Adsense optimization tips and techniques

Being the primary monetization tool for most blogs and other websites, it’s imperative to get the most out of Adsense. While it’s good to read up on other people’s strategies, sometimes it’s nice to hear it, er… straight from the horse’s mouth. Google has recently come out with a video for Adsense optimization and I thought I’d share it with you. But first, here’s a quick summary:

5 Steps to optimize your Google Adsense Earnings

1. Analyze your webpages. Different types of sites elicit different user behaviors, and you should tailor-fit your ad placement accordingly. However, the general rule is to place them as near to the primary content as possible. The video shows a heat map as a guide.

2. Set up custom channels. Create custom channels per ad unit to track their individual performance, instead of lumping everything together. This is pretty basic stuff which will give you many wonderful benefits down the line (and it’s a sin not to do it!).

3. Optimize your ad unit design and placement. One of the great things about this video is that it spills the beans on what specific ad formats advertisers prefer most, which also happen to be the top performing formats in terms of clickthrough rates and CPM. What’s more, it gives smart tips on optimizing the color palette to increase ad effectiveness.

4. Maximize revenue from multiple ad units. Cluttering your pages with ads will only turn off your visitors, so a better approach is to maximize the yield from the limited number of ad units allowed by Adsense. The video shows how to use the data from your custom channels to map out a strategy.

5. Track and measure your results. The last step is to take full advantage of the flexible reports generation feature of Adsense, and this tutorial tells you how. They also give further references at the end of the video.

I’ve used Adsense for some time and have implemented some of these suggestions before, but I still found it helpful with the little bits and pieces of information they were generous enough to provide. So do yourself a favor. Take a 10 minute break, drink your favorite beverage, and watch the video by clicking the image below. Cheers!