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Where To Place AdSense Ads For Earning The Highest Revenue?

August 18, 2012 by

I have seen Google AdSense ads placed at various spots on several sites, including spots that are known to have ad-blindness. In the case of WordPress sites, and other sites that use ready-to-use themes and templates, I find some typical patterns followed by publishers for placing ads.

Whether webmasters knowingly do so or not, I have strong reasons to believe that these ads are not placed as per the choice of the respective site owners, but they are placed according to the design of the themes or templates that finally give the look and feel of the sites.

It otherwise means that the ads are not strategically placed so that the site owners are able to generate the maximum Click Through Rates (CTR) and ad revenue. In fact, some personalized tips from the AdSense team advise the publishers that they lose as much as 60% (or more) of their ad revenue because of ads that are placed at spots that do not give good conversion rates for ads.

Earn More Money By Placing AdSense Ads Closer To Your Unique Content

The most preferred locations for AdSense ads are spots indicated in the Google AdSense heat map. But that need not be the ultimate guide for optimized ad placing in view of the fact that the actual structure of site templates vary vastly and the ad units placed nearest to the content get the most content-specific ads served and in most cases they attract the best ad rates per click.

However, the pattern followed by some AdSense publishers show that their decisions on where ads are to be placed are dictated by the designers and developers of their themes and plugins. This observation is typically true of WordPress sites as well as publishers using Blogger/ BlogSpot platforms both of which I have been using.

The reasons why some publishers follow these wrongly conceived ad placement ideas are as follows:

  • There are several WordPress themes that are predesigned to accommodate AdSense ads. If you make a Google search for AdSense ready themes, you can find hundreds of them, both free themes as well as commercial (premium/ paid) themes. So, most publishers just place their ads in the predesigned widget areas and ad spots without thinking whether these ads are placed at the appropriate places to attract maximum ad clicks.
  • There are several WordPress plugins that make it possible and easier for publishers to place AdSense ads at the desired locations, especially aimed at those who either do not want to mess around with the code of theme files or do not know how to place ads in between codes in theme files. But these plugins too do not tell you which ad spots are the best for your content, or by placing the ads in which spots you can earn more.
  • Most WordPress themes, as themes and templates designed for other CMS software, have built-in provisions for placing text widgets in predesigned spots. AdSense ads can be placed using these widgets also. Again, these also need not necessarily be the most paying ad spots.
  • Some publishers who can customize their themes place their ads at spots where they find the most suitable for placing ads and that too at locations that can be easily customized without breaking the theme’s functions. Unfortunately, these easily customizable areas need not be the best paying ad spots.
  • Some others who can afford to pay for custom designed themes place AdSense ads at locations mostly decided by their designers. Such designers need not necessarily be experts in optimizing ad placement for maximum AdSense revenue. This is not to say that theme designers do not know AdSense Optimization. There are good designers who take care of not only ad placement, but also other aspects of how a well-optimized site should function.

Well, I am quite aware that several of my readers are well-versed with AdSense optimization, theme designing, content writing and similar aspects and how these together can work wonders just like a well-oiled machine to generate the highest revenue out of their sites.

So, in a sense, this small how-to tutorial is written to help the beginners who are new to blogging, AdSense, WordPress, theme designs, etc. and also experts who might have overlooked these aspects. So, here below are a few handy tips that can help those who are new to AdSense as well as blogging.

The Best Spots For Placing AdSense Ads

  • Instead of the commonly used above the fold option (at the top of everything else on the site), AdSense publishers must place larger ad units such as the 728×90 ad banners closer to the rest of the content of the posts or pages, even though they can still be above the fold, that is the spot just above the beginning of the post. This position is more preferable because when ads appear as the first item at the top of the page, they rather respond to the nearest content that are common to all pages like the general site description, site title, navigation elements, etc. This tends to make AdSense think that all posts and pages are similar and either lesser number of ads will be served, or irrelevant and less-paying ads will be served, and that can drastically reduce your click through rates (CTR) and consequently your overall advertising earnings can decrease. You can still use the same spots for non-AdSense ads, and earn quite a good amount of extra advertising income as many advertisers prefer this slot from where you moved your main AdSense banners.
  • Ads that appear on top of the pages are typically placed in the header section, or above the header. Moving larger ad units just above your post or page content will bring AdSense ads closer to the content.
  • Side bars are another preferred spot for placing ads. If you are placing ads on your side bar, try placing them almost at the top of the sidebar. Do not place more than one large ad unit on the side bar. If you feel like placing more ads, you may place an ad link unit below the main ad, but after a few other widgets on the side bar.
  • Placing ads within posts and pages will bring AdSense ads closest to your unique content and they can get you the highest click through rates, the highest rates per ad, almost a sure possibility of ads being served and hence the highest overall advertising revenue from AdSense.
  • Though Google allows three ad units and three ad links per page/ URL, do not try to use all of them unless your posts and pages have large amounts of textual content. Sites such as photo blogs, video blogs, etc. that do not have much text-based content may do well by placing lesser number of AdSense ads per post, keeping a balance between your content and the ads being displayed. That otherwise means, you may reduce the number of ads, if you have lesser text-based content.
  • And here is a confusing piece of advice that can come from Google AdSense. Often you will find notifications or personalized advice/ tips from AdSense team telling you that you are losing opportunities to earn more from a large number of ad servings because you do not place all the allowed number of ad units and link units. My personal advice is: Don’t jump for that, just ignore it. The reason is, if you follow the advice, in most cases where the sites are not rich in unique content, soon you will get another notification telling you that you do not have enough content to place all those ads and they will tell you to remove some ads so that the ads are content-oriented and proportionate to the content of your site.

It is expected that those who follow the above steps can earn over 60% more than their current AdSense incomes, as various notifications, blog posts and Google AdSense guidelines show, and as revealed by top AdSense money makers.

However, what you find above is NOT a complete solution, and you can find many more other options to improve your AdSense revenue. The final answer to how to earn the maximum from AdSense depends on your unique content, spots where you place the ads, the structure of your themes, and several other factors.

In view of the above observations (which at any cost is not a sure formula to earn more from ads), it is for you to experiment with placing ads at various spots and observe how each ad unit returns revenue and to decide on which option pays you well. Keep on observing and experimenting; that is the name of the game to earn more!

And here are two most important practices that you may avoid:

  • Do not place ads (especially ad links) in such a way that your visitors are misled to believe them as your other links and click on them. AdSense policies specifically tell you not to do so.
  • Most site users suffer from what is referred to as ad-blindness. It is especially true of ads above the folder almost at the top, sometimes at the footer and sidebar where several other ads, links, etc. clutter and compel the visitors to ignore them. Placing ads in spots that are known to induce ad-blindness can reduce your ad revenue drastically.

Come back soon for more useful info on AdSense

Filed Under: Blogging, How-to, Tips and Tricks Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Red-eye effect in photography

April 27, 2012 by
White cat with red-eye effect

A white domestic cat’s photo with red-eye effect (not the natural color of its eyes), wallpaper size: 1280 x 960

This is a picture of a beautiful white cat lazing on a pair of blue jeans carelessly thrown on the floor carpet. Those who have observed the habits of domestic cat know that they may choose the cleanest and the softest of the cloths, bed spreads, etc. to take rest or to sleep on. So, this cat had two choices, one is to laze on the carpet, and it needed the denim, and it just pulled it down. So, the clothing is not carelessly thrown there.

The other choice the cat did not have is the opportunity to avoid being photographed. And the chance it did not give the photographer is to photograph it without the much malice-stricken “red-eye effect”. So, the cat’s eyes are just normal, but in the photograph, it has red eyes.

The red-eye effect is a very common occurrence in photography, especially when compact cameras are used. It also happens when the photographic flash is very close to the lens in the case of better or larger cameras.

Red-eye effect occurs when the flash falls too fast for the pupil of the eyes to close and the blinding flash passes through the pupil and reflects back from the fundus of the eye that includes the optic disc, retina, and posterior pole. The camera records the reflected light that carries the red color of the blood in the choroid behind the retina. The eye also has several photo-sensitive pigments that absorb the lower wavelength components of light such as violet, indigo, blue, etc. and reflects higher wavelength components such as orange and red. This also contributes to the red-eye effect in photography.

However, red-eye effect in photos can be rectified using photo-editing software such as Adobe Photoshop, Apple iPhoto, Corel Photo-Paint, GIMP, Google Picasa, and Paint.NET, etc.

Filed Under: How-to, Technology Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Funny experience while using Microsoft Word as an editor

March 1, 2011 by

It was with interest that I read some time ago from a blog post that posting directly from Microsoft Word to a blog or Facebook can have unpredictable and undesired funny results.

As many people may be using Microsoft Word for writing articles or editing, probably because the app helps in checking spelling and grammar and also to count the number of words in an article without manual counting, there is a tendency to post the edited articles directly into blogs. In such cases, especially in the visual mode, there is a possibility the article will carry with it the formatting code used by the program along with it and will not be visible.

I did not take it seriously, as I always use the HTML mode and I can always see the coding/ HTML that goes into the blog post. But the writer of the article claimed that even in HTML mode, there will be some codes associated with formatting in Microsoft Word, and carried to the posts and reappearing when re-posting, exporting/ importing, or re-tweeting.

I have noticed it happening while posting to the good old MS FrontPage that I used to use for HTML editing. And today a funny thing happened while I was sharing an interesting article I found on a friend’s blog on poverty in New York City to Facebook. After that I just posted an excerpt that I edited in Microsoft Word as my review to my Facebook post.

The words I posted were only:

Approximately 1.4 million New Yorkers rely on soup kitchens and food pantries. Please don’t make them beg

And what went into the Facebook box was a huge chunk of 17,330 characters/ 1272 words, instead of only 105 characters/ 17 words. See the entire code to format 17 words in the text box below (scroll it down, it is quite huge):

Advice: If you are using Microsoft Word as an editor, before posting to blogs, or other locations, first cut and paste to a plain editor like a Notepad and from there cut and paste to wherever you want so that the embarrassing hidden code like the above will disappear.

Filed Under: Apps, How-to, Tips and Tricks Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

How to choose your own header images

February 11, 2011 by
FREE Header Image for WordPress themes: size 1024 x 125 pixels

FREE Header Image for WordPress themes: size 1024 x 125 pixels

A suitable header image that highlights the contents of your blog or website makes your site stand out from the rest of the crowd. It also adds to the individuality and personal identification that you and your site are recognized by your friends, family, admirers, and all visitors.

People who are creative themselves can do this job exceptionally better than professional designers, who may sometimes burn a hole in your pocket for this simple job, though there are very good web designers who offer all that is needed for your site’s design in their package offer. Still you may need changes, or just need to change only the header image.

If you are a site owner who depends on professional services for everything this article is not for you. Also, if you are big enough to maintain paid staff for each and every aspect of your site and business, do not read this further. But if you are a do-it-yourself (DIY) site owner, or even a newbie blogger, this article will help you, and you MUST read it.

There are two ways you can get a suitable header image for your blog or site. The first sweat-free option is to make a search and find out suitable images for headers that are offered as public domain images, or free stock images, or whatever name they call for such images. You can find tons of such images on the internet. And the second step is to design your own header images.

It is easier than it sounds, and better for various reasons. First of all, some ready-to-use themes or site design templates that can be used without the knowledge of designing or coding will have options to upload your own header image, as a part of theme customization. Some of them will specify sizes, for example, 1024 x 125, or any other size. That means you have to upload the same size. With a bit of knowledge of resizing photos and images using Adobe Photoshop or other software, you can easily do it.

So, if you are designing your own headers, it is the easiest because you know the size of the header image and you can do it easily from the start of the header image designing work. The image above is created by me, and if you like it you can DOWNLOAD IT HERE and use it for free. If you need more designs, textures, backgrounds, etc., for your WordPress theme design work, you can view some of my free designs HERE. Or, if you need a different size header image for free, just contact us.

The other option is to get the entire work of WordPress installation, theme designing, SEO, etc. done through us so that you get everything at an affordable price that includes one of the best premium themes in the market, or a custom design exclusively created for your site.

Filed Under: How-to, Themes, WordPress Setup Tagged With: , , , ,

Migrating your blog to WordPress – video tutorial

January 25, 2011 by

Here is another very short YouTube video on how to move a blog, i.e., migrating your blog to WordPress from other blogging software such as TypePad or Blogger. Please note that you can find many tutorials like this on the Internet, and you will find many more articles posted by professional bloggers. The most important thing is that many of them may not give you the complete idea, and it is for you to understand each step before you move your well-established blog. If you mess around things that you do not understand you may neither have your established old blog nor the new blog on WordPress. So, backup every thing before you prepare yourself to move.

Filed Under: Blogging, How-to, video Tagged With: , , , ,

Video: Blogger to WordPress migration

January 25, 2011 by

Here is a short but very lucid video clip by Amit Agarwal, one of the most successful blogger and the founder of Digital Inspiration. It explains how you can migrate your blog from Blogger (blogspot.com) to WordPress, without losing your Google juice, RSS readers, etc. For more clarity and step by step instructions go to the post entitled Migrate your Blog from Blogger to WordPress

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Filed Under: Blogging, How-to, video Tagged With: , , , ,

How to add Tweet Button from Twitter

January 20, 2011 by

Would you like to add the authentic, official Tweet Button from Twitter.com to your blog or website? It is the best choice if you want to avoid plugins that can increase your pages load time (increased page load time is not good for SEO) and eat up your server’s valuable storage space? If yes, this button is for you.

The benefits: It allows your visitors to share your content on Twitter without leaving your site or blog and helps you promote your Twitter account at the same time.

There are three buttons to choose from and you have the options to customize them if you wish. Given below are the simple steps to add Tweet Button to your website/ blog:

1. Choose your button that suits your taste from the three buttons showing vertical count, horizontal count or the only the button showing no count, and customize it (if you like) with your Tweet text that people will include in their tweets automatically.

2. You can optionally recommend up to two Twitter accounts for your users to follow after they share content from your website, including your own or your friends or associates.

3. Once you have done the above steps, you can just copy and paste the self-generated code into your site or blog! Done!

Here below is a simple Tweet Button with no count. Try it.

Button with vertical count is below:

Button with horizontal count is below:

Make your own Tweet Button at Twitter.

Filed Under: Blogging, How-to, Plugins Tagged With: , , , ,

How to choose a domain name

January 19, 2011 by

In my earlier days of using the internet, I used to wonder why certain domain names were odd or strange as they appeared to me. Certain domain names were too long with unrecognizable words or alphabets, while others were too short with as little as two or three alphabets or numbers that made no sense to me. Some of the domain names were easily memorable and made sense to me. I think it is so in one way or the other for many people.

In the course of time, while reading informative articles on domain names, and the dilemmas I faced while I had to use my own domain names, I learned a lot, and still I am learning. So, I describe below what I could understand on this topic.

In the earlier days of internet, a person who wanted to establish a website on books could easily register a domain name with the word book and any domain extension like com, net, etc. But very soon all the single words that you can find in any or all dictionaries were registered and people had to look for combinations of two or more words. Even these are mostly not available now. So, the trend is to look for one or two words relevant to the site you want to setup and some abbreviated words or derivatives to make up your domain name.

So, the first step in registering a domain name is to make a list of names consisting of different words or permitted alpha-numerical characters that suit your site. Then decide the domain TLD (extension) that suits your site and go to the domain registrar and see if your preferred domain names are already taken or available. Most domain registrars also suggest available alternative domain names. Based on your own list of preferred names and/or suggested alternatives, you can register your domain. But before registering, also read the other criteria you may like to consider before registering your domain name.

As said, you cannot get any single word name, or even some combinations. That means your domain may consist of more than one word or parts of many words. In such cases, it is better to separate them with hyphens (-) rather than using the name as a single string, or separating with underscores. This is important as search engine bots (spiders) and sometimes human beings cannot identify each part of the domain name separately. Separating words with hyphens is especially important if your domain name consists of your main keywords.

While it is difficult to find your favorite domain name, after you settle for a particular name, the question arises as to which Top-Level Domain (TLD) is better than others. The most popular, the most used and preferred one is a .com domain compared to .biz or .us, as I find that most SEO experts are of the opinion that a com domains can rank better than other TLDs. The TLD .edu (mostly used by universities and educational organizations) are rated to have higher credibility in the eyes of search engines. Also the .org TLD is rated by some SEO professionals as better than others.

Filed Under: How-to, SEO Tagged With: , ,

How to manage bounce rate

January 12, 2011 by

Before going into the question about managing bounce rates of your blog or site, it will be better to understand what bounce rate is, especially for those who are new to it, or those who really never cared about bounce rates.

One of the sources that explains bounce rate is the Wikipedia article on bounce rate, which I read quite some time back and find it remains more or less the same now. Anyway, it explains bounce rate as ‘a term used in web site traffic analysis… It essentially represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site…’ and gives the formula for calculating bounce rate as:

‘Bounce rate = total number of visits viewing only one page / total number of visits’.

According to Google, ‘Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.’ Google also advises as to how you can minimize bounce rates by ‘tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run’.

I feel the above advice is not practical, as you can only know which landing pages have high or low bounce rates only after quite some time. At that stage, how can you re-do the landing page to match each keyword and ad that you run, unless you want to rewrite the entire page or post? It may be practical for small static sites that are used for selling your products or services. For larger sites, you have to engage SEO professionals who may optimize the whole site for you. Moreover Google does not specify what high bounce rate is and what low or desirable bounce rate is.

Wikipedia quotes ‘Google Analytics specialist Avinash Kaushik’ as having stated, “My own personal observation is that it is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying. I stress that this is my personal analysis…”

A more practical and insightful advice can be found if you read the article, What Is High, Normal And Low Bounce Rates? by Daniel Scocco, the founder of DailyBlogTips, who writes, ‘If you don’t have many ads on your blog and your priority is to grow your traffic and audience, then your bounce rate should be between 40% and 70%…’ Scocco also opines that ‘if you have exceptionally engaging content and a very user friendly design’ you can get your bounce rate below the 40%.

Bounce rate is one of the few metrics that caught my attention when I started my first website way back in 2006, a friendship and dating site offering free services. Then, it was my pet project and I was hell-bound to improve its performance. I had enough time to sign up for e-mail newsletters, visit top SEO forums, and read articles. I tried to follow all the tricks and hacks offered by top-level SEO professionals. But the site’s bounce rate always hovered around 50% to 60%, and it continues to do so. After sometime, I stopped worrying about bounce rate.

I started some blogs initially as a support for my main site. But I also experimented with all sorts of SEO tips and tried them on a few blogs. And I have placed AdSense ads in my blogs and sites. Also, I continued to monitor bounce rate, though I stopped doing anything to reduce high bounce rates.

Recently, that is a few months back, I noticed in my Google Analytics account that one of my blogs showed bounce rates as low as less than 1%, and another showed a bounce rate around 7%. However, though it surprised me, it did not give me any reason to celebrate, as my other metrics, including earnings from them, remained the same.

I think, the very low bounce rate might be because of the change in the algorithms used by Google, and they keep on changing, though you can never know what changed, and why.

In view of the above, though I endorse the highly researched opinions of Daniel Scocco, personally I feel that a bounce rate between 50% to 70% is not bad, as long as your Return on Investment (ROI), and other targets are good. Also, I feel a very low bounce rate, though desirable, cannot get you anything extra, including an improved page rank, though, low bounce rate is a very good indicator of how much your visitors are interested in your site, and how many pages they visit.

If you have your own experiences and observations about bounce rate, feel free to use the comment box and share it with our visitors.

Filed Under: How-to, SEO Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

How to beat the low-traffic syndrome?

January 6, 2011 by

Well, traffic is the life-force of any blog or site. It is especially so if you are a blogger and started blogging with dreams of building up a blog that is visited by a lot of people who are interested in the unique content that you create. Your enthusiasm may last a few days till you are hit by the biggest dampener of your blogging spirit – very low traffic or almost no visitors on certain days.

It happens because of a few things. First and foremost, it takes a few days for your blog to be indexed by search engines that sent the bulk of traffic to most sites. Even if you submit your blog or site to search engines this may happen. Links exchanges and other means of link building also help, though link exchanges are not counted by search engines like Google for your link popularity computation. Commenting on other blogs and sites helps a lot, but mostly in the form of clicks from visitors to those blogs who find your views interesting. The maximum benefits from the SEO point of view comes when your links are picked up by other blogs and quoted to show some important views expressed by you, or to recommend your blog otherwise. However, all these take time. But you have to continue link building, and keep updating your blog with new compelling fresh and unique content.

Posting some content every day, many times a day, or at least as frequently as you can, helps in many ways, because, as soon as you post something, search engines are alerted and your blog is crawled and indexed. A regular practice like this can boost your traffic in a very short duration of time. When more visitors come in, it provides a psychological boost to your enthusiasm to blog more and more.

Reading inspirational and motivating posts in other blogs and authentic sources like WordPress can motivate you and lift your sagging spirits. Today I read such an article published by WordPress.com titled Challenge for 2011: Want to blog more often? and that made me write this post. It is really inspiring because it gives you tips to think and concentrate on ideas to blog about.

Filed Under: Blogging, How-to, SEO Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,