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One of the more difficult aspects of using AdSense is keeping up to date with changes that Google likes to introduce from time to time. Most of these changes are pretty minor. That doesn’t mean that you can ignore them — you will need to be aware of them. But you won’t usually have to make massive changes to your site and the way you’ve optimized your ads when Google adjusts its policy.
One change that did have a dramatic effect on publishers took place in April, 2004: Google introduced Smart Pricing. We’ve already felt some of its effects in this book. Now we’re going to explain exactly what it means...
First, let me just say that Smart Pricing was a pretty smart move, especially for advertisers. The principle is simple: before Smart Pricing, advertisers paid the price they had bid for each click their ad received on a website... regardless of whether that click resulted in a sale. The result was that some advertisers were receiving large numbers of clicks — for which they were paying large sums of money — but were seeing only a low return on that investment (ROI).
Not surprisingly, they were drifting away to other ad distributors, particularly Yahoo!, in the search for visitors who wouldn’t just click but buy too.
To improve advertisers’ ROI (and win them back from Yahoo!), Google lowered the price of ads on sites that tend to give advertisers few sales, even if they give them large numbers of clicks.

To put it another way, the same ad can now cost different amounts when it appears on different sites. And of course, that same ad will pay publishers different amounts too.
Before Smart Pricing, publishers had focused solely on attracting as many clicks as possible. With Smart Pricing, a site with a high CTR can still earn less than a site with a low CTR.
So how does Google measure an advertiser’s conversion rate and what can publishers do to increase their conversion rates to ensure their ad rates remain high?
This is where things get tricky. Google is playing its cards pretty close to its chest when it comes to the methods it uses to calculate Smart Pricing and even measure ROI.
13.1 What Google Has Said About Smart Pricing

This is what Google has officially told us about Smart Pricing:
The price of an ad is influenced by a number of differentfactors.

Those factors can include: the bid price; the quality of the ad; competition from other ads in the same field; the location of the ad as part of a marketing campaign; “and other advertiser fluctuations.”
The ad price is not affected by the clickthrough rate.

Sending advertisers large numbers of clicks will not increase the bid price. (That doesn’t mean that CTR isn’t important at all for your revenues; it’s just not important in determining the amount you receive for the click.)
“Content Is King.”

Google makes it pretty clear that sites that will benefit most from AdSense are those that “create compelling content for interested users.” They also emphasize the importance of bringing targeted traffic to look at that content. Those are two different factors which together create a site with loyal, appreciative users. Just the sort of thing that every serious webmaster wants.
13.2 What Else Do We Know About Smart Pricing?

What Google has told us about Smart Pricing isn’t much. It also raises at least as many questions as it answers: How does Google judge the quality of an ad? How can they tell the role an ad plays in a marketing campaign? What

are the other “advertiser fluctuations”? And perhaps most importantly, how do they track the results of the clicks?
All of those pieces of information would be very useful to a publisher. But Google wasn’t letting on.
Fortunately, publishers caught a break. Jennifer Sleg, the author of an excellent contextual advertising blog at www.Jensense.com, (you should definitely make this site a part of your regular reading) was contacted by an advertiser who was being tempted back from Yahoo! to Google. He told Jen what the AdSense salesman had told him about Smart Pricing. She told us.
This is what it boiled down to:
Smart Pricing is calculated across an AdSense account.

So if you have a number of different sites covering a range of different topics and one of them delivers a low ROI, all of your ad prices may be lowered.
Smart Pricing is evaluated weekly.

If you believe that an ad is delivering a low ROI, you can remove it from your site and you should see higher ad prices within a week.
Smart pricing is tracked with a 30-day cookie.

Users don’t have to convert immediately into a sale (or whatever will count as a conversion) for you to benefit. They can think about it for a month and you’ll still get the benefit.
Image ads are affected by smart pricing.

Few serious publishers use image ads except when they’re receiving CPM campaigns. Was this a reference to ads in low locations receiving lower rates?
Prices may be reduced even below an advertiser’s minimum bid.

So looking up the bid prices for targeted keywords won’t help you very much; if your ROI is low, your rates could be lower than the minimum quoted.
Conversions accounts are tracked by advertisers opting into AdWords Conversion Tracking.

But we still don’t know what Google is tracking or how it’s makingcalculations with its results.

13.3 Strategies To Benefit From Smart Pricing

The challenge for publishers trying to keep their ad rates high is that there’s no way to know exactly how many of your clicks are converting into sales for your advertisers. You can’t even tell what would count as a sale for the different advertisers you’re promoting.
The best you can do is keep track of your clicks and your revenues, and make sure that they rise and fall at the same rates.
If following your stats was always important, Smart Pricing has made it absolutely vital. There’s little point in spending hours trying to increase your CTR if the value of your clicks is dropping like a rock.
So what should you do if you notice that your income is dropping but your CTR rate remains the same?
The first thing you should do is protect yourself. Because one site with a low ROI can affect all the sites in your account, dividing your sites between different accounts would prevent all of your revenues falling if one site underperforms. Officially, that’s a breach of TOS, so you can’t really do it But I don’t see why two different sites can’t be owned by two spouses. If you own more than two sites though... well, I guess you’re stuck.
Next, if you suspect that one page has a low ROI, try removing the AdSense code from that page, wait a week and see if you can spot an improvement in your ad prices. If there’s no improvement, replace the code and try taking the code from a different page. You want to find the page that’s poisoning your earnings and keep AdSense ads off it until you can bring in the kind of traffic that suits your advertisers.
And that’s where you’re most likely to find the underperforming pages. The pages that are most likely to have the greatest conversion rates for advertisers are those that have the most loyal following. The closer the connection between your site and the interests of your visitors the more likely they are to click on your ads — and buy when they click.
So it’s also a good idea to create niche sites that appeal to niche audiences, rather than general sites that bring in audiences interested in a bunch of different things. Those sorts of users will also only have a vague interest in some of the things on your site and could lower your conversion rate.
You might have a blog, for example, in which you discussed your interests in... oh, dogs, computer games and the movies of Mel Gibson. That would bring in users with three different kinds of interests... and three different kinds of ads. But a dog-loving user who clicks on an ad for Mel Gibson DVDs

is less likely to actually buy than a Mel Gibson fan. Your conversion rate would drop and the value of every ad you promote would fall too.
But if you created three separate blogs, one for each of your interests, you would receive fewer false clicks, and a higher rate of conversion.
Ultimately then, the ideal strategy is, as always, to create good content that attracts genuinely interested users.
Don’t remove the AdSense code from pages with low CTR; remove it from pages with low ROI!

Google lets you place more than one ad unit on each page of your Web site. In fact, you can place:
3 ad units3 link units3 referral units2 AdSense for search boxes
What does this mean for web publishers?
A real bonanza: you now have many more chances to hook readers with new ads as Google will show unique ads in each ad unit!
With multiple ad blocks, you can also decide which ads are served in the best places for your site.
10.1 How Many Ads Is Too Many?

In general, I recommend that you put as many AdSense units on your page as possible. The more choices you give your users, the more likely they are to click.
The only caveat to this is ad-blindness. Put lots of ads on your site and users are just going to ignore them. And when they ignore one unit, they’re likely to ignore them all.

This can be more of a problem for small Web pages than for larger pages such as those on blogs. On a short page, all those different ads can quickly outweigh the content; on a long page, you can scatter them about so that they’re less likely to get in the way of a user’s reading.
One great solution is to have a long home page with lots of ads but which contains only the headlines and the first paragraph or so from each article. To read more, the user has to click to a page with just that one article.
That page would have fewer units. But because those units would be influenced by just one article, the ads would be better targeted.
10.2 What To Do With Three Ad Units

The actual number of ads that you’ll choose will depend on the design of your site. But considering the range of different formats, you should find it pretty easy to squeeze in at least two ad units and usually three.
Most sites for example, have room for a leaderboard (although you should also experiment with a link unit to see which of the two in that position gives you the best results).
It’s also not too difficult to insert a rectangular unit into an article. You can do that with just about any article.
That’s two units already.
The final unit, a button or vertical banner, could do very well in a sidebar.
Most people choose to keep the ads far apart, but you can also have some pretty dramatic effects by putting your ad units together. This isn’t a strategy that’s going to work for everyone, but creating a zone — at the top of your page maybe or between blog entries — can really make those ads look like content.
After all, users are used to seeing ads in single blocks. When they see a whole section of the page given over to ads, there’s a good chance they’ll assume it’s content and give it some extra attention.
10.3 Where To Put The Search Boxes


The search boxes are usually easier. Probably the most popular place for these is one of the top corners or in the side bar.
You could try putting the second one at the bottom of the page if you want to give users somewhere to go when they’ve finished reading, but to be frank, I doubt if you’ll make any more money with a search box down there than you would from the one at the top.
They’re a good way to capture revenue from users who don’t click on the ads and are about to leave, but I don’t think that putting two search boxes on a page is going to give you more income than one. It’s possible and you can try it. But I wouldn’t expect any massive results.
10.4 Google Is Generous With The Link Units

Two search boxes might not make much of a difference, but I think that three link units might. They’re small enough to squeeze into all sorts of spots and they look so good at the top and bottom of a list of links that you could probably have fun with three of them.
You do want to be careful about not overloading your page with so many ads that users stop seeing them, so if you don’t have space for all three use just one or two.
And because link units look very different to ad units, I don’t think you have to worry too much about them competing for clicks — and ending up with nothing. They go very well with other ad units.
10.5 Put Referral Ads Near The Recommendation

Referrals work will in all sorts of places. The old Google product referral buttons were most eye-catching when kept together. The new product referrals can work in sidebars but you’ll probably get the best result when you put them close to a recommendation in the text.
10.6 Putting It All Together

Deciding where to put one ad can often be difficult. There are so many different options. Get it wrong and it will cost you money.
While having multiple ads lets you tempt users wherever they are on the page, it also compounds the problem. What’s the best combination of ads and where should the different ads go?

Experimentation and close tracking is the only real way to know for your site but you have to start somewhere. I’ve put three suggested starting points below. These aren’t meant to be final versions that will yield you the greatest income. They’re just meant to get you started quickly. You can then try swapping the locations of different units and see how those changes affect your CTR.
10.7 Putting Multiple Ads In Articles
Fig. 10.1 Distributing multiple ads on an article Web page.
On a Web page that features just one article, you could place a leaderboard beneath the navigation bar, a rectangular ad unit embedded at the beginning of the article and a link unit in a list of links in the left-hand sidebar.
On the right, you could place a search box, another link list (perhaps to archives, RSS content or news) followed by a link unit, and you could put a referral ad inside the text either as an image ad or a text link.
You could also try a second search box at the bottom of the page.
Possible alternatives to try:
Swapping the leaderboard or the second search box for a link unit;
Replacing the link unit on the left with a vertical banner;


Placing a half-banner at the end of the article instead of the second search box;
Moving the link unit on the left to the top of the sidebar;
Using a skyscraper on the right instead of a link unit;
Or just taking out some of the ads to see if that brings in more clicks.
10.8 Putting Multiple Ads In Blogs

Fig. 10.2 Distributing multiple ads on a blog.
The best places to put ads on a blog is between the blog entries. Link units would probably be ideal here... but you’ve only got one of them. Instead, you could start with a half-banner or even a full banner and use a link unit in between two of the blog entries.
A search button can be placed at the top of a sidebar on the right with a skyscraper blended into the second of two lists of links, and a second link unit between them. Again the referral unit can be placed inside one of the blog posts if the teaser is long enough.
Possible alternatives to try:
Swapping the link unit for another ad unit and using a link unit in place of the skyscraper;


Using banners instead of half-banners;
Embedding a rectangular ad unit into the text of the blog;
Placing ad units next to photos in the blogs;
Putting a referral ad in the sidebar;
Adding an extra search box to the bottom of the right-hand sidebar.
10.9 Putting Multiple Ads In Merchant Sites
Fig. 10.3 Distributing multiple ads on a merchant site.
There are really two approaches you can take to using AdSense on merchant sites. The first is simply to treat them in the same way as blogs: put a link at the end of each section of advertising copy and place a banner or half banner beneath it. That ad unit should blend into the text above and below. You can use a skyscraper on the edge of the screen, a link unit beneath a list of navigation links, a search box at the top of the page and referral ads on the side.
Alternatively, you could use graphic referral ads as images and write text about the products. That would give you an instant online store!

In the sample layout above, I’ve placed a large rectangular ad unit directly beneath a featured product. The feature would create the most attention and users would have read past it to reach the rest of the page.
Whenever you’re using AdSense on merchant sites though do keep a close eye on the ads you’re serving; you don’t want to advertise your competitors!
Possible alternatives to try:
Using a text link instead one of the ad units between the marketing copy;
Placing a large picture of a product on a page... and an ad unit right next to it;
Using banners instead of half-banners;
Placing a leaderboard either at the top of the page or at the bottom;
Separating each piece of marketing copy with a large square unit.

And if you’re worried you’ve put in too many ad units... just take one out and see if your CTR changes.
10.10 Ordering Your Ads

These strategies make for useful default placements. But there’s one more factor that you should consider when you’re planning your ads: the way that Google distributes ads to multiple units on a page.
The first ad unit to appear on a Web page always shows the ads that placed the highest bids. In other words, the higher an ad appears on a page, the more that ad is worth.
Because ads that are above the fold tend to get more clicks than those lower down the page, you won’t usually have to do a thing to make sure that the ads that receive the most clicks are those that pay the most.
If your Channels do show you that an ad unit at the bottom of the page is picking up more clicks than ad unit at the top of the page though, you might want try moving that unit to a higher position.
Frankly, I doubt that’s going to happen very often. A bigger problem is if you’ve placed your ad units inside DIV tags, tables or other positioning codes. As far as AdSense is concerned, the first ad unit is the first one the robot comes across in the HTML code, even if that HTML code places the unit at the bottom of the page.

When you place multiple ad units on a Web page then, it’s important to make sure that the AdSense codes appear in your HTML in the same order that they appear on your Web page. That should ensure that the ad units with the highest clickthrough rates are always the ones with the highest value ads.

Fig. 9.1 Google’s Referrals let you add another revenue stream to your Web page.
One of the biggest changes that Google has made to the AdSense program since the last edition of this book came out is in its referral programs. Initially, these were pretty poor. The products were Firefox, Picasa, Google Pack — a collection of different programs — and the AdSense program itself.
If you had users that included publishers interested in signing up for AdSense then you might be able to make some money. (The AdSense referral pays $5 for a publisher who makes the same amount within 180 days, another $250 if the publisher makes $100 and a very nice $2,000 bonus if you refer 25 of these kinds of users).
Most publishers though, don’t write content for other publishers. They were left hoping to earn a dollar a download for Firefox. Most found it more cost-effective to use that spot on their page for something else.
It turned out that those early referral products were just filling space.

Today, Google offers referral products in more than 26 categories, from animals to travel. Those products come in every format you can imagine and pay different amounts for different actions.
It’s a whole other way of making money on your website
9.1 What Are Referrals And How Do They Differ From AdSense?

The biggest difference between AdSense units and referral ads is why you’re being paid. Most AdSense ads pay for each click they receive. Some pay each thousand times they’re shown.
Referral ads pay on a cost-per-action basis, or CPA for short.
It’s not enough to get a click on an ad to earn income. The user has to do something when he reaches the advertiser’s site. That might be downloading a program, leaving an email address or even making a purchase.
It’s very similar to an affiliate system in which you’re paid a percentage of a sales price for a product. The only difference is that payable actions aren’t limited to buying.
Clearly, whatever the action the advertiser demands, it’s going to lower your success rate in comparison to your AdSense units. If 5 percent of your users click a referral ad and only 5 percent of those users take the action the advertiser wants, then you might generate only a few of these actions each month.
Higher payment rates should make up for the lower conversions.
We’ve already seen that the AdSense referral program can pay out $5 quite easily once you get the referral, but the payouts available on other referral products can be much, much higher than that.
Although most seem to fall between $10-$15, it’s not hard to find referral products that pay more than $50 for each user that takes action.
Fig. 9.2 J.G. Wentworth pays almost $77 for users who complete a form.
That already makes them attractive. But referral ads are attractive for another reason...
You should be building multiple revenue streams by placing different kinds of ads on the same page.
Ideally, each Web page should use at least three different types of payment system. Those could be cost-per-click ads, cost-per-mille ads and cost-peraction ads. That would help to ensure that you get something out of all your users.
A few users will take action on the referral ads and generate the most money per click for you.
Some will click your AdSense ads and generate larger numbers of small payments for you.
And your CPM ads will make sure that you get paid even if your users do nothing but look at your content and leave.
9.2 Signing Up For Google’s Referral Program

Putting referral ads on your site is very simple. Just click the Referrals link on the AdSense Setup tab and search for an ad by product, keyword or by category.
Search by product and you’ll be able to pick exactly the ad you want.
Search by keyword and Google will choose the ad for you, giving you what it thinks is the best performing ad to match the keywords you choose. You can enter up to ten keywords.

Search by category and Google will choose the best-performing ads within that category.
You’ll also need to select your ad format — the formats available vary from product to product — and create a channel so that you can track the ad’s performance.
Finally, place the ad (the category or the keyword) in your “Shopping Cart” and past the code.
Start the process by deciding where you want the ad to go. It might take a bit of experimentation to find out which really is the best spot on the page — you’ll have learn whether that location will perform better with a referral ad or an AdSense unit — but you’ll have to put it somewhere.
In general, you’ll probably find that it pays to keep the ad as close to the text as possible but the only way to find out which is actually the best setup for your Web page is to try different combinations and follow the results.
If you find that over a week, an AdSense unit earns more income embedded in your text than a referral unit, try using a different referral unit to see if the problem is the product rather than the placement.
And if the AdSense unit still performs best, move the referral unit somewhere else.
One good option is to use a square or rectangular AdSense unit at the start of an article and place a smaller referral unit lower down as though it were illustrating the text.
You can put up to three referral units on a single page but if your page isn’t very long, you might be better off sticking with one unit and optimizing it properly (I’ll explain how to do that below). You want your referral ads to be closely tied to your content and you don’t want them to compete with each other.
9.3 Choosing Your Referral Ads


Fig. 9.3 So many choices, so many ways to make money...
Obviously where you put your ads will be important. But choosing what you advertise will be even more important.
One option is to go for the highest paying ads, put them on your site and hope.
You’ll probably be hoping a lot and earning little.
Unless your referral ads are closely linked to the content on your page, you’re not likely to get many clicks, let alone many conversions.
It might be tempting to put J.G. Wentworth’s $76.92 ad on your site, for example, but unless you have the sort of users who are likely to want structured settlements, you’ll just be wasting valuable space on your page.
It might also be tempting to choose keywords or categories and let Google do the thinking for you. It does a pretty good job with the ads in AdSense units, so why shouldn’t it do a good job with the ads in Referral units too? Google even gives you a checkbox marked “Pick Best Performing Ads” that overrules your choice and places what it thinks is the best ad for your site.
(Actually, that box does something else too: it automatically serves up a different ad if your chosen advertiser ends his campaign. Leave the box unchecked and you’ll be left with a empty space. The best solution is to pick a big company with a big budget and keep a close eye on your referral ads.)
There are a couple of reasons why you should be choosing Referral ads yourself, by product, and not leaving it to Google.

The first is that the referral inventory is smaller than the AdSense inventory. That means there’s a much better chance that Google will get it wrong and give you something that’s close but not close enough.
It also means that there aren’t so many ads available that you can’t browse them yourself and make your own decision.
The choice you make should be a compromise between the price you can earn for the action and the closeness of the ad to your own content.
That’s going to be a calculated risk at first, followed by experimentation to make sure you’ve made the right decision.
The other reason you should be picking your own individual ads yourself is that you can recommend the products in your referral units. That’s an important difference in comparison to AdSense units and it’s a crucial element in optimizing your ads to get maximum conversions.
9.4 Getting The Most Out Of Your Referral Ads

Like AdSense units, referral units need to be optimized.
The same principles don’t necessarily apply. The fact that you can recommend the products in your referral ads changes everything.
You can recommend them because advertisers aren’t paying for the click. They’re only paying for the action. If a user reaches their site and does nothing, it’s cost them nothing. They don’t risk anything then, by having you send them users if those users turn out not to be interested.
Recommending products that you advertise is the number one most effective way of rocketing any ad clickthroughs. You’re only allowed to do it for CPA ads such as referral ads and affiliate ads.
Once you’ve chosen your ad then, try to mention the product in your text.
Ideally, you’ll choose a product that you’ve actually used and enjoyed. That will make the recommendation personal — and that’s the best kind. Your readers trust you, so they’ll trust your judgment.
If you haven’t used the product though, try to find a website or a blog that gives it a good review and mention that someone else has said these people have done a great job. That’ s not as powerful as saying that you’ve tried it and loved it yourself but it’s better than nothing. It’s certainly better than

abusing your readers’ trust by talking up something that you haven’t used and which might be poor.
But here’s the thing...
Once you’ve mentioned a product, people are going to look for it. Even if they see a banner and know it’s an ad, there’s still a good chance that they’ll click because you’ll have made them curious.
That affects the format you choose.
The range of formats available for each ad varies. But try to choose either a text link that you can slip right into your article, or a graphic ad that will attract ads.
Usually, I don’t recommend graphic ads. But if you’re recommending a product — and if you keep the image close to the recommendation — it will more look like an illustration than an ad. Fig. 9.4 Free Junk Car Removal offers a text links, an AdSense-style text block and a banner. Choose the link or the banner.
9.5 Creating Content For Referral Ads

I’ve said that you should choose ads that match your content as closely as possible.
I’ve also said that you should be recommending the ads in your referral units.
The easiest way to do both those things is to write a post, choose a referral ad that’s related to the post and add a sentence or two mentioning the product.
That’s very simple.

An alternative approach is to choose an ad that matches the content of your site, then write a post that matches the product.
The page can’t read like an ad. It has to be the same quality as all your other content otherwise users won’t read it and they won’t click the ads. The post would just find a reason to say something positive about the referral product.
It’s a very easy way to create a revenue-generating Web page.
In practice, you’re not going to be able to do this too often. You’ll probably find that there’s a limited number of ads that match your site. But even two or three pages like this on, easily reached and well-marketed, could give you some very nice extra income.

8.1 Finding Money With Search

What happens when your visitors can't find what they want on your website? They might be bored, probably they're hungry for more or they might want to refine their search. If you have a Google Search Box, you can now retain these 'quitters' — and make money from ads they click from their search results!
The Google Search Box isn't just an added convenience for your visitors — it can actually make you money! When your users enter a search term, you’ll receive a commission for any ad they click on the results page.
If your AdSense ads are being ignored then, add a link at the bottom of the AdSense ads, inviting visitors to try Google search. A simple note should do the trick. Try something like: "Can't find what you're looking for? Try Google Search!"
A Google Search box allows your visitors to specify their exact search terms, thereby "pulling" more relevant ads to your page. Using the Search feature, you can pull up on-demand AdSense ads at the top of the search results.
At the bottom of the Google text ads, place a link to the Google Search bar, inviting readers to Search for better-targeted content and offers. When visitors click an ad, YOU get paid!
You can invite users to search within the website or the entire web. As far as possible, use a staid gray button for the Google search feature. It looks more believable — and legitimate! Note that Google has not played around with its own search buttons, although the logo itself has undergone many theme-based transformations.

Fig 8.1 The "Search" feature is an important part of content-rich websites. On my website above, users are invited to search different threads within the website 'by keyword' and 'by username' creating a good potential to merge in a Google search box.
Google Search Boxes are getting increasingly popular with Internet Forums, enabling users to pull up relevant text ads "on demand"!
8.2 Learn How To Add Google Search To Your Web Page

Adding Google Search to your Web page is very easy. This Step-by-Step Tutorial shows you how:

How to… Add Google "AdSense for Search" to your Web Page!
1. Log in to your AdSense Account and click the "Account Information" tab.
2. From the

Account Information Page, click on "Products" and then the "Edit Information" button to Subscribe to AdSense for Search.
3. Click the "Search Settings" tab to specify your search preferences and results. Paste the html code on your web page and start turning those clicks into AdSense cash!

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8.3 Showing Your Results On Your Site

One of the decisions you’ll have to make when you put an AdSense search box on your site is where to bring up the results page. You have three choices:
On a Google page in the same window;
On a Google page in a new window;
On a page on your website.

Clearly, the last option is the best. You’ll be given two codes: one for the search box and one for the results. You’ll need to paste the search box code in the appropriate location on your Web page. The search results code goes on a page that you’ll have to create specially to hold the results.
Not only will you be able to offer your users a search option and earn from the ads that appear on that page, you’ll also be able to show your own internal links and AdSense ads to keep them on your site.
Fig. 8.2 Users have to scroll past an entire screen of ads and links to reach the search results at WorldVillage.com.

8.4 Flavoring Your Search Results

Another easy decision is whether or not to “site-flavor” your search. This is a real no-brainer. Site-flavoring lets Google figure out what your site is about so that searches made from it are better targeted.
So if you have a site about music, someone tossing “bass” into your search box is more likely to get results about guitars than singing fish.
That’s an option you’ll definitely want to switch on!
8.5 To Search Or Not To Search

Putting a Google search box on your site brings advantages and disadvantages. The big plus is that all the ads the user sees are going to be relevant. The user chooses the keyword so the results are going to be right in line with what the user wants.
On the other hand, that means you’ve got no control over the keywords they choose so you can’t try to promote high-paying keywords. You have to take what you’re given. You could have a high click-through rate but low revenues (although there’s still no guarantee that the user will click on an ad rather than an unpaid listing on the search results page.)
But your users will leave your site at some point anyway. Why shouldn’t you try to make money when they do click away? Even if Search doesn’t bring you huge amounts of money, you should still use it as an added revenue source and to bring extra functionality to your users.
I look at it this way. If a visitor doesn’t find what they want on my site, I’d prefer that they leave some change in the “tip jar” on the way out the door!
8.6 Home Page Searching

One way to increase your revenues from searching is to encourage your users to use your site as their home page.
Many users have Google as their home page. If you’re offering the same service as Google, using their search box and delivering their results, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be searching from your page — and giving you revenue from the ads.

Just encourage your users, especially users with Google as their home page, to switch to you, and you’ll be able to make the most of your search function and your ads.
8.7 Customizing Your Search

Google lets you customize the search box to match your site in the same way that you can customize your ad units. But a different principle applies here that applies to your ads: you want your search box to look like a search box.
You can certainly make the box look like part of your site so that it looks attractive but as I said, keep the button grey.
People trust Google to deliver results that they want. If the search box reminds them of Google, they’re more likely to use it than go to Google.com and search from there.
8.8 Google’s Custom Search Engine

One of the things I love most about Google is that they’re always improving their services and coming up with new ways of earning money through websites.
I’ve never been very enthusiastic about Google’s Search boxes. I’ve always seen them more of an added functionality for my users than a way of earning extra revenue.
Google’s Custom Search Engines though change all that. These let you limit the scope of a user’s search to sites that you’ve selected.
What’s the advantage of that?
Enter any keyword into a Google and only a fraction of the results are going to be relevant. Google might be a very powerful search engine, but to get the information you need, you’ll still have to filter out the sites with poor content, little information and ads instead of text.
A custom search engine lets you do that for your users so that they don’t have to do it themselves. Not only will they then be more likely to leave your site through your search box, they might even come back to your site every time they want to search for information on your topic.
Building your own search engine is very simple. You can start here: http://google.com/coop/cse/. You can even format your search results page

to match the look of your website and invite your readers to submit the sites that they like to make your own filtering easier.
Finally, place the line: “Didn’t find what you’re looking for? Search the [your subject] sites that we recommend” next to your search box, and guide your users to the tip box at your site’s exit.

You can be up and running with AdSense in just minutes. Sure, you’ll need a bit more time if you want to use all of the advanced strategies and techniques I discuss in the rest of this book, but you don’t have to wait until you’ve figured everything out before you can start earning with AdSense.
Remember, every minute that your site isn’t showing online or isn’t showing ads, you’re tossing money down the drain.

If you don’t have a site yet, or if you’re not showing ads on your site, before you move on to the rest of this book, follow one of these guides. You’ll be amazed at how easy it is to start making money with ads!
AdSense QuickStart Guide #1: Building A Blog
Blogging is probably the easiest way to get online with AdSense fast. The sites are already online, you don’t have to worry about graphics and the domains are all set up.
All you have to do is sign up, write and earn!
Step 1: Surf to www.blogger.com
Complete the registration page, choose a name for your blog and pick a template.
Step 2: Apply For AdSense Through Blogger
Another form, another five minutes. It will take a day or two before your application is approved. In the meantime, you can play with Blogger’s AdSense preview tool, and...
Step 3: Write Your First Blog Entry
Not sure what to write? Start with your family, spout off about a story in the news, put up pictures for your friends to see... it doesn’t matter. Everyone has something that occupies their mind, that interests them or that they’re good at. Put up anything. You can change it later but for now just get in the habit of writing to the Web. Once you’ve done it once you’ll see how easy it can be — and how addictive.
Step 4: Play With Your Ads
Once AdSense has approved your application, you’ll be able to start playing with your ads. You can change the colors, fix the font size, remove the border and move them into the sidebar if you wish. You can get everything geared up and ready to...
Step 5: Bring In The Traffic
It’s taken you minutes to get your site set up. Now you have to let people know you’re online. Chapter 20 will tell you how to bring in the traffic but for now you can start by telling your friends, swapping links with your favorite sites and submitting your site to the search engines. Hold off on the paid advertising though until you’ve got enough content to make it worthwhile. You’re rolling!

AdSense QuickStart Guide #2: Building An Ad-Supported Commercial Site With Zlio.
Writing content is just one way to fill a site that will earn from advertising. Another is to display products for sale. That might sound hard but with a website, it’s very, very easy.
You don’t have to see the products, store the products, touch the products or mail the products. All you have to do is market the products... and take a cut of the sales price.
Usually, ads on commercial sites don’t work too well. You want people to buy from you, not from a competitor. When you use Zlio.com— an online store-building service — to build your site though, you don’t need to care who gives you the money... as long as someone does.
Step 1. Sign Up And Choose Your Store Name
Zlio’s registration page is very simple. The only thing you’ll need to consider is the name of the store. You might want to think about that for... maybe a minute. Just choose something that’s simple to remember and which sums up the products you plan to sell.
Step 2. Pick A Template
There’s no programming with Zlio. Pick one of eleven ready-built templates and you’re ready to go.
Step 3. Add Products
Zlio has over three million different products that you can add to your store and receive commissions on sales or even payment for clicks. I’m sure you can find something you want to sell...
Step 4. Add AdSense
In addition to placing units containing products for sale, you can also include AdSense units. And Zlio’s AdSense API makes it a breeze. You don’t even have to go back to the AdSense site to get the code. It’s all automated from Zlio’s own site.
Step 5. Start Marketing
Building the site is easy. It will take about five minutes. Bringing in customers will be a bigger challenge and take a little longer. But it’s nothing that can’t be overcome with some hard work and steady learning.

AdSense QuickStart Guide #3: Building A Site From Scratch
Using an automated system like Blogger or Zlio is the easiest way to get started with AdSense but it’s not for everyone. Create a complete website from scratch is going to take a little longer... but not a lot longer.
Step 1: Pick Up A Name
The first thing you’ll need is a domain. You grab one of those at either GoDaddy.com or NetworkSolutions.com.
Step 2: Build Your Site
You can build your site yourself or hire someone to do it for you. Or you can take a pre-built template and pack it with your own content. Yahoo! has a program called SiteBuilder (http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/index.php) that’s packed with a good range of templates that you can use and play with but you’ll have to upload the finished site onto their servers. If you’re in a rush, it’s a great way to get online and earning fast.
Step 3: Create Your Content
Keep it simple! You don’t have to pack your site with Flash images or anything fancy. Write about what you like! If you’re into fun at the beach, create pages with reviews of your local sand spots. Into skiing? Discuss your favorite ski equipment. Everyone’s got something that lights their fire. Find yours and put it on your first site. You’ll find that a site that interests you interests all the people like you... and gets you the sort of following that wins clicks.
Step 4: Apply For AdSense
Once your first pages are up and built (and none of this should take you more than a few hours) you’re ready to apply to AdSense. Fill in the form and wait for the approval.
Step 5: Bring In The Traffic
While you’re waiting for the first ads, you can start submitting your site to the search engines and building up the traffic.
Step 6: Play With Your Ads
When the ads come in, don’t forget to optimize them for your site. It’s very simple and will have a massive effect on your CTR, even at this early stage.
And that’s all there is to it, apart from the final step... spending the money! I don’t think you need my help for that, do you?

6.1 Attracting Relevant Ads

Getting the color and placement right will help improve your click-through rate. But neither of those will affect which ads your site serves.
In theory, Google controls the ads that appear on your site. You don’t get to choose them at all. In practice, there are a few things that you can do to stop irrelevant ads from appearing and ensure that you get the ads that give you cash.
The more relevant the ads, the greater the chance that a user will click and you’ll earn money.
The most important factor is obviously going to be your content. Google’s crawlers will check your site and serve up ads based on the keywords and the content on your page.
Bear in mind that Google’s crawlers can’t read graphics or Flash or pretty much anything that isn’t text. I’ll talk about content in detail in Chapter 11 but for now, remember that if you want to keep your ads relevant, you’ve got to have the sort of page that Google can understand and use to give you the ads you want.
6.2 Keep The Title, Directory And Headlines Relevant

How exactly the crawlers read pages is a secret guarded about as closely as Coca Cola’s special syrup formula. One thing that does seem to have an effect though is the title of your URLs and files.
When you create your pages and view them on your computer before uploading them to the server, you should find that AdSense serves up ads related to the name of the directory that holds the page. That gives a pretty big clue as to at least one of the things that Google is looking at: the name of the directory.

Actually, it’s not just the name of the directory that’s important. The name of the file plays a big part too.
If you have a website about wedding trains and the title of one of your pages is trains.php for example, there’s a good chance that you’ll get ads about Amtrak and Caltrain. That wouldn’t give you many clicks. Change the name of the file to weddingtrains.php and there’s a much better chance that you’ll see ads related to weddings.
If you find that the ads that are appearing on your site have nothing to do with your content, the first places to look are your directory and your title. Make them more relevant to your content and you should find that you get better ads.
Another place to look is your headlines. Instead of using a tag for your heading, try using the h1 tag with headings that contain your keywords. That should help them to stand out to the crawlers.
And if you don’t have any headlines at all, try adding some.
6.3 Finding Keywords

We know that Google’s crawlers search websites for keywords, then reports back and tells the company what kind of ads to send to the site. If your site is about pension plans for example, then your keywords would be things like “retirement”, “401k” and “pension”.
Getting the right keywords on your site won’t just make your ads relevant; it will also help you to make sure that the ads you get are the ones that pay the most.
There are all sorts of tools available on the Web that tell you how much people are prepared to pay for keywords. www.overture.com and www.googlest.com let you see how much people are prepared to pay, and keywords.clickhereforit.com also has a list of keywords with their prices.
On the more professional side, WordTracker provides a wealth of keyword research tools that unearth pure gold. You can check it out at www.WordTracker.com.
Again, you don’t want to build a site just to cash in on a high paying keyword but if you know that “401k” pays more than “retirement” for example, then it makes sense to use the higher paying keywords more than the lower paying ones.

See Chapter 17 for more on finding the most up-to-date high paying keywords.
6.4 Keyword Density

You’ll need the right keywords to get the right ads. But you’ll also need the right amount of keywords.
There’s no golden rule for putting the right number of keywords on a page to get the ads you want. You’ll just have to experiment. It also seems to be the case that keyword density is counted across pages, especially for high-paying keywords. If you have a site that's generally about cars and you write a page for car rental, a higher-paying keyword, you might find that you need to produce several pages about car rental before you get the ads.
In general though, if you find that your ads are missing the point of your page and that your titles are all correct, then the next step would be to try mentioning your keywords more often and make sure that they’re all finely focused. For example, talking about “fire extinguishers” is likely to get you better results than talking generally about “safety equipment.”
6.5 Keyword Placement

It shouldn’t really matter where you put your keywords, should it? As long as the right words are on the right page in the right amount of numbers, that should be enough to get you relevant ads, right?
Wrong.
One of the strangest results that people have had using AdSense is that putting keywords in particular places on the page can have an effect on the ads the site gets.
The most important place on your webpage is directly beneath the AdSense box. The keywords you place there could influence your ads.
For example, mentioning clowns in the space directly beneath the AdSense box could give you ads about circuses and red noses!
Keeping that in mind, you could play with your ads in all sorts of ways. If you had a site about camping for example, you might find that you’re getting lots of ads about tents and sleeping bags, which would be fine. But if you also wanted to make sure that one or two of your ads were about Yosemite or

mobile homes, then mentioning those keywords once or twice on the page directly below the AdSense box could give you ads for sites with that sort of content too.
Bear in mind though that you’ll often find that you get ads that try to combine the main thrust of your site with the words in that keyword space below the ad box. So if you had a site about gardening and you mentioned “cabbages” beneath the ad box, you’re more likely to get ads about growing cabbages than ads about cabbage recipes.
Experimenting with the placement of the keywords could allow you to control at least one or two of the ads you receive and help keep them varied. That’s definitely something to try.
6.6 Keyword Frames

One of the reasons that websites don’t always receive relevant ads may be that all the navigation and other non-content words affect the way Google reads the page. If your links and other words take up lots of space, it could well skew your results.
One way to avoid your navigation affecting your ads is simply to create frames. You put all of your content in your main frame and the navigation material in a separate frame. Only the “content frame” has the Google code (google_page_url = document.location), so your keywords won’t be diluted by non-relevant words.
6.7 Section Targeting

Probably the most effective way to ensure the crawlers read the keywords you want to emphasize though is to use Section Targeting. This is a fantastic technique. By simply inserting a couple of lines of HTML code into your Web page, you can tell the crawler which parts of your site are the most important and ensure that you get ads relevant to that content.
The lines you want to use to emphasize particular sections of your Web page are:

Section text.


The rest of the page won’t be ignored, but those particular lines will receive a heavier weighting. If you want to tell the crawlers to ignore particular sections, you can use these lines:

Section text.

You can highlight (and de-emphasize) as many or as few sections as you wish, but what you can’t do is use these instructions solely to highlight keywords. So you can’t put them around particular single words or phrases on your page and hope to see ads that relate only to those terms.
In fact, Google recommends that you highlight a sizeable portion of text — as much as 20 percent — for the targeting to be most effective. The result of targeting small amounts of text could be irrelevant ads, public service ads... or even a banning if you deliberately tried to bring up ads that have nothing to do with your site.
Section Targeting is probably most useful if you have a Web page that covers lots of different topics. So if you had a blog about MP3 players but had written an article about rap music for example, you could use Section Targeting to ensure that you didn’t lose ads about the music players to ads about rap music. Or you could tell the crawlers to ignore your readers’ comments and focus on your own entries.
And presumably, there’s nothing wrong with stuffing a paragraph with keywords related to your subject and telling the crawlers to focus on that section to ensure that your ads stay targeted.
It’s definitely something that you want to play with.
If there’s one problem with Section Targeting though, it’s that it can take up to two weeks before you see the results — the time it can take for the crawler to re-visit your page. So it’s not a fast process and that can make it a bit of a blunt tool. But it’s not blunt enough to be ignored.
6.8 No 'Baiting'!

Often I've clicked through a 'promising' website, only to find reams of keyword spam, interspersed with AdSense. Websites like these make AdSense look bad.

Keyword spam may trick search spiders, but your human visitors will leave disappointed.
People hate being 'baited' by a web site. Offer content that makes their visit worthwhile. Address the needs and concerns of your visitors with original content.
Quality content builds trust and loyalty — and that, in turn, makes people want to click. Search rankings may change, but loyal visitors keep coming back for more!
6.9 Changing Metatags

Metatags certainly aren’t what they used to be, and in AdSense they’re barely anything at all. There’s a good chance that when it comes to deciding ad relevance, your metatags have no effect whatsoever.
I’ve already mentioned that the title of your page will have an effect. It’s also very likely that the description does too.
But that doesn’t mean that your metatags are completely irrelevant when it comes to AdSense. They aren’t. They’re only seem to be irrelevant when it comes to serving ads; they still play a role in search engine optimization and getting your site indexed faster.
6.10 Inviting The Robot

So far in this chapter, I’ve explained some of the ways that you can tweak your page to keep your ads relevant. But the changes you make won’t have any effect until Google’s robot stops by and re-indexes your page. What will generally happen is that once you upload your new page, you’ll still get the old ads and you might have to wait some time before the robot visits it again and you can find out whether your changes have the right result.
To get the robot to stop by earlier, reload the page in your browser, and then again a few minutes later. Do not click on any of the ads just reload and wait a few minutes before attempts.
This doesn’t always work but with a bit of luck, you should find that you receive new ads within a few minutes.

6.11 Google Ads Preview

Don’t want to wait for the robot? No problem. The Google Ads Preview tool at http://googleadspreview.blogspot.com/ lets you see the ads your site is likely to receive right away.
Google has its own tool for this, but this program by Digital Inspiration is much better. That’s not just because it also works with Firefox (Google’s preview tool only works in Internet Explorer) but mostly because it lets you compare different programs and formats side by side.
When you’re just starting out, that’s not really important. But when you’re combining AdSense with Chitika eMiniMalls it’s useful to see what effect a single change can have across the different ads you’re displaying.
You can also compare the AdSense ads with those served by Yahoo! Publishers Network.
And here’s the real kicker: the Google Ads Preview Tool also lets you toss in keywords and see which ads turn up.
Try it! Surf over to the site, toss in a keyword relevant to your site and see what ads you’re likely to receive.
Note that I said which ads you’re likely to receive, not which ads you will receive.
That’s an important difference. Google uses all sorts of criteria to decide which ads you’re going to get. I’m not sure which criterion this preview tool uses to choose ads for keywords but I can’t see it emulating Google completely.
Use the tool to preview the ads on your site and you’re on pretty firm ground. You’ll get a great impression of the ads you’re likely to get and you can either match your content to it or change your content to bring up some different ads. Use it to preview the ads you’re likely to get with a certain keyword and you’ve got a guide to where those keywords can take you.
Either way, you’ve got a very useful tool.

6.12 Public Service Ads

The penalty for not getting your keyword placement and density right isn’t just irrelevant ads. It could also be no ads at all. If Google can’t find any relevant ads to give you, it could use your space to present public service ads, which are very nice but they don’t pay you a penny. You might prefer to earn money and give it to a charity of your choice rather than give space on your site to a cause that Google chooses.
Google lets you get rid of that space by collapsing the ad, tossing in an image or by creating a color block in the same tone as the background color. But that seems like a waste to me. That space can earn you money. If something goes wrong with your contextualization, you want a back-up that brings revenue.
The most obvious solution is to specify an alternate URL in the event that Google has no ads for you. You can do this from your AdSense account. Instead of linking to the Red Cross or whoever it may be, you’ll receive a link to a site that you’ve pre-chosen.
I’ve created my own default set of ads for various block sizes. You can see an example of this at www.worldvillage.com/336x280-1.html. Fig. 6.1 My own version of AdSense. Just don’t run it on the same page as real
AdSense ads or Google will be unhappy with you.

A great replacement for pesky PSAs, right?
Just remember that Google doesn’t like it when publishers use ad units that mimic AdSense ads ON THE SAME PAGE as live AdSense ads. That’s why I only use this format for PSA replacement.
But there are plenty of other options.
For example, you could use this space to deliver image-based ads that come from your server. For offers that pay per action (clicks or signups), I like to use WebSponsors.com. You can signup for a free account and find new ways to monetize your unused ad space.
Probably the best way to turn that wasted space into revenue though is to place a Chitika ad there. I talk about Chitika later in this book, in the chapter about other ad systems. The company has some fantastic looking ad units, and they can be used in conjunction with AdSense.
Having a Chitika ad automatically replace a PSA ad is, I feel, the perfect solution until you manage to sort out the problem with your AdSense unit.
The principle is the same as the AdSense-like ad units I used to use: create a blank page on your site, add your Chitika code and use the URL as your alternate AdSense URL
It’s really very simple and very effective.
6.13 Blocking Ads

Another useful way to control the ads you see on your site is to block ads you don’t want.
Google gives you a limit of 200 URLs to block, which isn’t much. You might well find yourself burning through them pretty fast, especially if you try to block lower paying ads in favor of the higher-paying ones.
Playing with keywords, content and placement will give you much better results.

6.14 “Advertise On This Site”

Editor’s Note: Google has discontinued this service since the time of publication.
Finally, there is one more way to influence the ads that you show on your site through AdSense: by placing a link inviting users to “Advertise on this site.”
In the past, as long as you hadn’t opted out, the link would appear with your ads automatically. Now you have to add the link manually. AdSense’s Help Center explains how to do it, but it’s quite simple. You’ll just need to use this line of code, replacing “NUMBER” with your AdSense publisher ID number and “YOURSITE” with the name of your site:
Advertise on this site
Google even says that you can’t change the text. It has to say, “Advertise on this site.”
Although that’s certainly more work than simply choosing to uncheck a box, as we used to be able to do, it does provide a lot more flexibility. You can now put the link anywhere. Publishers often expect to see these sorts of things at the bottom of the page.
And what will happen when they click that link? They’ll be sent to a special landing page that invites them to sign up to AdWords and place their ads on your site. You’d be paid for those ads on a CPM basis.
You can edit that landing page!
Google sees this page as a co-brand: they host and supply it; you can do what you like with it. Advertisers that don’t yet have an AdWord account will be shown how to sign up and place their ads on your pages, and advertisers that do have an account will be shown how to advertise on your site.
Google lets you make three kinds of changes to this page:
You can add a logo;
You can set the color scheme;


And you can write your own welcome message.

Do you see why these options are so important?
This is the only place in AdSense where publishers get to talk directly to advertisers.
That’s crucial!
AdSense is structured so that Google stands between the network of advertisers and the network of publishers. Ads go in one end, Google sorts them and sends them out the other end.
Advertisers have no way of telling publishers to put their ads at the top of the page or next to relevant pictures or only on pages that contain positive reviews of their products, or anything else. Once they’ve submitted their ads, they just have to trust the publisher to promote their sites in the best way possible.
Similarly, as publishers, we have no control over what the advertisers write in their ads. We can’t tell them to use particular keywords, to write certain things in their headlines or to produce their copy in a particular style.
If we get an ad with bad copy, we just have to put up with the lower CTR until we either block it or see it replaced by a more profitable ad.
Edit the landing page, and you can tell the advertisers what they should write to get the most clicks with an ad on your site.
You can even include your email address and contact information and invite them to contact you directly.
Fig. 6.2 The “Advertise on this site” landing page. Your communication channel to advertisers.
You want that page to look like part of your site. If an advertiser has clicked on the “Advertise” link on your site, it’s because they’ve liked what they’ve seen. You’ve impressed them, not Google, not Google’s robot and not Google’s method of matching ads to publishers.
Google understands that means they’ve got more chance of signing up an advertiser if they let you do the selling.
You should certainly add your logo to this page. It appears in the top left-hand corner and makes the landing page look like you’ve endorsed it — which, of course, you have. If you don’t have a logo, this is a good time to create one. You could just use any graphic that appears on your site; the effect will still be to draw a link between the landing page and your site.
And that’s the effect you want.
You only get one landing page per account. If you have multiple sites, the ads will only appear on the site whose URL you inserted in the link, but you might not want to mention a site name on the landing page in case you confuse the advertiser.
The color scheme, of course, should match the colors used on your site.
It’s in the welcome text that things can really get interesting.

You don’t really want to give advertisers a list of keywords that they should use. It’s unlikely that they’re going to be impressed by a bunch of demands from someone who has yet to earn them a dime.
But they will appreciate information about the sorts of words that are likely to attract the most clicks. They’ll still feel that they’ve got the freedom to decide on their own ad copy — but they’ll be more likely to write the sort of copy you want.
For example, if you have a site about cars and you know your users are particularly interested in models that suit families, you could let the advertisers know. If your blog mostly attracts Republicans you could suggest issues that are likely to get your users clicking an ad. If you’ve got a site about pets, you could point out that your users are more interested in accessories for dogs than for cats.
No one knows your users better than you. This is the place to share that information so that you can share some higher revenues.
And finally, you could also encourage advertisers to sign up for a targeted-site campaign.
While it’s likely that most of the advertisers who click on the link will want to advertise exclusively on your site — and Google has set up the system to encourage that result — it’s also possible that some advertisers who are new to AdSense will decide to spread their ads over a number of different sites in your field.
That means you’re only getting a fraction of their advertising budget. A targeted-site campaign will give you all of it.
Just tell them that a targeted campaign on your site is likely to give them the best results.
Does all that sound hard? Don’t worry, I’ll make it easy for you. You can just take the text below and adjust it for your site, swapping the underlined sections for details relevant to your site:
Thank you for advertising on FamilyFirst.com, the web's leading site for family-friendly web site reviews. Our users are typically traditional families, stay-at-home moms and parentsof childrenaged between 3 and 16. We’ve found that users respond most favorably to articles and links about filter software, children’s DVDs and computer games, toys and family entertainment. Highlighting these aspects of your business in your ad is likely to earn the highest number of clicks and the best conversions. We’d also recommend that you focus your advertising with a targeted-site campaign. We look forward to helping your business grow! If you would like more information about advertising on FamilyFirst.com, please write to sales@FamilyFirst.com.
See how easy that is?
The page should be available within 24 hours, and once you’ve created it, you can put links to it anywhere you like; you’re not restricted to the little line under the ads. So you could put them in your emails and on your Web pages in places of your choice.
Why would you send potential advertisers to Google’s advertising sign-up page instead of your own? Well, you might not want to. You might prefer to just vet each advertiser yourself and set your own price. But bear in mind that any advertiser who follows that link has to outbid other advertisers on Google who want that same space. You don’t know what exactly the current highest bid is; the most you can know is how many clicks your ads received and how much money you earned in the previous days and weeks.
You certainly can’t tell how much you’re going to receive in the weeks to come.
Sending potential advertisers to your Google sign-in page will ensure that you’re always getting the highest-paying ads for those spaces.
6.15 Does Location Matter For CPM Ads?

In a word, yes! This is what Google has to say about CPM ads, the type of ads you’re likely to get from a site-targeted campaign (my emphasis):
You'll earn revenue each time a CPM (cost per 1000 impressions, also known as pay-per-impression) ad is displayed on your site. You won't earn additional revenue for clicks on these ads.
Please note that the placement of CPM ads on your pages can affect the amount an advertiser pays for that impression. Placing your CPM ad units below the fold, or in an otherwise low-impact location, may result in lower earnings than if the ad unit was placed in a conspicuous location.
So if you were thinking, “Great! I’ll encourage click-throughs above the fold and get paid per impression with an expanded text ad at the bottom of the page...” think again.
Google claims that CPM campaigns have to bid for space on publishers’ websites in the same marketplace as CPC ads, and that therefore you would only receive a CPM ad if it’s the highest paying option. If advertisers are paying less for a CPM ad at the bottom of a page, it’s less likely then that you’re going to get one down there.
Now, how Google is figuring out where on the page you’re putting your ads beats me. Their love of Smart Pricing (see Chapter 13) though, suggests that they could be comparing advertisers’ sales results with the number of impressions and assuming that sites with high impressions and low sales have put the ads in out-of-the-way places.
Whichever method they’re using, the end result is that you’re still going to see higher revenues from ads in the best locations and less from the worst spots.

Using Colors To Increase Your Clicks
4.1 Design Your Website To Highlight Adsense

I once went to a fashion show where each model wore the exact same black outfit for the entire duration of the show. Boring? Hardly! The show was intended to showcase platinum jewelry, and the outfits were designed to enhance the jewelry — instead of distracting the audience.
You don’t have to make all the pages on your website identical (or black). But you do want to make sure that the look of your page draws attention to the ads — and makes them appear as attractive and as valuable as platinum jewelry.
Many websites have strong graphic elements that catch the eye — usually at the expense of the AdSense units. If you're using AdSense, be judicious in the selection of fonts, font size, colors, images, tables and other visual aspects of your website. Draw subtle attention to your AdSense units. Make them the stars of your show!
Fig. 4.1 On this website, Tim Carter employs subtle design and placement to make AdSense the center of attraction. Check it out at:
http://www.askthebuilder.com/457_Tar_and_Chip_Update_-_It_Rocks_.shtml

4.2 Make The Border Go!

You can more than DOUBLE your click-throughs with this one simple tweak!
Even before the Internet, ads in newspapers and magazines were marked off with a thick, heavy border. No wonder borders and boxes have come to symbolize advertising messages.
Fig. 4.2 It's always easier to work with a white background. If your page background is white, you can instantly see the results with the Example ad next to the color palette.
Ads with prominent borders make your pages look cluttered. They distract the eye from the ad text, while marking off the ad blocks from the rest of the content.
Google provides an extensive color palette in your administrative area. Use it to tweak the look of your ads to suit your web page.
With just one simple click, you can match the color of your ad's border with the background color of your web page. When the border blends with the background, it frees up loads of space. The page looks instantly neater and the ads look more inviting.
Make sure you also pick a matching background color for the ad. The ad's
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background must match the page background on which the ad will appear. If the ad appears in a table, match the table background color with the ad background color.
The key is to blend the background and border color with the page, so that the text looks like an integral part of your web content. Fig. 4.3 Don't forget to match the background color for your ad with the background color of your web page. Even with a matching border, the ad in the Example above sticks out against the white background.
4.3 Text Is Design Too!

That's right: the text size, font, color and the color of your ads must match the other text elements. If the text color of the ads is the same as the text in the body of your page, it’ll help the ads blend into the site and make the reader feel that you’ve endorsed them.
And if the size of the font in the ads is the same as the size of the main body of the content, it will have the same effect: they’ll look like part of your site and not something brought in by Google.

That’s the sort of blending that translates into clicks.
Fig 4.4 Format your text ads to maximize clicks! On my blog, I have removed the border and matched the ad’s background color and fonts to my content. See more at http://www.joelcomm.com
This 3-way matching (titles, text and background) can generate excellent click-through rates.
Too many text styles add clutter and can confuse your visitors. Instead, try every legitimate way to make the ads look like a part of your web content.
In other words use the colors to make sure that your ads don't look like ads!
4.4 Blue Is Best

So you want to get rid of the border. You want to get your ads the same color as the text on the rest of your page and the background matching the background color of your Web page.
But what about the link itself, the line the user is actually going to click? What color should that be?

That’s an easy one: blue.
I used to say that all the text in the ad should match the text on your page, including the link. After seeing an article about the benefits of keeping the links blue — and testing extensively — I don’t say that any more.
The logic is that users have come to expect links on websites to be blue. Just as they expect stop signs to be red and warning signs to be yellow, so they expect their links to blue.
That means people are more likely to click on a blue link than a link in any other color.
The line in your AdSense code that sets the color of your link is the one that says:
Google_color_link = “#color”;
“#color” is the hexadecimal number for the color you want to use. You should make sure that number is #0000FF.
Keep your link blue and you can experience an increase in click-throughs as high as 25 percent!
4.5 Where Did My URL Go?

You can change the color of your text and you can make sure that your links scream, “I’m a FREE road to where you want to go!”
But you still have to display the URL. It’s one of Google’s rules. But you don’t have to display it in a way that people can see it.
One legitimate trick to make the click-through link less obtrusive is to change the URL display color to match the text description color. Now the link will blend in with the text description and the eye will be drawn to the hyperlink instead of the URL. Google provides these tools for you. Why not use them?
Note that the 728 x 90 leaderboard and the 468 x 60 banner do not display the URL line by Google’s design. It is not a mistake and you will not get in trouble for the URL not appearing with these ad blocks. It’s just the way it is.

4.6 Deliberate Mismatching

When it comes to choosing colors, I recommend 3-way matching and using blue for the links. But there is another strategy that you can use.
You can deliberately mismatch your ad colors and styles, provided you keep it to the top of your page.
This distinction generates two powerful 'zones' and therefore two types of experience for the visitor.
The first zone is always at the top of the first page, above the main site banner. The titles and text colors match colors found in the banner graphic heading. (Important — the URL links are hidden, so only certain text ads will allow you to do this.)
The end result is that these ads, placed above the banner graphic look like key control points for your site and are just more likely to be clicked. The visitor feels that they are visiting another major area of that site.
Fig. 4.5 www.dressesforthewedding.com has two zones: an ad zone at the top and a free article beneath. Implementing this design increased their revenues FIVE-FOLD!

4.7 Changing The Look Of Your Ads

The strategies I’ve provided in this chapter will all help to improve your clickthrough rates. That’s what happened when I used them and it’s what happened when other people used them.
But one of the most important strategies you can use with AdSense is to experiment.
If you find that a slightly larger ad format gives you better results, for example, then obviously, you should use the bigger one.
In the past, changing your ads meant copying the code and pasting it into your site again.
Today, things are a bit easier than that.
When you create your ad code, you’ll be asked to give that code a name.
Make sure that name tells you exactly where the ad will be placed and its format.
Whenever you want to change the way an ad looks, you’ll be able to pull up that code on your AdSense center and make the changes. Your ad will be updated automatically within the next ten minutes.
Unless you want to change the size of your ads. That you’ll still have to do manually by pasting in the new code.

3.1 Ad Formats: “Dress” your ads for success!

How would you like your ads served? Banners? Skyscrapers? Rectangles? Squares? What about borders and background colors?
The choices can be overwhelming. Many people let Google decide for them-preferring to stick with the default settings. Big mistake! From my own experience I can tell you that it’s like swapping a hundred-dollar bill for a ten-dollar one.
For almost one year I settled for just a tenth of what I could have been making — just because I didn’t bother to control the looks and placement of my AdSense ads.
The various ad formats, colors and their placement on the web page can be done in thousands of combinations. You can literally spend hours every day experimenting with every possible combination. But you don’t want to, do you?
Let me give you a few ‘ground rules’ that have sky-rocketed the CTRs on my top-grossing pages:
3.2 Don't "Look" Like An Ad

People don't visit your website for ads. They want good content.
If you make the ads stick out with eye-popping colors, images or borders, that makes them easy to recognize as ads — and people work extra hard to avoid them.
The same goes for ads that are tucked away in the top, bottom or some other far corner of the page. So easy to ignore!

If you want people to click, make the ads look like an integral part of your content.
Today's visitors are blind to banners, mad at pop-ups, weary of ads and skeptical of contests and giveaways. So how do you win their confidence? Simple. Don't make your ads look like ads!
Let’s begin by reviewing each of the different types of ad available from AdSense and explaining their uses... then I’ll introduce you to a few simple choices that zoomed my CTRs to incredible heights.
3.3 Meet the AdSense Family

Google serves its ads in several flavors, with each of those flavors coming in a range of different shapes and sizes. It is very important to understand the differences between each of these ads. Some are ideal for particular locations. Some should never be used in certain locations. And some should be used very rarely—if at all.
The sample page at www.google.com/adsense/adformats lets you see all of the different kinds of ads at once. It even has links to sample placements that demonstrate how the ads can be used.
For the most part, I’d recommend that you ignore those sample placements.
I’ll talk about location in more detail later in the book, but for now just bear in mind that many of the ads in the samples are just too out of the way to be noticed.
You can use them as a starting point if you want but you’ll save yourself a lot of time — and money — by taking advantage of the experience of myself and others, and following the recommendations here.
3.4 Text Ads — Google’s Finest

Text ads are probably the types of ad that you’re most familiar with. You get a box containing one or a number of ads with a linked headline, a brief

description and a URL. You also get the “Ads by Google” notice that appears on all AdSense ads. (Google changed this notice recently and it now blends in much better than it used to.)
There are eight different types of text ad. The most popular is probably the leaderboard. At 728 x 90, it stretches pretty much across the screen and while it can be placed anywhere, it’s mostly used at the top of the page, above the main text. Fig. 3.1 The leaderboard.
That’s a great location. It’s the first thing the reader sees and it offers a good selection of ads to choose from. When you’re just starting out and still experimenting with the types of ads that work best with your users, it’s a pretty good default to begin with.
Of course, you can put it in other places too. Putting a leaderboard ad between forum entries for example can be a pretty good strategy sometimes and definitely worth trying. On the whole though, I think you’ll probably find that one of the smaller ads, such as a banner or half-banner might blend in more there and bring better results.
And I think you can often forget about putting a leaderboard at the bottom of the page, despite what Google’s samples show you. It would certainly fit there but you have to be certain that people are going to reach the bottom of the page, especially a long page. You might find that only a small minority of readers would get that far, so you’re already reducing the percentage of readers who would click through.
Overall, I’d say that leaderboards are most effective blended into the top of the page beneath the navigation bar and sometimes placed between forum entries.
Fig. 3.2 A nicely optimized half banner onthisSquidoo page.
Banners (468 x 60) and half-banners (234 x 60) are much more flexible.
Like leaderboards you can certainly put these sorts of ads at the top of the page, and lots of sites do it. Again, that’s something worth trying. You can put up a leaderboard for a week or so, swap it for a banner for another week or so, and compare the results. Fig. 3.3 A banner and a half-banner.
But at the top of the page, I’d expect the leaderboard to do better.
A banner or a half-banner would leave too much space on one side and make the ad stand out. It would look like you’ve set aside an area of the page for advertising instead of for content. That would alert the reader that that section of the page is one that they can just ignore.
When you’re looking for an ad to put in the middle of the page though, a half-banner can be just the ticket.
While a leaderboard will stretch over the sidebars of your site, just like the navigation bar, a 234 x 60 half-banner will fit neatly into the text space on most sites.

This sort of ad should be your default option for the end of articles and the bottom of blog entries.
But for the most part, stay away from the 468 x 60 banner ad block!
One of the first things people do when they sign up for AdSense is to grab a 468 x 60 ad block.
Big mistake.
I have a theory about why they do this. It’s the same theory that explains why the 468 x 60 block does not entice clicks.
Most site owners have the mindset that when they put Google ads on their site, they must place the code that conforms most to traditional web advertising. And that would be...? Yup, the 468 x 60, the ubiquitous banner format that we have all come to know and love and... IGNORE.
Everyone is familiar with the 468 x 60. And that’s exactly why the click-through rate on this size is very low, even among advertisers who use images on their banners.
The 468 x 60 blocks screams, "Hey! I am an advertisement! Whatever you do, DON'T click me. In fact, you should run from me as fast as you can!"
In all but a few special cases, I have found the 468 x 60 ad block to be completely ineffective, and recommend ignoring it the same way your visitors do.
Now, that doesn’t mean you can never use it. You just have to know what you’re doing and do it smartly. You have to do everything you can to make sure that that ad block looks absolutely nothing like a traditional banner ad.
At my site, WorldVillage.com, I’ve done that by surrounding the ad with text. Because there’s no border around the unit, the ads blend into the text and look almost as they’re a part of the article.
If I had left that unit in the middle of some empty space — at the top of the page for example — it would have looked exactly like the sort of banner that users have trained themselves to avoid. It wouldn’t have picked up any clicks at all.
(Note, I could probably have used a half-banner here too but in general, I like to give my users as wide a choice of ads to click as possible.)

While this use of a 468 x 60 works for me — and it can work for you too if you blend it into the page properly — I’d stick to other formats, like the, half-banner if you’re not 100 percent sure that you can pull it off.
When this ad unit fails, it can fail big.
Google also offers six different kinds of rectangular ads: buttons (125 x 125), small rectangles (180 x 150), medium rectangles (300 x 250), large rectangles (336 x 280), and two sizes of squares 250 x 250 and 200 x 200.
In fact, all of the rectangles can be slotted into the same spots on the page... with the exception of the button. Fig. 3.4 Banner ads at WorldVillage.com. Note how the ad links come immediately after an article link so that the ads look like part of the site.
Probably the most common use of rectangles is at the beginning of articles. You can wrap the text around the ad, forcing the reader to look at it if he wants to read the article. That’s very effective.
But you can really put these sorts of ads anywhere on the page. On my site, DealOfDay.com, I’ve put two rectangular ads right at the top of the page so that they take up the bulk of the space the user sees before he starts to scroll. That’s a very aggressive approach that might not work on every site. It’s worth trying though because if it works for you, you can find that it brings in great revenues.

If you’re wondering which size of ad would be best for the position you’ve got in mind, my advice is to start with the large rectangle, the 336 x 280.
Fig. 3.5 Small, medium and large rectangles... and the square.
Why should you choose the 336 x 280 ad block? Simple. It gets the most clicks! My studies have shown that this format looks most like real content added to a page. I’ve dabbled with every size Google offers and this is the size that consistently has the best results. Other people have told me the exact same thing. That’s all I need to know!
Second best is the 300 x 250 rectangle. Fig. 3.6 A typical use of a rectangle embedded into the text at www.joelcomm.com...
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This ad block size is really useful when you want to have two sets of ads side by side. They fit on most web pages just perfectly. Fig. 3.7 ... and an atypical use of two rectangles at Dealofday.com.
Buttons should generally be used in a different way to other rectangles. Like the half-banners, they’re distinctive for their small size. While that means you could slot them in anywhere, I think they work best when slipped into the sidebars.
For example, you might have a list of links to frequently-read articles or other sites on one side of your page. Putting a button ad at the end of a list like that could help it to blend in well.
The final types of text ads are those that run vertically. These come in three sizes: skyscraper (120 x 600), wide skyscraper (160 x 600) and vertical banner (120 x 240).
Clearly, these are useful options for filling up the sides of the page.
I would also recommend using the 'wide skyscraper', text-only ads on the right hand edge of the screen — in conjunction with the 3-Way Matching I discuss later in the book.
If you think about it, nearly all PC users are right handed (even left-handed people like me control their mouse with their right hand because it's how we were 'brought up' to use a mouse.) By placing the ads on the right hand edge it's psychologically 'less distance' between your right hand and the screen.

This 'closeness' in my opinion makes the user feel more comfortable and therefore more likely to click through to a link. They feel more in control of their visit experience.
On the whole, you can often divide sites into those that have plenty of content at the sides (especially on some blogs), and those that have nothing on the sides (like at JoelComm.com).
I think putting vertical ads in space so that they form the border of the main text makes the page look a lot cleaner. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to get more clicks. If you’re putting a vertical banner in an area where you have other content then just make sure, as always, that you blend them in well so that they look like the rest of your content.
3.5 Image Ads — Built To Be Ignored

Text ads should always be your first pick when you start to load up your site. Image ads should always be your last choice.
A text ad offers many advantages over image ads:
A. With the right formatting, a text ad 'blends in' with your site content. An image ad will not give you the same freedom with its appearance, as the only thing you can play with is the size and positioning.
B. You can squeeze more text ads into the space that a conventional banner takes. People love to have more choices!
C. Properly formatted text ads don't look like clutter. Banners do!
D. People hate banners and avoid them at sight. Many tests confirm that people are much more receptive to text ads related with your content.

I just can’t think of a reason why anyone would want to take an image ad from Google. Text ads perform so much better, in my opinion, you’re better off sticking with those and ignoring image ads altogether.
Fig. 3.8 This banner ad stands out, but will it get clicked? Dave Taylor, best-selling technology writer and AdSense partner, stands up for text ads in this article at: http://www.free-web-money.com/000449.html You can read more of his AdSense articles on this page.
3.6 Video Ads

There is however, one type of image ad that you should welcome on your website: Google’s video ads.
These are an excellent addition to Google’s inventory and for sites that get them, they can bring very impressive returns.
Instead of receiving the sort of static image that just gets ignored, you’ll receive the opening still of an online video. The video is stored on Google’s servers so your download times won’t be affected, and it only plays when the user clicks the Play button, minimizing distraction to the user.
That’s a good thing. If a user’s eyes keep drifting to a moving image when he’s trying to read your content, he’s going to get pretty frustrated and not want to come back.

Fig. 3.9 Play-per-click: a scene from Google’s sample video ad.
And it’s fine too if you’re being paid on a CPM basis; you won’t care then how often someone sees the video. But you’re not always paid on a CPM basis; you might also be paid on a CPC basis.
Unlike Google’s other ad formats though, you won’t be paid for just one click. Users first have to click the Play button—which won’t pay you a dime—and then click either the screen while it’s playing or the link underneath the screen before you’ll earn money.
In fact, you can’t even track the number of times the film is shown. (Although that does mean that you can watch the film yourself without getting rude messages from Google, and it also means that CPC advertisers are less likely to get free branding at the expense of your page space.)
That extra step might sound like it’s going to hit your clickthrough rate for that ad unit but I’m not sure that’s true.
As soon as someone sees a button anywhere, they want to click it. In fact, I’m sure that if you put a big notice next to the Play button saying, “DO NOT PUSH THIS BUTTON” you can be sure that your clicks would go through the roof. (But don’t try it; it’s unlikely that Google will appreciate it.)
People will want to click that Play button, and many of them will want to learn more about the company that created the ad. And even if your CTR does drop for that unit, it’s likely that the click price for video ads will be higher than for other units competing for that space.
Video ads are more expensive to create than text or image ads. That’s why they tend to be created by big companies like car giants or Disney. They might even be offering their television ads. If those corporations have gone to the trouble creating an original video ad or formatting a television ad for the Web, there’s a great chance that they’ll go to the trouble of outbidding their nearest rival for exposure.

If you’re getting a video ad, track how long it appears on that page and compare the revenues it brings with the days on which no video ad appeared. You should expect to see a spike in earnings. If you don’t see that spike, you can always opt out.
Unlike text or image ads though, there’s no guarantee you’re going to get a video ad. To qualify, you have to be opted in to receive image ads on an ad unit in one of these sizes:
Medium Rectangle (300x250)
Large Rectangle (336x280)
Square (250x250)
Small Square (200x200)
Leaderboard (28x90)
Skyscraper (120x600)
Wide Skyscraper (160x600)

(It’s worth noting that with video ads, the bigger the format, the better the results).
If you’re receiving those kinds of image ads and AdSense has a video ad to match your content, you might receive one.
But what if you don’t? You’ll be receiving the sort of image ads that earn a poor clickthrough rate. That would cost you money.
There are two things that you can do to minimize any losses from fishing for video ads and not getting them.
The first is to stop fishing fast. If a week has gone by and your image ad unit hasn’t acquired a Play button, it’s probably not going to. So turn that image ad back into a text ad.
The second is to follow the strategy I use at DealofDay.com. I’ve placed two rectangular ads at the top of the page to make them unmissable but one of them is an image ad.
Google no longer allows publishers to place related images right next to ad units to draw attention to them but you can put an image ad next to a text ad. If that image ad becomes a video ad, you’re going to earn more money. If it stays an image ad, it’s going to pull eyes into your ad zone.
This is about the only time I can think of when an image ad might be better than a text ad.

And when you do get video ads, there are also a couple of things that you can do to make the most of them...
Adding video to your Web pages for example, is a breeze. There are millions of clips available for free use on the Web, and there’s nothing to stop you from shooting your own short.
If your site regularly receives a video ad from AdSense, placing one or two more videos on those pages would help the ad blend into the site and increase clicks.
You could also encourage advertisers to build their own video ads specifically for your site. In Chapter 6, I talk about Google’s “Advertise on this site” feature and recommend that you make use of the landing page to help advertisers create effective ads for your site. You could also add a line or two there about video ads.
Video ads are still fairly new on AdSense, but I’m really excited about them. I think we’re going to be seeing a lot more of them in the future and they’re going to really prove their worth.
3.7 Gadget Ads — Clever But Are They Effective?

I’m optimistic about video ads. I’m not sure yet about Gadget ads.
These are rich media ads that might contain animation, Flash games and interactive content. At the moment advertisers are big brands like Coca-Cola and I suspect it’s likely to stay that way. Ads like these cost a lot more to design and program than a text ad, a graphic ad or even a home-made video ad.
They can pay by impression or by click but I’m skeptical that you’ll get many clicks. An early test showed that only a third of one percent of viewers actually interacted with the ad.
The problem is that they just look too much like ads. Most users have learnt to ignore them.
If you do want to test them though, you’ll need to opt in to receive image ads. Apparently the most popular sizes for gadgets are rectangles, leaderboards and skyscrapers.
Some ads might do well — such as those for movies or which have an attractive built-in game — but on the whole, I expect you’ll find that a well-blended text ad unit will do better.
Fig. 3.10 This kind of Gadget ad could do well. But will others — and how much will it cost you to find out?
3.8 Link Units — Great Little Stocking Fillers

An ad format that has already proved its worth, when used correctly, is link units.
If you’ve ever bought Christmas presents for children, you’ve probably bought stocking fillers. You dole out hundreds of bucks on some state-of-theart electronic gizmo, toss in a couple of toy cars that cost a dollar each just to fill up space and give the kid more to unwrap... then watch him spend 90 percent of his time playing with the car that cost 10 percent of your total gift budget.
Ad Link units have the potential to be equally profitable.
They’re very small, almost unnoticeable... but when used well, they can be extremely effective.
Ad Link units let you place a box on your site that contains four or five links. They come in sizes ranging from 20 x 90 to 200 x 90, and are really meant to be placed on a sidebar.
Because you can place both Ad Link units as well as other ad units on the page, you might find that the choice helps: if a user doesn’t spot something interesting in one type of ad block, he might spot it on another.

Where Ad Links differ from other types of ads is that they only display a list of topics that Google believes are relevant to the content of your pages. They don’t display the ads themselves. When a visitor clicks on a topic, Google pops up a new window with targeted ads.
It can be argued that the Ad Links are ineffective because like video ads, people have to go through two clicks in order for you to get paid. That’s right, once again, you’re only getting paid for the second click (but that does mean you can check to see which ads your users are being served.)
But it can also be argued that if someone is taking the time to click on a topic, then they are probably very interested in the link, and are likely to click an actual advertisement on the resulting page. Some people have found that just about everyone who clicks on an Ad Link will click on the ads that appear on the next page.
I have tested Ad Links on multiple sites and have seen vast differences in results. That makes it more difficult to say whether or not they are for you.
In the first case, I placed the Ad Links on an information-based site with a very general audience. The results were nothing to write home about. Let's just say that you could just about buy a large candy bar with the CPM I saw.
In the second case, I placed the Ad Links on a product specific site with a narrow audience. The results were fantastic! We're talking about a CPM that is greater than what someone might make flipping burgers in one day.
The conclusions should be obvious. If you’re going to use an Ad Links unit campaign. You need to put them:
1. On a site with a specific field of interest. A general site will give you general ads — and few clicks.
2. Above the fold with few other links. For Ad Links, this is crucial: If your users are going to click a link, it should be a link that gives you money.

It’s also a good idea to keep your Ad Link units for sites with high-paying keywords. If someone comes to your site seeking out information or a product on a top-notch keyword, they tend to be more likely to click as a Fig. 3.11 A cunningly disguised link unit at Worldvillage.com.

result.
There are two kinds of link units: vertical units and horizontal units. Vertical link units are great slotted into sidebars. They just look like a natural extension of the link list.
But horizontal link units can be at least as effective. Since they were introduced, they really have become an extremely useful tool.
Some users have reported increases in CTR as high as 200 percent using these units!
Instead of piling the links one on top of the other—which is great for putting above lists of links but stand out too clearly when placed in text—the horizontal ads blend in perfectly when placed on pages with articles.
Fig. 3.12 Horizontal Ad Link units are great for inserting into articles and show very clearly which keywords your site is generating.
You can still only use one Ad Link unit per page and users still have to click twice before you get paid but they’re definitely worth slipping into a long article. You probably shouldn’t put them at the bottom of a page where they’ll be very easy to miss, but there are plenty of other places where these sorts of ads can work very, very well.
For example, a horizontal ad unit can be a great alternative to a leaderboard. It’s much more subtle and takes up less space on the page — definitely something to experiment with to see which of the two brings you the highest revenues.
Or you could use them to separate forum or blog entries. As a horizontal unit, they can be very effective as frames that give people somewhere easy to go when they reach the end of a text unit.

One great use for horizontal link units though is on directory pages. If you have a Web page that contains tables of links, slipping a horizontal link unit above or below them — or both — can make the ads look like a part of the directory.
It almost makes you want to build a directory just to try it out! Fig. 3.13 A horizontal link unit at the top of the page at BetaNews.com. Would a leaderboard have produced better revenues in that position? Again, something that can easily be tested.
3.9 Expanded Text Ads — Shrinking Control Or Expanded

Income?
Take a look at the ad format samples on the AdSense site and you’ll see a bunch of squares and rectangles filled with ads. Most of those ad units will contain more than one ad. On those units that do contain just the one ad, like the button or the half-banner, the ad will fill the space neatly and look pretty subtle.
You might be surprised then to put a skyscraper or a leaderboard on your site and find just one giant ad, written in super-sized text.
Fig. 3.14 You can’t miss that! An expanded text ad strikes JoelComm.com.
All the effort you’ve put into picking the right ad for your site, testing to see which formats work best and calculating which will give you the most clicks will have gone right out of the window.
You’ve prepared your site to serve multiple ads that look like content, and instead you’re handing out a single ad that just screams “Don’t click me!”
This can happen sometimes, but it’s not a reason to panic. It might even be a reason to celebrate.
There are two possible reasons that Google is sending you these expanded text ads.
The first possible reason is that you’ve been keyword-targeted. Google keeps track of your results (just like you should be doing) and tries to serve up the number of ads for your page that will bring in the highest amount of income. That might be four ads in a unit. Or just the one.
Frankly, I’m a touch skeptical that showing one ad is going to bring me more revenues than showing several. But I’m prepared to give AdSense the benefit of the doubt.
If I see that Google is giving me one ad, I’ll compare the results for that one ad to the previous results that I’ve had serving multiple ads in the same unit. If I find that my revenues have dropped I can either block that ad using my filters or just ask AdSense not to give me any more single ads.
But if I find that the expanded text ad is giving me more money, I might still be worried. I know that users are more likely to click ads that look like content. I also know that they prefer to have a choice of ads rather than just one option.
If I’m getting more clicks then with just one ad, it could well be that I have been doing something wrong with that ad unit in the past. I would want to look at how well it’s been optimized and whether it’s in the right place to bring in the best income.
It could well be that this single ad is a high-payer and works better with little competition. But it could also be that getting that one ad is a warning that something was wrong with the way you’ve laid out that ad unit on your site.
You might want to try some different strategies to see if they’ll increase your revenues when the multiple ads come back.
There is another possibility though. You might have been site-targeted.

This is a whole different ball game. It means that an advertiser has spotted your site and asked Google to run their ads on it on a pay-per-impression (CPM) basis.
You’re no longer dealing with tempting people to click, so you don’t care how much your ad looks like an ad. In fact you might even want it to look like an ad, if that’s what will keep the advertiser happy.
The most important point to bear in mind here is that you want to make sure that you’re not losing money. It might be very nice for the advertiser to have exclusive control over a particular spot on your page but if you can make more money serving CPC ads in that space, then you need to make sure that your site is working for you and not for the advertiser.
Again, watch your stats for a week and see if the revenues you receive for your impressions are higher than those you receive for your clicks.
Most publishers do find that ads that pay by CPM pay better, especially sites with high traffic rates. After all, you’re getting paid for every visitor who comes to your site rather than just those that click, so all you have to do to increase your revenue is increase your traffic. As long as each impression pays more than you’re paying for the traffic, you’re going to be making a profit. That should be easy to calculate.
If you find the revenues are lower though, then you’ll want to boot that ad off and go back to serving conventional ads. You can do that by opting out of showing site-targeted ads (you’re automatically opted in).
In general, the biggest problem with these sorts of campaigns is not lower revenues; it’s that you’ve got no idea how long they’re going to last, which makes it difficult for you to take advantage of them. If you knew, for example, that you were going to get paid per impression for the next two weeks, then you’d want to buy in as much traffic as possible for that period, provided that you were paying less than you were earning.
And because you don’t care about CTR, You could also lay off the optimization and focus on making your site more attractive to users.
But you can’t tell when your site is going to be used for a CPM campaign and you can’t tell how long it’s going to last either. That means there’s little point in making major changes to your optimization; you might have to rebuild it the next day.

The best strategy then when you spot a site-targeted ad on your site is to keep a close eye on the cash flows. Buy in more traffic if you can do it profitably but for the most part, just enjoy the extra income!
3.10 Seasons Greeting With Themed Units

There is one more type of ad unit that you can use on your site. You just can’t use it all the time. Every time a holiday rolls around, Google brings out new ad units with seasonal themes.
The designs themselves vary according to season and location (users in Europe, for example, won’t see Thanksgiving ads).
In general, I always say that your ads should be unobtrusive but I like these themed ads. They’re eye-catching without looking like banners. When
it’s holiday-time, it’s always worth checking out the format page again and seeing what’s available. Fig. 3.15 A Thanksgiving ad that isn’t a turkey.
To sum up the different types of ad format then...
Leaderboards are best at the top of the page;
Squares and rectangles can be embedded into text itself;
Vertical ads and buttons should slip down the side of the page;
Vertical link units should be placed next to link lists;
Horizontal link units can go at the top of the page, between blog entries or above and below directories;
Image ads should rarely be used at all;
Themed ads can be slotted in at holiday time;
And Video ads should be used whenever possible.

Those are the general rules governing ad formats. They’re worth knowing because they’re a good place to start.
They’re also worth knowing because you can’t break the rules until you know what they are... and that’s when the fun really begins!