Adsense Ad Placement & Wordpress

Posted on June 22, 2007 | By Enkay | Leave a Comment | 461 Views

I was planning on upgrading to the new Wordpress 2.2.1 last night but due to the fact that it takes a little bit of time and the website would not function properly I decided to wait a little bit before I do it and I thought that this time I would do it at an odd time (2am or 3am) to avoid having my readers face an awkward looking home page. I realized that my host had some database problems around 10:30pm CST yesterday and I guess those are the costs of having a free host. I have to say that I have never had problems with them until last night. I guess that as soon as my hosting is over I will need a new host and I was wondering if I could get some suggestions regarding good hosts from you guys.

Anyway, my next topic is Adsense Ad Placement so lets get to it. If you visited my blog ever in the first two weeks you may have noticed that I used a 250×250 Adsense ad block at the end of my post that was aligned to the center. It made the posts look weird but at the time I didn’t know how else to do it. I also had a skyscraper ad running across the side of the page that really didn’t fit well into the entire landscape of the website. In those first two weeks I had earned about 96 cents and after experimenting with my ads I made $9 in the two weeks following that. Here are a few tips to help you get started:

Tip # 1 - You have to make your ads blend into your overall design. You cant have your page display blue headings and black text and have your ads display red headings and black text. That will case your ads to stick out like a sore thumb and instead of having people click on it, they may just avoid them completely. I included an ad in this post so that you can see a working example. The Ad title and text match the black color of my post title and text and the URL is located below in red, the same way the URLs are seen in my posts.

Tip # 2 - You have to blend your ads into the post. You really cant have your ads show up in the middle of a post because I have heard Google getting in touch with such people. If you see my ad, it floats to the side at the beginning of the post itself that way its distinguishable because thats where its located on every post. What I mean by blend is that you cannot use a 350×200 ad after you have written 5 lines of post and where you have another 10 lines after the ad. It breaks the flow of the reading and can be a little annoying.

Tip # 3 - You have to experiment with ad placement. When I had the skyscraper ad on the sidebar and an ad placed at the end of a post which used to be center aligned, it never caught anyone’s attention. They didn’t see it as part of the post or it didn’t blend into the post as well and they just skipped it. As for the sidebar skyscraper ad, it was just a little too long and maybe I would have done well with something a little shorter. Either way, after placing my ads in the posts as floating boxes my ad revenue went from 96 cents in 2 weeks to almost 9 dollars in the two weeks following that.

Tip # 4 - Don’t overload one post with all your ads. Google Adsense currently allows you to run 3 ads simultaneously on each page. If you see my post today, it only has one 250×250 ad and thats because I don’t want to accumulate all the space with more ads than content. Your readers come back because of your content, not because of how beautiful the ads look. If you don’t have enough content, you may find yourself clicking on the ads yourself - which is a violation of the rules by the way! So, break it up, have around 5 posts on a page and let 3 of them sport the ad and the other two can be just as good without the ads. If you see this page on my blog, you will notice that only two of the posts have an ad. This one and the post about the Wendy’s Sale. I am allowed 3 per page and if you look at some of the archives you will see a few pages with 3 ads on them but usually you will see 2 per page. In other words, don’t bore your readers with a lot of ads and very little content on each page. Keep a balance between content and advertising.

Tip # 5- Don’t constantly keep track of your Adsense earnings. If you go back more than once daily to see how much you have earned through Adsense or any other advertising programs then you are just pressuring yourself. What usually happens is, if you check your daily earnings once an hour, you start to feel disappointed in your ad setup if nobody has clicked as yet and you may go around and change your ad placement without realizing that it takes more than just one day for a strategy to be successful. Without realizing it, you may have changed an ad placement strategy that would have been highly successful to one that may not be as successful. They key is to be patient and to give a new advertising “campaign” or strategy at least 10 to 14 days to see how it is working out for you. You could wait longer to see how it pans out but usually if you aren’t seeing any action or you are seeing less than average earnings then you you may want to switch around that something else you think works well.

In the end, its all about how you go about implementing your strategy. In the beginning I used to be highly paranoid about my Adsense earnings and I would check them several times a day whereas now, I check them twice a day usually once when I wake up and once before I go to sleep. My Adsense earnings aren’t spectacular (trust me) but now that I don’t keep track of them as often, it stays off my mind longer and that way I don’t begin to interfere with my ads. So, I hope these tips will help you and if you would like to shed some light on the issue then please leave a comment. Let me know what works for you!