Designing your AdSense ads

You will also be able to design the format of your ads within your AdSense account. Google allows you to play around the text of the ads within certain parameters like size, type, nature, text color, borders color, background colors, url color and the shape of their edges. Google also lets you choose how you want your AdSense ads to contrast against your main text by being able to choose the templates among them blend, mother earth etc. Personally I have found blending my ads to the text works where I don't want them to conspicuously stand out.

While designing your ads for primarily the purposes of AdSense income, you may want to consider making them stand out. Take care however not to overdo the colors, otherwise your site will look like its reading the riots act to visitors to click on them or else... The idea here is to softly make the ads stand out but not so much as to distract the reader of the main text. This means you will be doing a balancing act with the AdSense font color, the background and the general shape around the edges of the ad boxes.

My research has shown that choosing a soft AdSense ad background like light grey combined with emphasized text color on that ad's background has a good effect on the click through rates. But grey if your own site's background is white. Grey works best with websites with a white background. Other lighter colors work best with different backgrounds on websites. I guess I'm trying to say that your AdSense background color should just be enough to provide a slight shade to differentiate it from your original website's background. Don't make it scream here.

This might hold true when you visit other websites like hubpages.com which shares its AdSense revenues with article contributors. What they do here is that they serve AdSense ads around your article and if it's a nice piece, you will get decent clicks if not an outright click-riot. I observed that, since their website background is white, they serve their AdSense ads with an ad-background of light grey while blending the top-text ad's background white. Your best bet here is not to take my word for it but to keep on tweaking, testing and turning the ads until you see what works for your website.

Positioning Your AdSense Ads

As mentioned above, you need to know which areas of your website or blog work for AdSense. Research (and don't ask me by who) has shown that an online browser's eye is trained more emphatically on certain areas of a webpage while other areas receive just a gloss-over glance. It is also true that a webpage visitor's eye lands automatically and for the first instance on a particular area of a page and then follows a certain trail of vision on that webpage. Disconcerting, is it?...No, it's actually a nightmare for an advertiser if you don't have those facts.

You might have noticed that, in a Google SERP (i.e. the results page you get when you search a word in Google) ads always appear on the mid top and right side of the page. Fact is that, advertisers on these two areas pay completely different rates. The ads on the top of the page are called sponsored ads, while those on the right edge of the page are called adwords.

The middle top area (sponsored ads) is also much more expensive to advertise on while the right-top side ads (1st to 5th positions) are priced higher than the mid-right and bottom right adwords areas. Although, this is done through a bidding process, the idea is clear that, if your ad is the first on the top right side of the page, you get hit more than those below you. This is not only exclusive to Google but to most if not all search engines online that run ads on their SERPs.

Ok, let's bring it home. Considering your webpage will be providing other relevant and mainframe content in the middle of the page, you will need to follow Google ad positioning example. For starters, you can try to place AdSense ads at the mid-top of the webpage. The best ad design that works for the top page section is the leaderboard format which stretches the ads across from left to right of the page. Usually about three to four AdSense ads will be served with the leader board format.

The leaderboard ads are available in the ads set up button within the horizontal ads drop down. All this is possible once you get Google to approve your account, you will be able to create your ads there and get a HTML code provided for you to paste to your webpage. Google promotes family friendly websites and blogs and will need to review your website before approval. They discourage websites with adult content; your website should also have well arranged and meaningful content.

Your next prime real estate on the webpage is the far right hand side. This is a crucial area and you might want to place the ads right from the top running downwards as a column. Again, I have experimented on this area with the broad banner ads from AdSense and they fit in like a glove hence bracketing the main middle text. The broad banner format is available from your Google ad set up button in your account under the vertical ads section.

Positioning And Designing Your Ads

This is an area that I want to approach with a lot of caution. One thing is painfully true, and that is your AdSense ads are not worth the space if they are not optimally designed and positioned. One of the biggest advantages with serving AdSense ads is that Google lets you design and position your ads on your own website. But, which design and positions work best? Just like the offline world, positioning an outdoor advertisement makes all the difference between the ad being seen and it passing as a waste of resources.

Why does placing a TV ad at prime time, for example, cost more than double that of placing it dead in the night or early in the morning? Better still a billboard on an unused highway will not receive as much audience as one in a freeway that has huge amounts of vehicular traffic.

The same principle works with serving ads from Google AdSense. Placement of your ads is everything in getting noticed by visitors to your website and eventually getting them clicked on. Some areas of your website are actually prime real (or is that virtual) estate while others are... well, badlands, abandoned dumb and quarry sites.

Serving Only High Paying Ads

In the real sense, choosing high paying ads from Google AdSense will in effect determine the content you put on your website. In other words, if you want to concentrate on high paying ads, and considering that you need relevant content to earn good AdSense income, then by default you will have to make a website or blog on topics that pay prime dollar for clicks on them. In a nutshell, not all ads pay the same with Google. Since competition for some products is excruciatingly high, the advertisers are willing to pay top dollar for their ads to appear first on Google content based advertising network.

Google adwords (this is where advertisers bid and create their ads on Google) offer the advertisers an option to allow Google to distribute their ads to other websites within their network besides Google that have relevant content to the ads. This is how you end up with AdSense being served by Google on your website in the first place. Now here is the spoiler, not all ads that you choose will pay as high. Ads for new technology, gadgets and gizmos pay much more higher since the manufacturers are willing to pay as much to enter the market and make their product known. Google ads for such products pay you equally higher dollars per click as opposed to ads for say nail vanish.

I have seen some adwords bids that start from $5 per click. Other companies and individuals bid as high as $50 per click to maintain the pole position in Google results pages. The revenue principle applying to AdSense when Google serves the ads onto your website is practically the same. On the converse, the highest bid by advertisers is a paltry $0.05 for some products. Which ads would you rather get served with by Google?-go figure.

For you to be able to run high paying AdSense ads, you will need to make a thorough research on minimum bids made by advertisers in adwords. This is not rocket science really. One way of telling a certain area has higher bids is to Google a product you suspect might have high competition among advertisers. Just counting the number of adwords ads appearing for that particular keyword will tell you much.

A Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page) with a lot of ads appearing on it might indicate that the advertisers on that keyword are bidding serious figures per click on their website.

The higher a particular ad appears on a highly competitive keyword usually indicates higher bids and you may want to consider creating websites in such an area and get it served with AdSense. But also bear in mind that high ad counts also means that it's a highly competitive field and getting traffic for your website might be like pulling teeth...and with a pair of tweezers that is.

It pays to do an intensive research into areas to create websites for AdSense revenue. Since AdSense is served automatically by Google to your website, your only maneuver is to look for very specialized, less competitive, high paying niche areas and keywords to create your website content on. As a rule of thumb, new products are naturally good niche areas to start with; assuming that you catch on the fad soon enough before every man and his dog start selling the same product. Please note that we are placing emphasis on guys that want to use AdSense as their main source of online revenue here.

Creating Relevant Ads

From my Google AdSense account reports, I have noticed I earn much more from AdSense for content ad groups as opposed to the AdSense referral ads and AdSense for search bar. If you have an AdSense account, you know that there are three types of AdSense ads that you can choose to be served by Google on your site. These are AdSense for content ads that are related to your website's general content. The content based ads are the best performers in generating you AdSense revenue and they are definitely your best bet. Make sure to concentrate your efforts to having as many relevant content ads as possible if you want to make the money.

Then there are AdSense referral ads that you can choose for your website. These ads are not related to your website content and will advertise anything from bio fuels to air tickets. These Google ads do not do as well as the content based ads. The main reason being that visitors to your site are more interested in relevant content to what they were looking for in the first place. AdSense referral ads are however second to the content based ads in generating revenue. And that's a distant second from content ads.

The last type of ads that Google offers you for your website is the Google search bar. The search bar ad group is such that a visitor to your website can type the name of what they are looking for in the bar. The bar connects directly to Google search and will bring the visitor to a Google page with several ads related to what they searched for. I have really not experimented on the effectiveness of this ad groups from Google and would not therefore conclusively say they work or don't. It's however worth putting up a search bar at a corner of your page or at the bottom.

From the above three discussed Google adgroups, you will notice that content based ads perform better than the other two. Its not rocket science to figure out why. The main reason however is that people searching the web are looking for particular information of their interest. They are therefore more likely to click on ads that seem relevant to their search. AdSense adcopies are written such that they offer answers to very specific needs and a visitor will most likely click on an ad that seems to answer their quest. And that's all you need them to do to earn your money. Click.

For example, people looking for Movie Downloads will be confronted with ads that offer them all sorts of diverse benefits and types of downloading movies online. Likewise, People looking for Water-for- gas cost saver kits and manuals on their cars will be bombarded with ads that offer increasing mileage per gallon of gas etc. Once again, concentrate on requesting from Google only those ads relevant to your website's content.

4 Keys to Increasing Your AdSense Income Online

Nothing is as frustrating as watching your Google AdSense revenue trickling in cents; $.10 here $.30 cents there and $.0 cents over there. So much for all the hype about guys making thousands a month with AdSense. Me thinks, thiz Adzenz thing be weird!!

Read this article, Try the 4 facts, and up the wall you will drive AdSense!

Lets face it, if my website traffic is anywhere in the hundreds a day, there is no way under these blue skies I'm gonna make myself enough money over the internet. I read a review of some website with mammoth traffic and they make over $15,000 a month. Heck, Digital Point makes anywhere around $10,000 a month on a 50% revenue share with their contributor members. That is $10,000 being 50% of what is left after forum members have been paid off. "Google pays Digital Point about $10,000 a month, depending on how many people view or click on those ads", said Shawn D. Hogan, the owner and chief technology officer of Digital Point.

Here is the kicker. I don't in my wildest dreams think I'll ever have a website the size of digital point, ever! But I can make 100 small ones. See, I'm just an average Joe trying to make head, tail, or both, whichever comes first; of this internet money thingii. And right now I'm not sure I'm holding onto the tail or neck.

I have been doing some research on Google AdSense and I want to share with you some interesting things. Things that I didn't know about and things I believe if I had known earlier, I would still be having some hair left on my head. (Pulled much of it off trying to double my AdSense to $ 0.40 a day). Anyway, I have concentrated my research on how to optimize my AdSense revenue even before I work on increasing traffic to my 2 blogs.

In my quest, I have learned that the secret to increasing your AdSense revenue lies in mastering four main factors namely: