Tips to Increase your AdSense Revenue

There are two ways to increase your AdSense revenue: increase your traffic or increase the CTR (click-through rate) of your existing traffic. This article will give you tips to get more revenue out of a given amount of traffic. The tips given in this article should work well with all advertising networks that serve text ads.

You are going to make money every time all of these four events happen:

1. a visitor comes to your site and looks at a page
2. the visitor notices the ads that your site serves
3. the visitor looks at the ads and gets interested in one or more of them
4. the visitor clicks on the ad(s) that peak his/her interest and you profit

"Point 1" is beyond the scope of this article. "Point 3" and "Point 4" depend on how relevant ads does Google serve on your pages.

My article will focus on "Point 2".

The more visitors notice the ads on your pages, the more money you will make out of a given amount of traffic. It's really that simple. You will make the most money out of a given traffic when 100% of your users actually look at the ads.

Which part of a page are your visitors going to look at? It depends from page to page and from visitor to visitor.

Visitors who just arrived at your site for the first time are not familiar with your navigation and content. They will tend to look at the big headlines to see if your page is worth reading. If you get them interested, they will read the text and look for your navigation links.

Your returning visitors will be familiar with your navigation and will generally look at the part of a page that either contains some information they are interested in (latest articles, forum threads) or they will look at links they need to click to use your site (login to your forum, services etc.).

You want your ads at the location your visitors are most likely to look at. The best tip I can give you is to place your ads around important navigational links and big headlines (on your content pages).

Analyze your web logs to see which links your users click. If your page is not very interesting, visitors will look for "a way out". Place the ads in a prominent place around the top/left part of your page just above or under your big headlines.

I like to place ads within the content just below the article title, author, date and above the article text. For these pages, I disable image ads and use borderless ads.

Your navigational links, major headline and the start of your content should form a small triangle or line, and the ads should be placed in the middle of it.

Your ads should blend with your design. The best way to do it is to use borderless ads (set the ad border color as your background color). This way your design will look more professional and your ads will look less like ads.

Because visitors associate the quality of a site with all the displayed links (ads), your ads will become more credible and visitors are more likely to click on them.

And because your ads will look less like ads, visitors will be more comfortable clicking on them.

All your page elements compete for the visitor's attention. Avoid designs with flashy images, animations and colorful page elements.

A clean design with just a few non-distracting colors, blended with borderless ads placed at the right location, which elegantly use a unique ad color, should drive your visitors' attention.

If for some reason, you must use colorful designs, then your ads should be even more colorful than the rest of your page. In this case, use rotating ad colors, emphasize attention-grabbing colors such as red and allow image ads.

Let's recap the major points:

• know your visitors, where they look and click
• place your ads where your visitors look at
• integrate your ads with your design
• your ads should attract the attention of your visitors more than your other page elements (via careful color selection)

Think, Test and Experiment.

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