A few weeks ago I was invited by Google to a Google Adsense Special
Event they were holding at the Google office in Boulder, Colorado. The
event included some generic PowerPoint presentations and some solid
advice. I was also matched up with a member of the Google Adsense team
for a one on one review of my account and my main website. This one one
one session was very interesting and since then I have been playing with
different Google Adsense variations.
I can taell you that there are many ways to reduce your income from Google
Adsense. It is amazing how much a small change can make Google Adsense
ads less performing. Of course there are plenty of options how things
can work the opposite direction as well. But it requires a lot of
testing and it requires some balls to mess around with one of your top
performing websites. You probably should not care about reduced income
if you make only a few dollars per month, but if your Google Adsense
income is significant a small change can mean a lot less coin being
transferred your way with the next payment. Definitely make sure you
play with different ad sizes and color variations and give each ad
enough time to collect data so that you can make an informed decision.
While split testing the different ads it is also important how to
position your ads on your website. The best performing ad position for
me is above the article, but below the headline of that article.
However, this is bad for the user experience in my opinion. It can
actually happen that the user will never see the article they came for
in the first place if they find an ad appealing and click on it. While
that is great from a revenue perspective, it can have a big negative
impact on your search engine rankings and you can jeopardize your good
ranking for some short revenue. The Google Adsense team will tell you
one thing, while the Google Search team will tell you otherwise. It is
up to you to really find the thin line in the middle. In addition, I
prefer to have visitors on my websites a little longer and not to lose
them right away.
One way to compromise is to place the Google Adsense ads at the top
of the article, but to let the text flow around the ads. It is not as
intrusive compared to just placing the ads above the article. Overall it
makes the pages look nicer, too. The user experience is better and in
the end that is an important piece for me (and your search engine
rankings). In addition to have the text flow around the Google ads I am
also making sure that on my WordPress based websites the ads are only
shown on the specific article pages and not on the home page. Here is a
piece of code that you can use to accomplish just that. Just paste it
into the location that represents the place where you want to display
the Google ads. The screenshot above gives you a good view at how this
will look like production.
<div style=”float: left; margin: 5pt”><?php if(is_single()) { ?>Your Adsense Code Goes Here<?php } ?> </div>
By the way – the color combination for the ad block that you did not
perform very well for me. I am using an Excel Spreadsheet to keep track
of when I made changes to a specific ad and ad channel and then how the
specific ad worked out in production. This testing process is called
split testing and if you are trying to sell online should be something
you do all the time.
I use the Genesis Framework (Studiopress)
on most of my websites because it is SEO optimized right out of the box
and it allows easy changes to WordPress through hooks. There are even
some Genesis related WordPress plugins available so that you do not need
any coding knowledge to customize your blog. I’ll put the code from
above into the following Genesis Hook
genesis_before_post_content
Very easy to do split testing this way. One single change updates the Google Adsense ads on all your postings.
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