In the last year I had the opportunity to deal with hundreds of blogs of a variety of topics and very distinct owners yet there are a few points when it comes to Google AdSense that can be applied to each of them that immediately result 30-100% rise in revenue.

Inserting AdSense Boxes Into Your Site

Maybe you read somewhere that people make $10,000+ a month by using GA and you inserted a widget into your blog hoping that the same will happen to you. It’s not that easy. Let me show you some examples of the worst positioned AdSense boxes on a website ever:

Example of Bad Ad Placement

As you can see the worst thing you can do with an AdSense ad is to put it somewhere where the average visitor will never ever look because there’s no real content there. The second problem with this setup is that the ad has the default GA color palette. Even though these Google ads are highly relevant and they do offer new information for the reader most people nowadays still disregard them because they’re “just paid ads”. Using the default color helps them separate ads from the rest of the content so they can easily ignore them.

So what you have to do is edit the theme (or raw html) files of your website and put the ads in places where the visitors will surely see them. If you’re using WordPress like we do for all our websites, then there are free plugins (like Easy AdSense) to do one of the most important placements that will give you an immediate boost of at least 30% compared to regular banner placements: positioning your ad between the title of your article and the actual content of the article. To comply with AdSense TOS you shouldn’t have a title that encourages or misleads visitors into clicking the ads. Don’t worry, they’ll most likely do it anyways. If you’re concerned with this rule then you can add some text between your title and banner like author name, date of publishing, etc.

The ad size should be the largest available: 336×280. Font size: largest, font type: verdana (this last one is only a preference of mine, you can go with whatever you like).

Two Variations for Placing The Largest Ad First One is With a float:left CSS Property

In addition to this already powerful modification I can personally advise to put a 728×90 banner between the header and main sections of your website. This might look a little bit odd on some sites but I can assure you that it’s worth it. This alone added +20% to my profits when I started to use it on several websites.

Optimized Ad Placement: Header Horizontal

Finally here’s my own trick that I think you haven’t heard about anywhere before… Put a standard 250×250 or maybe 300×250 (whichever fits into your layout) in the sidebar after the first two most important widgets (like recent posts and related posts or whatever you have there). This is critical, so don’t forget about this one!

Setting the Colors of the Ads

This is the second part of maximizing your AdSense profits so don’t be lazy. When setting up your ads you should follow this strategy: the two ads between the header and the content section of your page and the one before the content should blend completely in your design. If you’re using red color for article titles, then use red color for the ads’ titles and I assume you’re using black as color of your articles’ text so you should use black as in the ads and something between dark red and black for the URL so it looks better for the eye.

Here’s my trick: the last ad in your sidebar should be totally different. Highlight it with a bright colored background and other attention-calling colors for the text! So people will think that “Oh okay, that’s where the ads are on this page, so I can safely click everywhere else…” and that’s when they click on your other ads.

This is Our Best Layout, Gets ~20-70% CTR

Two More Tricks That I Personally Use

Use heatmaps! This might sound strange but it really helps a lot if you know where do people look and click on your website. There are services called heatmaps that give you a visual understanding of your visitors behavior. Then you can focus more on areas that are “attention-intensive” and place ads there, etc. One of the most popular services providers is Crazy Egg.

Random ad placement: if you have lots of returning visitors because you have a large daily readership that are used to the layout of your site, then you could install a random ad placement script / plugin that will spice things up a little and solve the banner blindness issue.

Don’t forget that you can add up to 3 ad units on a site and 3 link units with AdSense. That’s 6 in total but max. 3 of the same type. You can add a long horizontal link unit with 5 links in your footer for example and believe me it will be good to see that it brings in some rare clicks but at the end of the day all these little improvements help you double or triple your AdSense profits!