Congratulations for getting your first site up and running. If you found this article you likely have built out a site, you’ve done your optimization, you’re getting some traffic, but you might be starting to realize that Adsense is not going to simply spit out money at you! Have no fear, I am going to be covering some great Adsense tips, and help you take your sites earnings to the next level.
Optimizing your Adsense earnings can really be broken down to two categories, content optimization, and ad optimization. I am going to be breaking down each in depth, and covering some basic marketing principles as well, so lets get started!
Tips for Optimizing Adsense Ad Placement
There are tons of strategies on ad placement, I am going to be covering the most popular, and cover a few different strategies that are well suited for different types of sites. Its also key to keep in mind that Google is also actively searching for sites that display too many ads above the fold, which makes things a little more complex. The key to optimizing ad placement is knowing how users browse your site, so we will be starting by looking at some interesting behaviors from eye tracking and heatmap studies of users on the web. I’ll be listing out findings from studies as well as a takeaway for Ad placement. I will summarize the takeaways at the end of this section.
User Behavior Studies
Observation One:
Users Spend the majority of their time browsing above the fold, and eyes tend to spend more time on the left side of your website.
“Web users spend 80% of their time looking at content above the fold. This study showed that while users did scroll down, only 20% of their attention was allocated to all information below the fold. “
Source: http://www.nngroup.com/articles/scrolling-and-attention/
Takeaways:
You need to have a very compelling hook in the first sentence or two of your content, create enough intrigue for users to view the entirety of your content. If you fail to hook a user early, they are significantly less likely to be exposed to all three of your ad units.
Since we know that Google has an algorithm that penalizes websites for having too many ads above the fold, your best bet is to have a single ad only slightly visible above the fold, and a well crafted introduction that will compel visitors to view the rest of your ad inventory. Prioritize your content, and hit them with the big guns early. You can choose to have more ads above the fold but you risk a small decrease in rankings.
Finally, this tells us the absolute worst place to place an ad would be a skyscraper in the bottom-right position of your site. If you must use skyscrapers, move your sidebar to the left side of your site, and keep it relatively high on the page.
Observation Two:
Users Skim, and don’t have the time for your awesome content. The majority of users browse sites in a “F” pattern.
“During an average visit, web users at most have time to read little more than 20% of the content on a given page.”
Source: http://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-little-do-users-read/
“Eyetracking Visualizations showed that users often read web pages in an F-shaped pattern – two horizontal stripes followed by a verticle stripe.”
Source: http://www.nngroup.com/articles/f-shaped-pattern-reading-web-content/
Takeaway: Make your content easily scannable. Users will be scanning your content, quickly gauging if your page contains the information they are seeking. Making your important content easily digestible is key to improving your sites stickiness, and will increase earnings. Try starting paragraphs, bullet points, and headings with information carrying words, which grab users attention and encourage them to read more.
Google’s Above the Fold Algorithm
Before we cover some popular setups, its important to understand why we cannot use all the knowledge we gained from the studies to position ads in areas that would garner the most clicks. When Adsense was launched, it was not uncommon for websites to add multiple ad units above the fold focusing in on the top left portion of the website. Google has since implemented an algorithm that searches for sites that are “top heavy” with ads, meaning that the majority of the space above the fold is dominated by ads, and the actual content the user is looking for is being pushed down the page.
The first implementation of the algorithm was released in early 2012, with an update in late 2012 and a more recent update in early 2014.
It is largely speculated that this ad takes into account browser size, and measures the amount of users that can see the content without having to scroll, the amount of content that is displayed above the fold, and the amount of ads a user would navigate before seeing the content.
Google has realised a tool that you can run your site through – check it out here: http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/12/introducing-google-browser-size.html
What you really want to focus on is ensuring that the vast majority of browser sizes can atleast see your content, and upper elements of your site are forcing content lower down the page. If you find that your content is a bit low, it is worth investing some time reducing the size or adjusting your header, sliders, margins, and ad units.
Here is an example of an Adsense setup that would generate a ton of clicks, but would definitely trigger an ad heaviness penalty.
With that out of the way, lets move on to what works now.
The trick to Adsense is maximizing the impact we can have on users while still abiding by Google’s rules. Keep in mind that we need to be careful to not trigger an ad heaviness ranking penalty, so we will be primarily focusing on setups that avoid having too many ads high on the page. It is worth noting that websites that do not primarily depend on organic traffic can place their ad units where they please without fear of repercussions.
Setups Endorsed By Google – the dotted line is the average above the fold line.
The following is the setup used by No Hat Digitals Adsense sites, and was chosen for producing the most revenue, while avoiding any organic ranking penalties.
This setup includes one ad block below the 2nd paragraph, another in the middle of the content, and a third at the end of the content. This delivers a high cpc ad near the top of your content in prime territory while avoiding any ad heavy issues above the fold.
AD Types
Google offers several ad types, but overall you are going to want to stick with the rectangle, and the large rectangle in most cases. Every website is different, and I always recommend split testing, but when it comes to choosing ad types large rectangles are likely to far outperform the other sizes available.
The issue here is that many users have developed what is called banner blindness. Internet users have been absolutely bombarded with banner ads since the dawn of the internet. There are some hilariously bad statistics about banners, and keep in mind skyscrapers ad units are just banners that are rotated 90 degrees. Just think about it – according to comscore the average internet user viewed 1700 banner ads in the last month, can you remember any that you clicked? Solve Media put out some humorous statistics on the abysmal click through rate of these ads – such as “ You are more likely to have completed Navy Seal training or climbed the summit of Mount Everest than have clicked a banner ad”. So while split testing is always a good idea, unless you have a unique site setup, you can feel comfortable simply sticking with large rectangle ad units within content.
Styling Ads
Something worth split testing is how your ads are styled. This only comes into play if you are using text ads, which can still be effective. There are three main strategies that should be tested when split testing ad styling, Blending, Complementing, and Contrasting ad units.
Image source: Google Adsense Optimization Support
They all three warrant testing if you are using text ad units. Something to keep in mind is your sites user base, specifically the amount of visitors who return each month vs the amount of new users. Users who frequently visit the same site will become blind to the areas that the ads occupy on your site regardless of the styling strategy you have chosen. The trick to combatting this is to shift your ad placement periodically with sites that have a large returning user base.
Blocking Advertisers
Google Adsense gives you the option to block specific advertisers from running ads on your website. This should only be implemented if a narrow set of circumstances, and can decrease your revenue as well. Most webmasters should instead focus on improving their sites quality score, integrating keywords with a higher cpc, and other strategies.
Blocking advertisers will likely only decrease your CPC because Adsense runs ads that have the placed the highest bid first, followed by lower bidders, in descending order. Webmasters who claim that blocking advertisers that are low bidders don’t fully understand how ads are served. Since ads are shown in descending order by bid price, eliminating ads at any bid level will only ensure an ad with a lower bid will be shown in its place.
Blocking advertisers can improve your earnings. It only works when you can definitely tell that an advertisers click through rate on your site is significantly lower than all other advertisers. This is the only situation that would warrant a block, with the logic being that you are sacrificing the poor performers higher cpc for higher performing ad units. Even if your site has served enough ads for you to isolate poor performers, something to keep in mind is your sites overall ad inventory – if your main keywords have medium or low competition in Adwords, it may be worth leaving in low performers with high bidders simply because there are so few alternatives.
To get a good idea of how advertisers are performing on your site, you can visit the Performance Reports > Ad Networks page.
Optimizing Content for Increased Adsense Earnings
There are a few tricks that can be done to increase earnings on existing pages. First thing you will want to do is examine the quality of the content on your site. In most cases longer articles that serve as a complete resource are outranking and outearning smaller articles that focus on a narrow topic. Take a look at your pages that are already performing well, and brainstorm on how you can add to the content to truly make it a complete resource on the topic.
For example, a page about a stair stepper covers the basic specs, tips on where to find it, helpful reviews, and comparisons with similar products is performing well, generating a high cpc and drawing in a healthy amount of traffic.
To expand upon it, a webmaster could add the following:
A calorie calculator that is specific to the product
A weekly exercise plan that revolves around the product
A diet plan to complement the product
Suggest complementary products, such as water bottles, and womens athletic wear.
By adding on to existing content, you greatly increase your chances of ranking for additional long tail keywords, and introduce additional high cpc keywords onto your page. This can even lead to gaining natural links!
A good rule of thumb is to produce content in the 1500 word range. Pages with 1500+ words of quality content have been consistently outperforming articles of shorter lengths.
The Winning Adsense Strategy for 2014 and 2015
1. Ensure your site is not ad heavy above the fold.
2. Ensure your content pulls readers in early.
3. Rectangles and Large Rectangles are currently the highest performing ad units.
4. Build additional content onto high performing pages, every page should be a total resource for the topic.
5. Split test everything.