10 Ways You Can Optimize AdSense for More Revenue
AdSense
is the most popular ad network on the planet and for good reason: It’s
technologically robust, has a great pool of advertisers, and is absolutely
free. No wonder so many publisher sign up for it.
Unfortunately,
for most, it ends right there — a vast majority of publishers make little
effort to optimize AdSense once they’ve initially set it up with one or two ads
units randomly placed anywhere on their website. This is a cause for concern
because the lack of ad optimization equates to a direct loss of potential
revenue. But wait, what is ad optimization anyway? Glad you asked.
What is
ad optimization?
Optimization
simply means taking the necessary steps to ensure that you’re making the
most of your ad inventory by maximizing revenue while at the same time
providing an optimum user experience to your visitors.
Why
optimize ads?
Optimizing
your ads is crucial when it comes to meeting your business goals whether that
may be increasing your overall ad revenue, improving the usability of your
website, increasing the visibility of your ads, or any other specific goal that
you may have.
1. Test
different ad styles
Choosing the
right ad style for your text ad units helps improve the visibility of your ads
and reduce the effect of banner blindness wherein users just skip right over
your ads. There are three main recommended strategies to style your ads:
·
To blend ads, make the
background and border color of your ads match the background of the
web page. This works well with pages with a white background.
·
To complement ads, use
colors that already exist on your site, but don’t match the background and
borders exactly where the ads are placed.
·
To contrast ads,
choose colors that stand out against the background color of the webpage. This
style is best suited for dark pages as it makes the ads more visible.
2. Test
different ad sizes
While we are
big advocates of meticulously testing the size, color, and placement of your
ads to figure out the setup that works best for you… there are some form
factors that almost always outperform others.
As a general
rule, wide ads tend to perform better than tall ads. This is because readers
consume information in “thought units”, i.e., several words at a time. Tall ad
units break the flow of reading as the user has to move to the next line to
read the complete text, this gives wide units an inherent advantage when it
comes to conversion rates.
Based on
extensive user interaction date, Google has found that the most effective sizes
for ad units are the 336×280 large rectangle,
the 300×250
medium rectangle, the 728×90 leaderboard,
the 300×600
half page, and on mobile the 320×100 large mobile banner.
Tip: Last year, AdSense launched two new ad sizes, which
are 970 x 250 Billboard and the 300 x 1050 Portrait. You should give these
two a run because apart from the new bigger creatives that are especially
designed for them, they also possess the ability to run text ads and smaller
display ads within their larger frames — thereby increasing ad competition
and increasing your revenue potential.
3. Test
different ad placements
Apart from ad
styles and ad sizes, the placement or location of ads is another factor that
can have a huge impact on your overall revenue numbers.
The first step to understanding the best location for placing
your ads is to figure out where your users are spending a majority of their
time on your website. You can get some actionable user behavior data on this if
you link your Google AdSense account to your Google Analytics account.
Another
important thing to note is that an ad setup that may work for an online
technology magazine may for work as well for, let’s say, a blog about football.
Similarly, just because a particular ad setup is working great on your homepage
doesn’t mean that it’s the best setup for individual web pages too.
The two areas
where you’ll be placing ads are “above the fold”, i.e., the part of a web page
that a user can see without scrolling, and “below the fold”, i.e., the part of
a web page that a user has to scroll down to access.
Diving
further down, you’ll typically be looking at placing ads in the header,
sidebar, inside the content, or under the content. The only way to find out
what works best is to setup ads once, rotate them, and then measure the
performance of one configuration against the other.
4.
Deploy multiple ad units
Whenever
possible, you should opt to display more than one ad unit on your web pages as
this increases the probability of the user clicking on at least one of them.
According to
Google policies, you can put up to three standard AdSense for content ad units,
three link units and two AdSense for search boxes on each page of your site.
Maximizing ad
coverage in this manner is especially beneficial to website owners whose web
pages tend to be longer than usual and require a fair bit of scrolling, giving
the ad network the opportunity to serve more than one targeted ads to the user
on the page.
5. Use
link units for small spaces
Link units
work a little differently from content ad units; they display a list of topics
relevant to the content on your site, when a user clicks on a link unit —
they are taken to a results page where they multiple ads from advertisers,
payout happens if the user ends up clicking on any of these ads.
Although it’s
a slightly more roundabout way of generating revenue, it’s a great option when
space is at a premium because link units take the least amount of space
compared to any other type of ad units.
They are also
pretty distinctive and thus more likely to evoke action from the user. Three
link units are allowed by Google and you should make full use of them by
placing them in unusual and interesting locations throughout your website.
6. Show
both text and display ads
In Google
AdSense, you have the option to display only text ads, only display ads, and
both text and display ads.
Google
strongly recommends that you allow the network to show both text and display
ads as a means to maximize your revenue potential. The
reason behind why this works is simple: Each ad, whether text or display,
participates in a bidding war to claim your ad inventory, and the ad space goes
to the highest bidder.
If you
disable the serving of either text or display ads, you effectively wipe out
roughly half of the advertisers bidding for space — resulting in
significantly lower revenue yields than what might have been possible with both
options enabled.
7.
Don’t filter ads too much
AdSense
allows publishers to filter ads by URL or categories. This is helpful in case
there’s a conflict of interest or if the publisher does not, for any
reason, wish to display a particular creative or ads from a specific
advertiser.
Although
AdSense allows publishers to filter up to 200 different websites, it’s
advisable to keep this list down to the minimum amount possible because
reducing the number of ads that can bid for your ad space equates to a
potential loss in earnings.
Filter only that what you absolutely must and let the rest run.
8. Use
pagination for content
Since AdSense
doesn’t allow auto ad refreshing (it has to be user-initiated, when anyone
rarely does), publishers are left to their own devices when it comes to making
the most of new and existing content.
If your text
posts tend to run long, a great idea is to setup pagination so that the user
can view the next page by clicking on a link. If your website runs on a content
management system like WordPress, you can just install a plugin to enable
pagination.
This has two benefits: From the user’s perspective, it
eliminates the need for endless scrolling and breaks down the post into
manageable chunks more suited for consumption; from an ad optimization
perspective, this is effective because a new set of ads is served each time the
page is refreshed — leading to a direct jump in revenue from CPM ads and
an increased probability of click on a CPC ad.
9. A/B
test your ad units regularly
With so many
different ad styles, sizes, and locations… it can be difficult to determine
which exact combination is the right one for your website and its users. A/B
testing is a method that allows you to eliminate the guesswork from this and
give you actual data that you can rely on to make a decision.
The A and B in A/B testing as simply indicators for two
different scenarios that you would like to test out.For instance, you might
want to test whether a text ad unit performs better with green as its
background color or blue. Using A/B testing, you can set up an experiment, wait
for a data, and conclusively know which color works better.
In Google
AdSense, you can conduct A/B testing by defining your own testing parameters in
the “Experiments” tab. Within the test, you also have the option of selecting
how to split the traffic between the test variants, although it is advised that
you let AdSense take care of that on its own.
10.
Automate your ad testing
As great as
A/B testing is, it can get cumbersome real quick when you need to go beyond
testing multiple parameters instead of just testing one ad variant against
another.
Taking the
example mentioned above, if you need to test the performance of a text ad unit
based on its background color being green or blue — that’s a simple enough
test that you can just setup once and wait for the result to come rolling in.
Now imagine a
scenario where you need to test out three different ad units for multiple ad
styles, ad sizes, and ad locations, and you can begin to grasp the complexity
you will encounter in manually running such a test simply because of the
permutations and combinations of ad configurations involved.
This is where automated testing comes in. We envisioned and
created AdPushup as a tool that helps publishers automate this entire process
and run these tests on autopilot based on machine learning algorithms with
minimal human intervention.
Once the
initial condition is set, our tool automatically starts serving different ad
variations, measures the performance for each one of them, and intelligently
splits and drives the bulk of the traffic towards the winning variant —
ensuring that the publisher’s ad inventory is always in optimum use.
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