The crucial element of success with display ad monetization is an ability and willingness to experiment. Through trial and error, you’ll eventually come up with combinations, layouts, and styles that deliver a higher level of earnings for your site. Because each site and audience is unique, it’s impossible to provide universally applicable suggestions. We can, however, provide some ideas for experiments to get you off and running.
- Replace Your 300×250 With a 300×600. This relatively ad unit offers an opportunity to devote more real estate to ads. Moreover, the larger size allows you to run more compelling ads with better calls-to-action (which hopefully translate into higher click rates).
- Replace Your 728×90 With a 970×90. Similarly, there’s a larger size of leaderboard that helps the ads to stand out more to both new and returning visitors.
- Familiarize Yourself with Google Experiments. It’s now easy to run A/B experiments within AdSense; there’s no reason not to have at least one experiment going at all times.
- Familiarize Yourself with the Concept of “Statistical Significance.” When running experiments, it’s important to avoid jumping to conclusions based on insufficient data. (There are several free tools out there if you need a hand.)
- Change the Colors of Your Ad Unit. This sounds like a simple suggestion, but this experiment idea can take on hundreds of variations and become a very lengthy process. Finding the optimal combination of text color, background color, and border color can take quite a while but result in a big jump in earnings.
- Try the Ugliest Color Combo You Can Come Up With. It probably won’t increase your click rates or earnings, but there’s a chance that going against your guy will result in higher visibility and an increase in clicks.
- Change the Link Unit Color. Link units will default to the traditional blue color normally associated with links, because this setting generally has the best performance. But in many cases a bolder color will work better, especially if links on your site are a color besides the standard blue. (For example, on MonetizePros.com we would try out orange link units.)
- Put a Link Unit Under your Nav Bar. This is within the terms of service, and will become a top earner immediately.
- Insert Banner Ads Into Your Text. Ads inserted into content can be very effective at attracting attention (and thus engagement). Here’s an example of a 300×250 ad that appears between two paragraphs of an article:
- Move Your Leaderboard Down. It’s common practice to put the leaderboard (728×90 ad unit) at the very top of the page, with the goal of making it be the very first thing people see. The drawback there is that as soon as visitors scroll down–which most do almost immediately–the ad unit is gone. That leaderboard is just about worthless; in order to view any of the content (not even the entire headline is above the fold) visitors need to scroll down and put the 728x90 ad unit out of view.
- Ditch The Leaderboard. Almost every site that uses AdSense features a 728×90 leaderboard ad unit. While this size is very popular, it isn’t always the best performer because it is inherently separated from the content. Ad units that can be integrated into a site’s content, such as a 300×250, often perform better.
- Shift Right to Left. All else being equal, content on the left side of your site is viewed more than content on the right side (due to the fact that most of the world reads left to right). If you have a skyscraper on the right side of the page, try moving it left.
- Re-position Right Rail Ads. If you have a section of your right rail dedicated to ads, try moving it up and down relative to other content and measure the impact on earnings.
- Align Ads With Content. In the image above, the 160×600 ad is adjacent to the intro video. Most visitors will skip to the start of the article, which puts the ad out of sight. Moving the ad down might actually be better in this case.
- Put Ads in the Comments Section. The comments section of a site is generally well below-the-fold, but typically received a very high level of engagement (which, of course, is good for ad visibility and earnings potential).
- Shut Off Other Revenue Streams. We’d generally encourage running other types of monetization efforts besides traditional banner ads and link units, such as Outbrain. But it’s worthwhile to experiment with shutting these other efforts off and analyze the impact on AdSense performance. If low paying monetization implementations are cannibalizing higher paying opportunities, you could make more money by removing the laggards.
- Place Link Units in Side Rails. As mentioned above, link units are a great opportunity to increase the number of ads per page without hurting the overall user experience. There are a number of 90-pixel-tall link units that can fit easily into a sidebar, including variations that are 200, 180, and 160 pixels wide.
- Make Your Ads “Omnipresent.” By setting your CSS so that ads follow visitors around, you can increase their visibility on your site.
- Try an Above Article Mini Banner. Placing text ads at the beginning of an article can result in high visibility for visitors expecting to begin reading a piece of content.
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