How To Increase Your Google AdSense CTR: Tips, Tricks & Guidelines
Who else wants to increase they AdSense CTR numbers? Everyone should be raising their hand. I’m going to tell you some of the secrets I have learned about AdSense throughout the years, and more specifically what you can do to increase your CTR percentage.
If you follow these steps, you should have no problem increasing your CTR by at least two percent, and you could possibly see a 100 to 1,000% or more increase if you follow these steps well.
Put Ad Units On Pages With Lots Of Text
This one is kind of a no brainer, but it makes perfect sense. For the most part, AdSense ads are displayed as text, and you can force AdSense to only display text ads too, which will work to your advantage. The more keywords you have, and the more content on your page, the easier it is for your ads to blend in with your site.
Do Not Tell Your Visitors That These Are Ads!
I have never understood why people blatantly point out to their visitors that what they are seeing is an advertisement, either by using “Sponsored Links” or “Adverisements,” since those are the only acceptable methods for labeling your ads. Google already tells the user that these are Google ads!
Place Your Ad Units Above The Fold
You only have a couple of seconds to capture your visitor’s attention, so why would you waste your time by putting ads where they can’t see them?
Use Ad Unit Sizes That Are Proven To Work
Google, and many others, have said that the wider the ad, the better. Use this information to your advantage. Read more about the top three ad unit sizes.
Blend The Color Of Your Ads With The Colors Of Your Site
Another no brainer. You do not want your ads to stand out, you want them to naturally blend in with the rest of your site. Keep the same theme throughout.
Blend Ads With Your Site
This one goes along with the blending of colors, but the emphasis here is that your ads shouldn’t have borders or even look like ads at all. Place it next to your text, making sure the text either wraps around the ad, or flows above and below it in a natural fashion.
Use Your Layout To Your Advantage
If your site has a sidebar, make sure the sidebar is the same width as your ad unit. A Wide Skyscraper (160×600) or Skyscraper (120×600) would be perfect for a navigation sidebar. Another sidebar size would be either the Medium Rectangle (300×250) or Square (250×250). Here’s an example of a good way to layout your ads relative to your content:
Place Your Ads On The Top Left Side Of Your Website
Eyetracking studies show that people read in an F- or E-shaped pattern. This is information you can use to your advantage.
Track Your Ads With AdSense Channels
You should always have a way to know which of your ad units are performing the best. Utilize the built-in channels to label your ads. It is also a great way to experiment. Maybe you don’t want to blend your ads, and instead want them to stand out. Label that ad as so, and run both variations for a week each.
I hope these tips will help you increase your AdSense CTR numbers. Depending on what your CTR rate is now, you can easily expect a 100 to 1,000% increase. Good luck!
November 18th, 2006 at 01:00 pm
“Place Your Ad Units Above The Fold”
Well.. Your case it’s fine, but remember not to go overboard! So many sites now you search for something and the page loads and all you see is ads, and no content.
Another tip.. Put one of those 468*60 ads at the end of your blog post. It’ll likely have to do with the content of the site, and if they get to that one they’ll be done reading the site and ready to visit another site, perhaps a site being advertised ;-)
November 18th, 2006 at 01:05 pm
Excellent point. It really comes down to experimenting. There’s no surefire solution for every website, you just have to play around, wait a week, and then try something new. I totally agree though about not going overboard with ads. I’ll have to see about adding a 468×60 when the redesign is done though, at least for the sake of experimenting, and report back on it. I’ve never really done a full-blown blog, so advertising on here might be a bit different, most of the sites I do are geared much differently.
November 20th, 2006 at 08:50 am
I used most of these tips on my website Scrabulous - http://www.scrabulous.com - where users can play Scrabble online. However I am yet to see any growth :(
November 20th, 2006 at 11:15 am
JA,
First of all, love the domain name. Second, first impression of the webiste: the ads stand out too much. Try and stay away from the wider “traditional” banners that you see corporate places like Yahoo!, MSN, and even news outlets using. They get paid to put those up, not the other way around, so they don’t have to worry about these kind of things.
Second, those link units, I never really liked them. Why? Because a user has to not only click that link once, but when they do click it, you don’t make any money unless they click a link on the next page that comes up.
Third, if you were to “blend” the ads, they’d have the same color as your links, which would be a reddish color, instead they’re all black (and I’m talking about just the text in bold). No borders either. And take a look at the top three ad sizes to use, you’d enjoy that article.
November 27th, 2006 at 02:54 pm
[…] Original post by Kyle and software by Elliott Back Filed under adsense, Google, Advertising by Permalink • Print • Email • Comment […]
December 5th, 2006 at 03:38 pm
Great article. I’ve been reading up on this for a while and think I’m sarting to get the hang of it. Am using Adsense myself now, but can’t seem to get my CTR very high (
December 5th, 2006 at 03:39 pm
Sorry…
used a wrong caracter a ‘less than’ sign and that screwed up the code.
Anyway the rest of my story:
…Less than 1 percent). For people interested I also found this site usefull:
http://www.abc-articles.info/ppc-advertising/
Thansk again,
Tim
December 23rd, 2006 at 04:17 pm
But how much of this can be done in blogger? I feel pretty hemmed in over there.
February 6th, 2007 at 02:04 am
I Googled for something completely different, but found your page…and have to say thanks. nice read.
February 22nd, 2007 at 09:26 pm
I’ve been studying adsense for a few months and using some promotion like adwords and SEO I’m getting hundreds from each of my pages =)
August 25th, 2007 at 08:07 pm
[…] read more | digg story […]
August 25th, 2007 at 08:16 pm
Kyle-
Thanks for another good entry, great tips… it’s been dugg! Looking forward to you posting more in the future.
-Tom
Coder X Designs
http://coderxdesigns.com