by: Kenny Hemphill

Google's Adsense is one of the most powerful weapons in website
publisher's arsenal. It enables you to monetize your sites easily
and if used properly can generate a very healthy income. However, if
you're not using it properly and maximizing the income you squeeze
from it, your leaving money on the table – something we all hate
doing.

Boosting your return from Adsense can be done very easily and
quickly, and you'll be amazed by the results.

I ran Adsense on my sites for over a year before I discovered these
techniques, and like many people, I though I was doing pretty well.
My clickthrough rates and CPM figures were very healthy, and I
didn't honestly think that they could be improved a great deal. How
wrong I was. Immediately after I implemented a few quick changes my
clickthrough rate more than doubled, and by doing some fine tuning I
manged to get nearly three times as many people to click on the ads
as had been previously doing so.

The first technique is one that was 'discovered' by the amazingly
helpful Debs, on SiteSell's SBI! forums. When I read it originally,
it made sense and I decided to goive it a go, but I wasn't prepared
for the immediate impact it would have on my income. It involves
making only a few simple changes to the format and positioning of
your Adsense ads.

Firstly, forget about using banners or skyscrapers. These ad formats
are almost universally ignored by surfers. Why? Because we've all
been conditioned to recognise a skyscraper or banner as an advert
and as these adverts are rarely of any interest, we ignore them.
What's needed is a way of integrating Adsense ads into the editorial
on your site as seamlessly as possible. To do this you need to do
three things:

1. Use the 250 x 250 rectangle format 2. Make the background color
of the ad the same as the background color of your site, or as close
to it as possible. 3. Make the ads borderless by setting the border
color to be the same as the background color of the ad.

These changes can be made by logging into your Adsense account and
creating a custom format. Just select the 250 x 250 ad format, and
create a custom color palette. Use the color picker to pick the coor
you want. The Javascript is automatically generated at the foot of
the page, ready for you to copy and paste into the pages on your
site.

Now, you need to position your ads where surfers are most likely to
click on them. Research using retina scanning technology has shown
that the place that surfers tend to look at first and most often is
the top left. I don't know the reasons for this, perhaps it's
because that's where we're used to seeing the most useful search
engine results (at the top of the rankings) and search engines are
the sites we most often visit, so we automatically look at the same
place on other sites.

Whatever the reasoning, as soon as I made the above changes to my
Adsense ads, clickthrough rates doubled, immediately.

The second technique is much newer and one which is entirely based
on my own experience. Google has recently added a new type of
Adsense format, called Adlinks. This displays a series of links on
your page in the same style of Ad unit as regular Adsense ads. When
a user clicks a link they are taken to a page of adverts that
resembles regular Google search results. As a publisher, you are
paid every time a user clicks one of those ads.

Adventurous soul that I am, I jumped in with both feet and started
to trial Adlinks on my most visited pages as soon as it was
launched. I'm using the four links in a square box format,
positioned top left of my page content. After a few weeks of running
Adlinks alongside regular Adsense ads, it's clear that the return on
Adlinks is about a fifth to a quarter higher than regular ads.
There's no clear reason for this but one explanation may lie in the
fact that clicking on an Adlink takes the user to page of 'results'.
When a user clicks on one of these, you are paid for the click. If
the user finds what they want, great, if not, it seems that they hit
the Back button on their browser and try again, just as you would
for normal search engine results. Then they click on another result,
and you get paid again. So it's possible to be paid more than once
from the same Adlink click. Now, this reasoning is speculative, but
it does make perfect sense in the light of my Adlinks results.

Finally, Adsense has some excellent tracking statistics that allow
you to track your results across a number of sites on a site by
site, page by page, or just about any other basis you choose. This
is a very powerful tool and you should use it to find out which ads
are performing best for you and fine tune your Adsense and Adlink
ads accordingly.

So you see, by spending an hour or so of your time making a few
adjustments to the Adsense ads on your sites, you can very quickly
treble your Adsense income. Give it a go, you'll be amazed by the
results.



Kenny Hemphill is the owner and publisher of The HDTV Tuner and has
been using Adsense for two years.