnings.
You can attract more visitors by optimizing your website for search engines, but also by adding more quality content and unique services to your site. Also, your site should have at least a “good design”, because your visitors probably won’t go to your site again if it looks too great. In case you don’t know how to do search engine optimization: I will write an article about it as well in the future.
Better traffic stats will result in more ad impressions. However, this does not mean that you have a higher CTR. The CTR may remain the same or even lower than before, so you also need to improve one more factor from the factors mentioned above.
2. How to get a higher CTR
There are many options you can choose to get a higher click-through rate.
For example, you have the possibility to change the ads themselves.
2.1 Advertising colours
Generally, you have two ad colors to choose from: premium ads and ads that blend.
Both may have their pros and cons, but in general you need to experiment with those types of color palettes to see which works best for your site. In my personal experience (and what I’ve been told by most webmasters I’ve spoken to) which colors blend into performance the best. Others, however, have seen better click-through rates than Spotify ad colors, so you should really try this out for yourself. Whatever option you choose, you should at least experiment with your ads to match your website design and color scheme.
My personal advice is: match the ad text color to your website content text color and match the ad link color to your site link color.
2.2 Ad placement
Another factor that affects CTR is the position of your ad. AdSense ads should not be hidden from your visitors, but they should be visible at first glance. Again, there are still many places you can choose to have your ads appear.
Text ads seem to attract the most clicks in the top or middle of a website’s content area. Especially on websites with a lot of text content.
Do you already know the so-called “heat map” from Google? Shows profitable ad placements on site layout example. Fields colored darker orange perform best while those of a brighter color do not perform as well.
Anyway, the heatmap is just a tip for you. It relies on Google research from many different websites that have AdSense ads, but the heat map probably won’t show the ideal ad placement area for your site. So – again – it’s up to you to try out where the ads work best on your website.
To give you a direction: On sites with an article, ads placed directly below the article seem to work well. In addition, you should also place an ad above the article, so that people can click on it at the top and bottom of the page.
What is important is that ads are placed where the user’s eyes are likely to focus on them. You should also try to place ads all over your entire site, as this adds variety across your site and users have more choice. Also, more ads means more earnings, in my experience.
If you are running a forum, please pay attention to the “AdSense in Forums” section below. There I will discuss specific placement criteria for forums.
2.3 Ad format
The third way to improve ad performance is to choose another ad format. AdSense provides you with many different ad formats.
In general, wide formats seem to perform better than narrow formats. This is because people can read more words at once without having to skip a line. I’ve tested that the 336×280 large rectangle, the 250×250 square, and the 160×600 wide skyscraper performed best on my sites. These are very large ad formats, of course, so they need a lot of space, but if they are placed well they usually generate more income than small and narrow ad formats.
Another good format is the wide 728 x 90 leaderboard, which works best under the editorial content of a web page or just below the page header, in my experience. The 468×60 banner format doesn’t convert that well, but it can still be placed in areas where you don’t have a lot of space, ie directly in the header (next to the banner) or inside articles.
3. Targeting
Targeting ppc ads is very important, because targeted ads perform much better than non-targeted banner ads. Therefore, you must ensure that all ads on your website display targeted ads that match the content of your site. This will increase the click-through rate of the ads and also lead to better branding of your site, because people only find content and links that fit the theme of your site.
Many webmasters are having problems with ads not displaying appropriate text links. Anyway, ppc ads are very easy to target.
The first thing you should do is control whether the site has enough content. The more textual content, the faster your ads will be targeted by Google bots. So you should add additional content to your site to get better ads.
If you are still not getting ad links that match the content of your site and therefore the interests of your visitors, you should implement sectional targeting.
Sectional targeting is a very useful tool for helping Google find the best ads for your site. It allows you to suggest which sections of your textual content you’d like Google to focus on when matching ads to your site’s content.
You can implement section targeting by adding special HTML comments to your site’s HTML code.
HTML tags to emphasize a page section take the following format:
If you want Google to ignore certain sections of your site when targeting ads, you need to use the following comment tag:
Here is an example of what your site code should look like after implementing section targeting:
Your site address
This is the textual content of your web page.
This is the text you want Google to focus on when targeting ads.
There may also be some content here.
Please keep in mind that a large amount of content should be placed within your section targeting tags, as insufficient content may result in less relevant ads appearing on your site. Also, using ad targeting to show ads that don’t fit your site’s content is against Google’s terms of service, so you can only use section targeting to emphasize which sections of your site have relevant content.
Another way to improve ad targeting to your site is to emphasize specific terms by making them bold (or) or headline (or). Google will pay special attention to the terms and phrases that are emphasized within your web page.
4. CPC
The fourth way to improve your total advertising income is to get a higher CPC for the ads shown on your site. But how do you increase CPC?
First of all, you should do some research on different keywords that match the theme of your site. Go to Google and perform searches for these keywords. The more AdWords ads appear in the right-hand bar of Google search results, the more likely your related keyword ads will get a higher CPC. Additionally, you can make use of Overture’s Bidtool tool to identify keywords that pay well in terms of PPC ads. Although the overture tool is a direct indicator of YPN, you can still use it to get a good idea of keyword click rates.
Now that you know the keywords for which AdSense should show ads on your site, the only thing you need to do is target the ads to your chosen keywords. You can do this by adding additional, targeted content and by emphasizing words or entire sections of your web page, as described above.
5. Google search box
AdSense also provides the ability to implement Google search into your website. Google Search is a useful service for your users, who can search either your site or the entire internet. Search results pages can be customized to fit the theme of your site, and you will be paid for each valid click on the ads that appear. The search box is also great for making money from visitors who didn’t find what they were looking for on your site, because the search box allows them to search for exactly what they were looking for and will display targeted ads based on the keyword(s) they are looking for.
So the Google search box can earn you some extra cash. You shouldn’t expect much from the search box though. I was only able to increase income by 1 to 3 percent with Google search.
6. Forum optimization tips
Although I’ve already written a lot about placing ads on “regular” websites, here are some tips on how to make more money from PPC ads displayed in forums:
Ad format and placement
160 x 600 skyscraper ads placed above the fold on the left side of your forum seem to perform very well. However, a 728×90 leaderboard ad should also be placed below the forum title. The combination of these two ad formats works well and leads to a high CTR, in my experience.
This can also be seen in the Google heatmap and I can only confirm the ad placements suggested by the heatmap.
In addition, you should also place an ad between the first and second post of threads in the forum. There is already a vBulletin script that automatically displays PPC ads in this niche. You should integrate this script into your forum to improve your PPC income.
I wrote above that a leaderboard ad directly below the editorial content would work just fine. This suggestion also works for forums. So it’s a good idea to place a leaderboard ad directly below the last thread post, because a user who has read the whole thread might be looking for the next link to click on – and what better link than a target ppc link?
Anyway, this will require you to remove the leaderboard ad below the forum title, because you can only display 3 AdSense ads per page. I recommend doing this, because the leaderboard ad at the bottom of the page seems to work better than the one below the heading, in my experience (and unlike Google Heatmap). Instead, I’d like to place one of Google’s horizontal link modules below the header (the link module can be placed as an add-on ad, so you can display more than 3 ads per page).
On the whole, you should try to use ads that blend in, because people spend a lot of time in forums and forum design shouldn’t be affected by cool ad colors.
A Google search box can also be implemented in your forum. I suggest putting it directly into the forum search tool. For example, dnforum.com offers its members to use both the forum and the Google site search.
Well, that’s it. I think I wrote everything that came to my mind at the moment.
I hope you enjoyed reading this article and at least some of the above information will be useful to you.
Thank you.
sincerely,
Dominic Mueller