So you have your articles/content site up, and you have placed your first adsense block up. Now it’s time for all the money to start rolling in, right?
Nope. Not really. So how to increase your clicks? How to get people to take notice of your ad units, and increase your adsense income?
It’s going to take a while before you figure out what works best, but on your first adsense site don’t be surprised if you run into some dry spells. So usually, what I do when first starting out with a new site, is create several different sizes of ad blocks.
Give each ad unit a different channel name so that you can track the performance of each one.
For example, I will usually set up one large square box, one vertical skyscraper, and one horizontal rectangle.
Common knowledge suggests that the top of the page and the left side column are the best place to put your ads, but of course each site is different. What you want to do is put your large square box in the center of the page, right smack dab in the middle of the content area. This is often the spot with the highest payoff.
Then put one skyscraper on the left column. You usually want to make sure it’s visible “above the fold”, because it will get maximum exposure that way. If you notice that a couple weeks have gone by and you haven’t gotten a single click on the left, change the placement to the right column for a couple weeks, and then compare your results. Of course this is not a very scientific test because traffic fluctuates, and you may have had more traffic and clicks one week than the next, but it will still give you a rough idea of which spot is a winner and which is a loser.
So the final block that I usually include, the horizontal rectangle, can either go near the top (again, above the fold) of the page; in the center, dividing the content in two; or at the bottom, after the content or article. If your large square box is already at the top, it might seem like overkill to put another unit so close to it, but each site is different.
You are weighing a few different factors here: visual appeal of the website’s layout, article space to ad space ratio, and whether or not you think your users will be annoyed by your ads. We will discuss color in a later article, but location is probably a larger determining factor of how much income you earn with your adsense ads.
Remember, even though some expert tells you what works and what doesn’t, the only person who can really decide the optimal spot to insert your ad units is you…AFTER testing different options! Only after time and practice will you be able to choose the best adsense locations, to get maximum clicks.
