Quick Win 1: Blogger makes it ridiculously easy to place Google text adverts on your blog, providing you've already got an AdSense account. You must have seen these before on sites. When a visitor clicks on an ad link, Google pays you a few cents. (1c = just over half a penny). Some online businesses apparently even base their entire business models on this. But you need an awful lot of clicks to make a significant amount of pennies so big traffic and eye-catching placement is really the key.We're going to give AdSense a try here and see if anyone clicks on the things. Rather than muddle around aimlessly trying to fathom out which and what works best, we WBFMs (Would-Be Future Millionaires) want to do it the easy way, so let's draw on the collective wisdom of the Internets.
Where should I place Google ads on my pages? That is the question.
Google itself has a "heat map" illustrating what it calls 'the ideal placing on a sample page layout'. In a nutshell, clicks are strongest in the area directly above the main content and parts where users' attention is focussed, which is plain common sense. Here's the advice for blogs.
There's a lot of anecdotal (and frankly conflicting) tips out there - see the Related Links below - but for me, the most useful yet is this guy's research. Interestingly, according to his tests, a wide standalone AdSense strip actually above the content worked much better than something plonked into text. He writes:
... the only way to find that out is to TEST, TEST and then TEST some more. It is the quickest and easiest way to increase your AdSense income immediately.Looks like we'd better get TESTING then...
See also:
- Really Evil Google AdSense Placement (Hongkiat.com)
- AdSense Placement Optimization: User Behavior (Robin Good)
- 9 Clever Google AdSense Recipes (Advice Maker) Google Cached version
- Adsense Optimization (Chris Pirillo via YouTube)
