Tastybuds

Google’s two products, AdSense for Search (AFS) and AdSense for Content (AFC), have much in common, but there are also some key differences. Most people who signup start with AFC, but they are missing out if they don’t implement AFS.

AFC targets content pages, and tried to find a relevant advertiser given everything you put on that page. It is a difficult task, but Google does a fairly good job of matching advertiser to publisher. To help, you can implement Section Targeting, which gives Google a better idea of what your true content is, and can increase CPC (better advertiser match) and CTR (more relevant).

AFS is triggered when a user searches through you site, and in these cases, Google really excels. Google is given an exact keyword or phrase that the user is looking for. Also, Google has more advertises paying into AFS specifically because it is better targeted. The payouts are almost always higher, and because the ads are way more relevant, the CTR is usually way higher.

Most sites do not implement AFS, even though it is fairly easy to set up. Once you are set up, there are several things you can do to optimize. First of all, just like any other ad, you should test several styles and locations on the page. You wihout a doubt will find something at least 20% better than where you started, and often more.

But after doing these basic optimizations, you might realize that one of your main problems is not enough traffc to the search results pages. To fix this, you need to play around with where your search boxes are. Add more of them, put them in different locations, and start testing how they are styled. Once again, you will fairly quickly see large gains to traffic, which then leads to revenue.

One last tip is to start playing around with forced keyword searches. This is where you create a direct link to a valuable search results page. This page might be valuable because it has a ton of good article results which you users will like, or because of high paying AFS ads. Use <a href=”https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal?defaultView=3″>Google’s Keyword Tool</a> to find the best paying, but still relevant terms, and start trying them out. Don’t forget to once again test style, location, and which terms you are using to maximize your Google revenue.

One change you can make to your Google AdSense campaign which will have enormous impact is getting your ad units above the fold. I have often seen gains of over 50% by moving from beneath the fold to above it. The increase in performance will not always be this much, but there are plenty of gains to be had.

Being above the fold means that your ad unit is visible when you first load the page, and that you don’t have to scroll down at all to see it. One thing that many people forget is that because people have different sized monitors, and use different screen resolutions, the fold can be in different places for different users. Make sure you play around with different settings and different browsers to make sure your ads are above the fold in each scenario.

If you can’t be above the fold for whatever reason, you might also want to try placing your ads on the bottom fold. Users often scroll to the bottom of the page, so this can be a valuable piece of real estate.

As always, make sure that you test plenty of different setups, as sometimes the unexpected ends up being the most valuable. That said, it is almost always worthwhile to get your ads above the fold.

Optimizing AdSense is a fairly simple procedure to get started on, and you will notice the results very quickly. But as you begin to do more of it, you have to take into consideration the possible negative effects of your optimization. Many sites have multiple revenue streams, including display media, leads, and sponsorship. Is your optimization hurting those other revenue streams?

In order to get a good idea of the effect you are having, it is necessary to segment users into groups, and see how those groups are monetizing with AdSense, along with any other useful metrics you have access to. For example, how many pageviews per user are you getting with each test style? How many leads are these users generating?

Depending on your site structure, and what tools or partners you are using, getting the answer to these questions will be different, but the overall methodology should stay the same. One simple way to look at the overall site performance is to start each page with a cookie. If a user already has a cookie, you check which test group they belong to, and assign that value to a variable. If they don’t yet have a cookie, you randomly put them in one of your test groups, and give them the cookie for later pages in their session.

Once you have established a user in a group, you then make sure to pass this information anywhere it applies. For AdSense you will show the test style associated with that group. If you use a partner like shopping.com, you can pass in the test name for tracking leads from these users. For your analytics software, you likewise segment based on this test group.

Now instead of looking how just AdSense is performing, you can start to see a larger picture. In my experience, often what is best for AdSense often is a net gain for sites, but there are definitely exceptions. Using this framework, you can make sure that your testing gives you results that optimize your entire site.

Jason Menayan over at the YieldBuild Blog wrote a series of Ad Format Myths posts which are all very insightful.  I’d recommend reading them all:

Myths
1. Bigger ads produce better yields
2. Ads that blend into the page background perform better
3. Optimization’s goal is determining one “best” ad layout
4. Once you’ve created an optimized set of layouts for a page, you’re done
5. All site visitors respond to ads in the same way
6. The more ads on a page, the greater your overall ad revenue

The common theme, which I believe is one of the most important things when using AdSense, is that testing is key.  Common sense works much of the time, but in the world of advertising, there are endless combinations of things to try, and many of them are bound to work better than what you would think to use.  Another great point is that users act differently from each other and even sometimes from their own past behavior.  You really need to be in a mode of continual testing of as many variables as possible, and breaking down pages and users and anything else you have control over into as many groups as possible.

This kind of testing can get complicated, but it has enormous return for a site of any size.  You will never get to the holy grail of fully customizable tests that segment users completely and try every variable, but you can work to get close, and thats what counts.

Every single site that used AdSense could be monitizing better, but by how much? Many sites that I have worked with have increased monetization by over 50% with a few minor tweaks, and have more than doubled revenue when we really worked on it.

There is so much money out there, and it is rather astonishing to me that there are not more resources available to inform people of proper techniques, or give ideas of what to do. It seems to me that if people were aware of the situation, there would be a ton of interest in the topic.

Considering my blog is on this very topic, I have been researching to see what other people are saying on the matter. There are definitely a few good resources out there, but it seems like much of the rest just repeats the same few things about using the correct unit sizes, blending or contrasting with your site colors, or following Google’s heatmap. Not that these are bad ideas, but there is so much else you can do, and there is not enough focus on testing.

The amount that has been written on topics like SEO or affiliate marketing completely dwarfs that of proper AdSense technique that could very easily make you way more money. Every SEO guide out there will tell you to find a niche, hopefully one that doesn’t have too much competition, and write as much as you can about it.

Well, I think I found my niche, and I can’t find any competition. I hope that I will eventually be able to get enough people interested in this topic so that we can begin to have conversations, and everyone can learn more.

The biggest issue most sites have with testing is that there is not enough traffic. Sure, you can test a few things over the course of a week or two, but that is not enough. To truly get the most out of your site, you should be testing as much as you can. Many sites I deal with will perform a dozen test styles in a day.

The reason traffic is so important is because it takes a while for your results to become significant. You might see one style perform quite a bit better than all others over 10,000 impressions, only to find out after switching that it performs worse.

One thing you can do to get more reliable results quickly is to focus on your CTR metric rather than CPC (or RPM, which is easentially a combination of the two). Most of the testing you might do will not greatly affect CPC. There are some test that will (such as testing number of ads), but for many tests, it is just a confounding variable.  So by focusing only on CTR, your test channels become statistically significant quite a bit faster.

Although many people believe that adding more ads equates to more revenue, this is not always the case. You will almost certainly increase your CTR, but possibly at the expense of CPC.

The first ad is always the most valuable, and each subsequent ad nets less and less revenue. For example, if you have 10 listings on your page, the first might be worth $.60, while the last worth only $.10. If you can manage to keep your overall CTR consistently high, obviously you would want only the first ad showing so that users can’t click on the less valuable ads. Sometimes the value between the first and last ads are not as pronounced ($.40 vs. $.35), in which case it might be beneficial to increase the number of ads.

In the end, increasing or decreasing the number of ads will almost always be a trade off between CPC and CTR. Depending on many factors (the relative advertising market of your topic, your type of audience, the location of your ads, and more), you might be better off with less, or more, ads.

Remember to always test as much as you can, and in this particular case, focus on RPM rather than any other factor.

A nice thing to try out that doesn’t affect how your site looks is to use a red hover color for your title. When users move the mouse over the AdSense ad, they see it illuminate with the new color.

Of course, you can also have this effect on the entire ad, or with different colors, but the red title hover has been effective enough for me while staying visually pleasing. In general, I’ve seen this add anywhere from 5-15% in revenue.

Let me know how it works out for you.

If you are looking for a simple, easy way to increase your monitization of AdSense, just increase the font size of the ads. The difference it makes varies per site and page, but I have seen over 40% gains by switching the titles from 12px to 14px.

The obvious downfall of doing this is you could reach a point where the ads are so ugly you are driving people away from the site. But by testing properly, you can make informed decisions that from my experience, almost always lead to upping the font size. To keep things looking as nice as possible, I generally only change the title, but there are times when changing the text and link of the ads helps as well.

To start off, I normally set up a test channel for every font size from 12px to 24px for the title. I sometimes add in test channels to increase the size of everything else from 12px to 14px, but this can be done later. Almost immediately you will see a pretty linear correlation between font size and CTR, but it should become pretty pronounced after each channel gets 15,000 impressions. Then I choose a size that I feel comfortable with keeping in mind the monitary impact. Sometimes there isn’t much of a difference between 24px and 20px, so I choose the smaller of the two (although usually there is a pretty big difference).

Remember that if you don’t have enough traffic to perform the test, you can always just make a change in the style, and watch the before and after effects.

When you have AdSense setup on your site, and are trying to optimize it to get more revenue there are two main things you can do: make changes, and run tests.

There are many simple changes you can make which will almost be guaranteed to increase your RPM, such as increasing the font size, changing the font from arial to verdana, or adding a red hover color to the title text. These are things I usually do when I first get started optimizing a site, or when a site doesn’t get much traffic.

The number one thing you need to have before you begin testing is traffic. At a minimum, I like to get at least 10,000 impressions per test bucket, and usually at least 5 buckets. That means that if you want your test to finish in under a week, you will need at least 7,000 pageviews per day. On the higher end of things I often use 15 buckets, want 70,000 impressions per bucket, and am only testing one pagegroup of a site.

It is really all a sliding scale. Testing gives you knowledge to make changes. But you can also use knowledge from this blog (more on that later), friends, or intuition (which doesn’t always pan out, but often does). I am too impatient to test unless I can do a lot of it quickly, but really it is possible for any level of traffic.