Great Tips for Working with AdSense

By Philipp Lenssen

1. Ads can work well in-between other stuff.
   On a games site of mine, some of the games don't contain ads next to
   the game area; the AdSense ad will only be shown in-between game
   rounds. This is the time the visitor is not concentrating on performing
   a task but might take a small break, and be open to the option of
   visiting new sites.

2. Put too much emphasis on AdSense and your site may be linked to less.
   The more available space you dedicate to AdSense on your site, and the
   less you differentiate between ads and content in your design, the more
   money you earn with the program, right? Not quite. While pushing the
   AdSense may result in short-term gains, it might also convince some
   visitors that the site is too crowded to be worth visiting again. And
   some of those visitors may also be bloggers or other people who might
   otherwise help to promote your site with links to it. And the less your
   site gets linked to, the less traffic it gets, meaning AdSense revenues
   may go down in the long term.

3. Even if you get huge traffic, the AdSense income from the site is more dependent on the site type and audience. Google targets AdSense ads automatically to the site content. Or at least, it does so ideally
   – but some types of content fare better than others with this
   targeting. I noticed for instance that AdSense does better on a games
   site than on a technology blog. I also heard people say that AdSense
   does quite good on product oriented blogs; say, one post solely about
   the iPod; another post solely about Gadget XYZ, and so on.

4. Image ads can be relevant and work for you, but they might also apall some visitors.
   Google's AdSense program gives you the option to choose between a
   couple of different ad formats. Two main groups are text ads vs text
   & image ads. When you choose the latter, Google will deliver what
   they deem works best for your content (or so one would hope, and it
   would be in Google's best self-interest to serve you the best possible
   ad, it seems).
   
   However, Google doesn't really know your layout
   preferences, and they don't really understand when your audience thinks
   ads are "too much"; and considering image ads include Flash animations
   (which you can't disable, once you go for image ads), Flash animations
   may well push some people away. One thing you can do is to only show
   image ads in areas where they don't disturb the content, e.g. at the
   end of posts. Also, you might want to listen to visitor feedback on the
   ads being served; I received emails before that the blinking ad on this
   or that site made a person want to leave the site, at which point I
   blocked the specific advertiser via the AdSense Setup -> Competitive
   Ad Filter option.

5. When it comes to context sensitive targeting, you can increase or lower the importance of certain parts of your page.
   To help Google find a matching ad for your content, you can use the
   HTML comment syntax by encapsulating more important parts with
   

   <!-- google_ad_section_start -->
   ... your important site content here ...
   <!-- google_ad_section_end -->.

   Or, to lower the importance of a section, use:
   
   

   <!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->
   ... your not so important site content here ...
   <!-- google_ad_section_end -->

   (Google notes that it may take up to 2 weeks for this change to your site will be taken into account by the AdSense.)
   
   
   What if your site doesn't have any good matchable content to begin
   with, though? Say, the page just includes an image. Well, for the
   reasons of search engine optimization but also ad optimization you
   might want to consider using at least a descriptive title, an
   explanatory footer containing the important keywords or keyphrases (the
   kind of footer that actually helps the human visitor by explaining what
   the page is about). In the case of image content, reasonable alt and
   title attribute texts should be used as well.*
   
   *Whatever
   you do, don't resort to "keyword-stuffing" as it doesn't help your
   visitors and may get your page ranked lower in search engines.

6. Be aware of risks when you change ad layouts too much.
   I once had a system on the server to randomly differ between various
   AdSense layouts on the same page. Doing so I was hoping to add some
   good variety to keep the ads at least somewhat interesting and notable.
   Shortly after I stopped doing so and simply included a rather big
   static area for the AdSense to "do what it wants," the AdSense revenues
   for that site increased. Now, I don't know if this was a coincidence of
   some sorts, as revenues often go down or up even when you don't do
   anything, but it might well have been that there was a connection
   between adding too much homemade randomization, and lowered revenues.
   
   
   At another time, during the redesign of this blog, I switched from one
   ad format to another for the end-of-posts AdSense ad space. This,
   combined with perhaps other layout changes, suddenly cut the ad
   revenues in half for the blog. It took me some time to realize that I
   had some ad channels* set up for the specific old layout size, and by
   changing this I must have kicked out all those advertisers who were
   pushing their ads through the channel.
   
   *This setting can be found at AdSense Setup -> Channels.

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