Not sure how to make the most out of adsense?
You’ve probably read the adsense tips page provided by Google, which includes what they call a “heat” map:
This basically shows the areas of a page with a colour coding to show the “best” positions for your ads.
Does it work?
It’s hard to say. Up until relatively recently the terms and conditions of the adsense program forbade publishers from discussing their success (or failure) in any detail. Needless to say you could discuss certain strategies and tactics, including “blending” options and other tips and tricks.
Graywolf has summarised some of the tips nicely. Some of the tips are probably common sense, whereas others may prove useful for less experienced webmasters.
For example, placing the adsense code in an include file would probably seem to be the logical thing to do if you take a structured approach to your website. Change one file and you change your entire website.
If you are using a blogging platform or CMS, then you are probably invoking your adsense code via a plugin or template call. On this blog, for example, the adsense links at the top of the pages are pulled in via an include in header.php, whereas the inline ads are invoked via a plugin. In both instances I can instantly change the look and feel of the ads by editing one file.
The downside to using adsense is that most of the ads rely on context, unless your site is being targetted. The downside being that until the media bot has had a chance to crawl your content it won’t serve relevant ads. On a blog you will probably end up seeing plenty of ads related to blogs, blogging and related services, regardless of what your article was actually about.
For example. I wrote this entry a few days ago about a hosting related topic. Depending on when I view the page I will probably see a mixture of ads related to “hosting” or “ireland”. If I compare that to a more recent entry within the last 48 hours I am probably going to find context lacking ads.
You could, therefore, conclude that you are more likely to serve relevant ads on your older posts, or if your blog content is homogenous.
My other blog is a good example of this, as it generally serves up ads related to seo, even if it is only a few days old.
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