Enhancing Your AdSense Revenue

AdSense is a new program, and a simple one. Starting up is easy (see
Chapter 12), and there’s no risk. You can’t lose money publishing
AdWords ads. The worst that can happen with AdSense is that you make no
money. I’ve never heard of anyone making absolutely no money — not a
single clickthrough; not a penny earned. Even one low-revenue click through
an ad on your page is an encouraging sign that the program works. This chapter
is about getting more clickthroughs.
Improving your AdSense performance involves mostly optimization and
design issues. It’s vital to remember that providing incentives to click your
AdSense ads, or merely pleading for clicks, violates the AdSense terms of service
and can easily get you kicked out of the program. Relevancy drives
clicks. Google’s job is to provide relevant ads, and your job is to focus your
page’s topic clearly so Google can do its job.
This chapter is also about eliminating competition from your pages (or
making a business decision to not eliminate it) and setting up alternate ads —
the two account features not covered in Chapter 12.
230 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
Optimizing Your Site for AdSense Success
Success in the AdSense program depends on several factors, most of which
are under your control. To get clickthroughs, you need
 Traffic
 Relevant ads
If nobody is visiting your site, you obviously won’t get clicks. If you have traffic
but your ads aren’t relevant, your visitors won’t feel motivated to click
them. You might think that it’s Google’s responsibility to send you relevant
ads (especially since I stated exactly that in the introduction to this chapter),
but successful AdSense publishers take responsibility for relevancy by giving
Google a clearly optimized site to work with. Optimization works both ends
of the equation, helping you attract more traffic while helping Google provide
relevant ads.
Briefly put, site optimization for search engines (usually called search engine
optimization, or SEO) is a bundle of writing, designing, and HTML-coding
techniques with two goals:
 Creating a more coherent experience for visitors
 Improving the site’s visibility in search engines
The two goals are tied together by Google’s primary mission to provide good
content to its users. Google strives to reward visitor-friendly sites with high
placement on its search results pages — taking into consideration other factors
as well. If you haven’t read Chapter 4, this is a good time to soak up its
elaborate tutorial in site optimization. That chapter is geared to improving
your site’s stature in Google, building PageRank, and climbing up the search
results page — all to the purpose of attracting traffic.
Promoting your site on other related sites is a tangential aspect of optimization
but a pertinent part of traffic building. Building a network of incoming links is
the most potent way to improve your PageRank in Google (see Chapter 3 for
much more about this). Building links is important also to your success with
AdSense. AdSense revenue benefits from all the normal ways that enterprising
Webmasters promote their online businesses.
Now, on to relevancy. Relevancy converts visitors to clickthroughs. Ironically, a
successful conversion sends the visitor away from your site, which might seem
counterproductive. Never mind that for now; if your site provides good information
value, your visitors will come back. Later in this chapter I describe how
to keep them anchored on your page even when they click an ad.
It’s no surprise that the AdSense program is much beloved by Webmasters running
information sites, as opposed to service, subscription, or transaction sites
that generate nonadvertising revenue. Information sites are often labors of
love, having been constructed from the ground up out of passion for the subject.
When AdSense burst on the scene, these hard-working, under-rewarded
folks began experiencing Internet-derived revenue for the first time. In those
cases, AdSense is the only source of site income. More established media sites
that build AdSense into the revenue mix are sometimes surprised to find it contributing
a larger-than-expected portion of income. No matter what your site’s
focus or scope, cleanly optimized content delivers more pertinent ads and
higher clickthrough rates.
The following is an AdSense-specific checklist of optimization points:
 Have only one subject per page. Get your site fiercely organized, and
eliminate extraneous content from any page. Don’t be afraid to add pages
to accommodate short subjects that don’t fit on other pages. Let there be
no question as to what a page is about.
 Determine key concepts, words, and phrases. For each page, that is.
Then, make sure those words and phrases are represented on the page.
Pay particular attention to getting those words into headlines. Your concentration
of keywords should be skewed toward the top of the page.
Don’t go overboard; your text must read naturally or your visitors (and
Google) will know that you’re spamming them.
 Put keywords in your tags. Take those keywords and phrases from
the preceding item and put them into your meta tags (the keyword,
description, and title tags). See Chapter 4 for details. Don’t use any
word more than three times in any single tag.
 Use text instead of images. Google doesn’t understand words that are
embedded in images, such as what you often seen in navigation buttons.
(Navigation buttons and other images are important in defining the subject
of the page and the site.) Replace the buttons with text navigation
links.
Try to fulfill these points before opening an AdSense account. Ideally, your
site is in its optimized state when Google first crawls it. You don’t know how
often your site will be crawled in the future, so getting properly indexed the
first time is key.
These optimization points apply more to home-grown information sites than
to database-driven media sites, such as online editions of newspapers, where
content deployment is determined by offsite editorial determinants. An online
newspaper follows the news, not the other way around, so the topicality of a
page might be torn apart by diverse stories. But even sites that drop in their
content from offline sources (such as reporters in the field) can optimize
Chapter 13: Enhancing Your AdSense Revenue 231
232 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
their subject categories by organizing site structure along topical lines whenever
possible. Keeping to shorter pages of focused content encourages
AdSense success.
So far, I’ve discussed optimization as it applies to sites already built and operating.
Such optimization is largely about defining your subject by keywords,
and putting those keywords into the page’s content and tags. Taking the
reverse approach is also possible: developing a site around keywords that
lead to a high-revenue AdSense account. That approach, which I cover later
in the next section, is trickier. The middle ground between optimizing a built
site and building an optimized site is adding pages to an existing site without
betraying the overall topicality, primarily to enhance AdSense revenue. Keep
reading to explore both these possibilities.
Shooting for More Valuable Ads
It’s no secret: All AdSense ads are not equally valuable. The value of any ad
displayed in your ad unit depends primarily on what the advertiser bid to put
it on your page, in its position in the Ad Group. That bid is the most that the
ad can be worth to both you and Google; Google might, in fact, charge the
advertiser less, depending on mathematical considerations I describe in the
AdWords chapters. And whatever the ad is worth to you and Google combined,
it’s worth less to you alone. You don’t know the percentage of its total
value that you receive per clickthrough, and you don’t know the overall value
in dollars and cents, either. That’s a lot of not knowing. Here’s the formula:
Advertiser’s bid minus Google’s discount to the advertiser minus Google’s
portion of the revenue split
With all this subtraction, it’s amazing that AdSense pays out at all, but it does.
Some of those advertiser’s bids are sky-high (and the AdWords bid market is
inflating all the time), and Google’s split with AdSense publishers appears to
be generous. Still, AdSense publishers who keep an eagle eye on their reports
quickly learn that some clickthroughs are worth much more than others. That
means that some ads are more valuable than others. Ideally, you want the
most valuable ads to appear on your pages.
To some extent, the relative value of ads you receive is a factor out of your
control. The best you can do is optimize each page to most clearly convey its
topic and run the ads Google sends. But you can travel down two other
avenues in the quest for more valuable ads:
 Start a new site
 Create new pages optimized for more valuable ads
The first option is not a possibility for Webmasters who are not devoted fulltime
to their Internet businesses. Even if they are working full-time online,
their hands might be full with properties they already run.
I must also point out that Google discourages building a site solely as a vehicle
for AdSense, but does not outright forbid such a site. Google looks for
quality content, regardless of its motivation. If you slap up nearly blank pages
with keywords stuffed into the meta tags, and start running AdSense ads on
them, Google will likely shut you down. (That means closing your entire
AdSense account, eliminating AdSense on any legitimate properties you
might be running.)
Dire consequences notwithstanding, there isn’t much difference between
a new site designed for AdSense and a long-running site that just joined
AdSense, if both sites have substantial and worthy content. A new genre of
Web site has started to appear, optimized for valuable AdSense ads and created
to earn AdSense revenue. If the content is good, nobody is harmed by
this scenario. Visitors enjoy a positive site experience; advertisers receive
high-quality clickthroughs; the AdSense publisher builds revenue; and Google
maintains the integrity of its value chain. It’s all about content and relevancy.
Identifying high-value keywords
So, looking back at those two methods of attracting high-value ads, the point to
remember is that the processes are identical. Whether starting a new site or
spinning off new pages, pulling more valuable ads from Google is accomplished
by identifying high-value keywords and optimizing new content around those
keywords. That’s a densely packed concept, so let me unwind it:
 The value of keywords is determined by advertiser bids on those
keywords.
 High bids for certain keywords represent an advertiser’s wish for a top
position on search results pages as well as on content pages.
 Clickthroughs on ads associated with expensive keywords cost advertisers
more, and yield more to AdSense publishers, than clickthroughs on
less valuable ads.
 AdSense publishers can use a variety of tools to determine the relative
value of keywords.
 Given the same number of clickthroughs, optimizing content around
expensive keywords versus less expensive keywords leads to higher
AdSense revenue.
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234 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
For existing sites, building new content optimized around high-value keywords
is a three-step process:
1. Identify current keywords.
These keywords are the core concepts of your page(s), which might or
might not be incorporated in your meta tags and embedded in your page
text.
2. Research related keywords.
Keyword research is . . . well, key to the whole Google ad game, for
advertisers and AdSense publishers alike. Your goal is to find keywords
that advertisers are bidding up. See the tip after this list for two interactive
tools that uncover this vital bidding information.
3. Build content around high-value keywords.
Building content is easier said than done. Writing and assembling page
content that keeps visitors coming back is a long-term process. For
existing sites, the issue might be one of reorganizing existing content to
optimize pages around high-value keywords.
The two biggest providers of pay-per-click search engine advertising, Google
and Overture, both provide on-screen tools for determining the relative value
of keywords. Using Google’s Traffic Estimator is more work than using
Overture’s Bid Estimator and yields less explicit results. However, the results
are more pertinent because you’re trying to attract high-value Google ads,
not Overture ads. Successful AdSense publishers put themselves in the mindset
of an AdWords advertiser. Achieving that state of mind is best accomplished
by opening an AdWords account and using the Keyword Suggestion
Tool and the Keyword Estimator. There’s no cost or obligation in opening an
AdWords account. See Chapter 7 for complete instructions.
Making the most of AdWords tools requires a certain amount of savvy. Figure
13-1 illustrates the Traffic Estimator. You can see that certain keywords generate
more clicks per day than others, meaning they are more popular search
terms. You can also see that a relatively high cost-per-click (such as 38 cents
for the keyword ipod) yields a lower ad position than a less expensive keyword
(such as imusic). By inference, you know that ipod is a more valuable
keyword than imusic, and if you create a content page optimized for ipod it
will probably pull more valuable ads than if you optimized for imusic.
Overture provides a more direct view of comparative keyword value. Follow
these steps to view Overture bid amounts:
1. Go to the Overture site at www.overture.com.
2. In the search box, type a keyword.
3. On the search results page, click the View Advertisers’ Max Bids link,
near the upper-right corner.
The View Bids window pops open.
4. Type the security code in the provided box.
This little speed bump prevents automated access of Overture’s Max
Bids features. Entering the code assures Overture that you are a human.
5. Click the Search button.
As you can see in Figure 13-2, Overture displays its advertisers’ ads for the
keyword you entered, listed in descending order of bid amount. This remarkably
public disclosure of what companies pay for their Overture ads does not
necessarily correlate with Google bid amounts, which are probably higher.
But it does give you a basis for comparison, especially if you repeat the
process with related keywords. (You can launch a new search directly from
the results window.) A recent search revealed a top bid of 40 cents for the
keyword ipod, and no bids at all for the keyword imusic, confirming the inference
of Google’s Traffic Estimator.
Figure 13-1:
The Traffic
Estimator
in the
AdWords
account
infers the
relative
value of
keywords.
Chapter 13: Enhancing Your AdSense Revenue 235
236 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
Keyword-bid research isn’t of much value, however, if you can’t think of
related keywords. Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool (in the AdWords
account) creates spectacular lists of related keywords, and is free to use
after opening an AdWords account. Overture provides a similar service, at
this URL:
inventory.overture.com
Figure 13-3 illustrates the results of Overture’s Search Term Suggestion Tool.
Notice that in addition to spitting out a list of related terms, Overture divulges
the search count for each term and presents the list in order of search term
popularity.
Wordtracker is another popular keyword suggestion tool, with added features
that calculate how popular the keywords are as search terms in various
search engines. The service is located here:
www.wordtracker.com
Wordtracker does not attempt to gauge bid value. The service is used by
advertisers and site optimizers to target subject niches. I discuss Wordtracker
comprehensively in Chapter 3.
Figure 13-2:
Overture
divulges its
inventory of
ads for
search
terms and
the amount
the advertiser
bid
for that
keyword.
Conceiving and building high-value
AdSense pages
After you’ve identified high-value keywords, you need to find ways of extending
your content to those key concepts without damaging or diluting your
site’s focus. If you operate a directory of bed-and-breakfast establishments,
for example, you don’t want to spin off pages about iPods just because of
their high keyword value. You might want to start an entirely new site about
iPods and digital music, but that’s a big project. The goal here is not mindless
opportunism. The goal is content management that leverages the best keyword
value that can legitimately be applied to your site.
Although it’s valuable to think like an AdWords advertiser and use the
AdWords tools, remember that your priorities are the opposite of the
advertiser’s priorities in one respect. The advertiser seeks niche categories
represented by highly targeted keywords over which there is little bidding
competition. The ideal keyword is used as a search term by a specific demographic
of searchers and has been overlooked by other advertisers. The
AdSense publisher, conversely, seeks broad categories represented by highdemand
keywords over which there is a great deal of competition. The ideal
keyword is both hugely popular as a search term and in demand by other
Figure 13-3:
Overture
offers
related
keywords
and their
popularity
as search
terms,
which
implies
relative
value.
Chapter 13: Enhancing Your AdSense Revenue 237
238 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
advertisers. The advertiser’s pain (high bid expenses to hit the desired
market) is your gain (high clickthrough revenue).
Creating higher-value pages from an existing site is often a matter of generalizing
from the specific. Returning to the bed-and-breakfast directory, whose
pages might naturally be optimized for the keyword phrase bed and breakfast,
the Webmaster could realize that hotel is a more valuable keyword. In
Overture, bed and breakfast draws a high bid of $0.35, while hotel enjoys
stronger demand with a high bid of $1.04. These numbers don’t speak for the
bid amounts in Google AdWords, but what does it matter? The Webmaster
never knows the absolute value of any ad on the page; only relative value
matters. With this awareness, the Webmaster might create a page optimized
in part for hotel.
High value is not necessarily the point. Capturing previously disregarded
value is also important. As an AdSense publisher, look at all your pages. If
you see the same ads on many of them, Google is perceiving your pages as
similarly optimized. There’s nothing wrong with topical consistency across
the site, but from an AdSense perspective that consistency is inefficient. Ad
replication can work for you and against you. Multiple impressions can
impose awareness of the ad on your visitors, motivating clicks that might not
occur with single impressions. At the same time, you risk annoying visitors
with repeated ads and encouraging “ad blindness,” in which visitors reflexively
block out ad displays. At the very least, you’re losing revenue by not
exploiting ads that would be drawn to topical pages related to, but different
from, your main pages. Continue adding content pages, with an eye to distinguishing
their keyword optimizations.
Improving Clickthrough Rates
Whatever your site’s level of traffic, clickthrough rate (CTR) is the determinant
of AdSense success. All AdSense Webmasters should monitor the clickthrough
rate in the account performance chart and watch its fluctuations.
Divulging any site’s CTR is a violation of Google’s terms of service, so a discussion
of specifics is out of bounds here. Shooting for a standard of excellence
isn’t the point in AdSense; improving CTR and maintaining that level is.
Remember, do not raise your CTR artificially. This is serious business; Google
will close accounts if it detects CTR mischief. Artificial clickthroughs mean
wasted advertiser money and the destruction of value in the AdWords program,
over which Google is fiercely protective. Playing it safe is the only way,
so avoid these three false types of clickthrough:
 Clicking your own ads
 Telling friends to visit your site and click ads
 Promoting ad clicks on your Web page
Fortunately, you can try a number of legitimate tactics to raise your CTR.
Experimentation is key. The only way to know what works for your site is to
try both sides of a strategy. The more traffic your site attracts, the more
quickly you can evaluate your CTR experiments.
Placing ads above the fold
You are concerned with the highest fold point. The lower the screen resolution,
the higher the fold point. Visitors running a monitor resolution of 640 x
480 pixels see very little of your page without scrolling. Most Webmasters no
longer design for 640 x 480 viewing, but 800 x 600 is widely in use, and that
resolution, too, has a high fold point. If you normally view your site with
higher resolutions, the advice here is to drop down to lower rez and see
where your ad units appear.
Horizontal ad layouts are far easier to squeeze above the fold than vertical
layouts that stretch down the page. (See Figure 13-4.) Some AdSense veterans
recommend against horizontal layouts for reasons I discuss a bit later. If you
choose a skyscraper ad unit, running down the page vertically, try to place
the first ad, at least, above the fold (see Figure 13-5).
Figure 13-4:
Believe it or
not, this
page is
running
AdSense
ads. The ad
unit is below
the fold of
an 800 x 600
screen.
Chapter 13: Enhancing Your AdSense Revenue 239
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Choosing your pages
Leaving behind the fold issue, another consideration is which pages should host
your ads. There is logic to thinking that you might as well code ads into every
page of your site. Indeed, if you use templates that establish the unchanging
elements of all your pages, it might be difficult to keep ads off individual pages.
But two tactics for enhancing your AdSense presentation come to mind.
First, consider eliminating ads from your index page — the first page of your
site. The rationale here is that an ad-free opening page welcomes your visitors
and won’t get their defenses up. The phenomenon of ad blindness can be
instilled on the home page and persist as the visitor moves through the site.
Eliminating ads from the index page makes your ad units stand out more in
the inner pages.
Ad-free index pages don’t work for all sites. If your index page is the highestranked
entry page and exit page, the index page is your main chance to generate
clickthroughs; if visitors exit the site from that page anyway, you might
as well lure them into exiting through your ads. Check your traffic logs.
Figure 13-5:
A vertical ad
layout,
pushed high
up on the
page, where
two full ads
are visible
above the
800 x 600
fold.
Now look at the Infoplease.com site, shown in Figure 13-5. That figure illustrates
one of the main inner pages of the infoplease domain. If you visit infoplease.
com, you see that the home page doesn’t run AdSense ads, though it
does sprout display banners and pop-ups. While not presenting an ad-free
environment by a long shot, the busy index page prepares visitors for the
quieter presentation of AdSense ads displayed on the inner pages.
Another strategy of great interest and potential is to limit ad displays
to boring and post-conversion pages of the site. Boring pages? Is it blasphemy
to suppose anyone’s pages are boring? Not at all. By “boring,” I
mean lacking in substantive content. Registration confirmation pages, for
example, contain little information. The same is true of post-download
pages. These pages represent lulls in the site experience during which the
visitor might be attracted to an AdSense ad as the most interesting content
on the page. Since many of these “boring” pages are presented after the
visitor has been converted in some way (signing up for a newsletter, for
example, or registering at the site), getting a clickthrough at that point is
icing on the cake, turning otherwise useless pages into revenue earners.
See the sidebar titled “An experiment with exit pages” for a real-life success
story using this strategy.
Chapter 13: Enhancing Your AdSense Revenue 241
An experiment with exit pages
Manuel Lemos operates an information and filedownload
site at www.phpclasses.org
focused on the PHP programming language. He
is an AdSense publisher. In trying to juice up his
clickthrough rate, Lemos experimented with a
placement strategy using primarily exit pages.
This is his account: “I formulated a thesis that
stated that if, on interesting content pages the
users tend to ignore the ads, the ads would be
more efficient on pages that would be less interesting.
To test the thesis, I figured that the less
interesting pages would be the exit pages. A
quick look at my site statistics showed me that
typical exit pages are the download pages. The
user’s tendency is to come to the site, check the
new components, and download them if they
are interesting. So I created new pages with
statistics of the files being downloaded and
placed ad units on them.
“The thesis turned out to be correct. These
pages have typical clickthrough rates that are
three or four times greater than content pages.
Users usually wait some time to download the
files, and while waiting they stare at the page a
bit. When the downloads end, users usually
leave the site because they got what they
wanted. At that time, they often click on the ads
on the page.”
242 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
Fighting ad blindness
Ad blindness affects content providers in all media. I read The New Yorker
magazine, and occasionally I’m startled to realize that the outer borders are
filled with ads that I block out of my perception. Television, of course, suffers
badly from not only ad blindness but ad walkaway and ad skipthrough, both
of which are a sort of self-enforced blindness. On the Internet, banners at the
top and sides of pages have accustomed the online citizenry to advertising
and created an immunity to it.
AdSense ads enjoy a threefold advantage over banner advertising that helps
them overcome ad blindness:
 Text ads look different than banners.
 Google ads are more relevant to the page’s content than most banner ads.
 Google ad colors can be customized to blend in with the page, appearing
almost as part of the editorial content.
Despite these advantages, visitors can get used to your ads and stop noticing
them. In a way, Google contributes to the problem by conditioning a huge percentage
of the online population to AdWords ads in Google. No doubt many
Google searchers contract AdWords blindness. On the other hand, Google has
also enlightened the Internet citizenry to the possibility and potential of highly
relevant advertising that doesn’t flash, pop up, or balloon across the page.
Searchers who have discovered good experiences clicking AdWords ads in
Google are likely to extend the expectation of a good experience when they see
AdWords ads on your page.
Four factors affect the ad blindness quotient of your site:
 Display location
 Color coordination
 Repeating ads
 Ad layout type
My purpose here is not to make hard-and-fast recommendations about where
your ads appear, what colors you use, or which ad layout is best. Opinions in
the AdSense community vary on these questions. I do think it’s important to
be aware of the factors under your control and to experiment. I also make the
following general recommendation regarding ad blindness: Don’t get into a
rut. Many AdSense publishers find that their clickthrough rate degrades over
time. If traffic remains steady, this distressing CTR phenomenon can easily be
attributed to visitors getting so used to your ads that they simply don’t see
them. When this seems to be the case, the antidote is to shake up your
AdSense presentation with new locations, new colors, new layout types, and
(this is more difficult) new ads.
In the previous two sections I discuss display location in a few respects:
placing ads above the fold, omitting ads from the index page, and concentrating
ads on exit pages. Although those sections are not presented in
the context of ad blindness, the location of ads certainly is part of the
problem. Now I want to move on to issues of layout type and customized
colors.
Fighting ad blindness with the right ad layout
In this section and the next, we move into the realm of subjectivity. No fast
rules apply to ad layout. You must balance two considerations, which don’t
always agree:
 What looks best in your page design
 What works best in your page design
By “what works best,” I mean what delivers the best clickthrough rate.Google
gives you four basic ad layout choices:
 Horizontal: Leaderboard and banner (see Figure 13-6)
 Vertical: Skyscrapers, also called towers
 Button: Two styles containing one ad each
 Inline: More rectangular than horizontals and verticals (see Figure 13-7)
Note that despite terminology that includes the words “banner” and “button,”
both of which imply graphic ads, all Google ad layouts contain identically formatted
text ads. Check out all available layout formats here:
www.google.com/adsense/adformats
One school of thought believes that leaderboard and banner layouts should
be avoided, because the Web’s history of banner advertising has blinded visitors
to the horizontal format. Also, Google uses vertical layouts for the most
part on its pages, acclimating users to seeing AdWords displayed in a tower
format. Thus, deviating from established success is risky. Arguing against
that viewpoint is the mandate to place ads high on the page, which is easier
to do with a horizontal layout.
Google’s ad layouts use inflexible dimensions and can stretch your table cells
to an accommodating size. This factor is a special issue with the leaderboard
horizontal layout, which is 728 pixels wide. Placing that wide unit into a narrower
table cell can widen the entire table beyond its original dimensions.
Such enlargement can be a problem for pages optimized for unscrolled viewing
at the 800 x 600 resolution.
Chapter 13: Enhancing Your AdSense Revenue 243
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Figure 13-7:
The inline
rectangle ad
layouts are
meant to be
inserted
in a block
of text.
Figure 13-6:
Google
provides ten
preset
horizontal
and vertical
ad layouts,
some of
which are
shown here.
You must discover through trial and error whether vertical or horizontal
layout works best for you. Consensus is evenly divided on the matter. Design
considerations play a part in the decision; if you don’t have free sidebar
space for a tower above the fold, you might feel forced into a leaderboard or
banner. The rectangular inline layouts work well in wide blocks of text; the
text flows around the ads. (See Figure 13-8.)
The two button options provided by Google are new layout choices, and
interesting ones. (By publication time, these single-ad buttons were not in
wide use.) Their advantage is clear: Such a small layout footprint is easy to
position all over the page. Their disadvantage is likewise obvious: With only
one ad to click, you reduce clickthrough opportunities. On the other hand,
people don’t always respond well to multiple choices, so a single, pointed
advertisement might work well in your user demographic. Are you getting
the idea that AdSense success is more art than science? Actually, in the true
spirit of science, AdSense responds to experimentation.
In the quest to reduce ad blindness, variety is key. Run different layouts
on different pages, and change each page’s layout from time to time. Track
performance in your AdSense account, and shake things up when your CTR
drops.
Figure 13-8:
Wide text
wraps
around
inline
rectangles.
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Fighting ad blindness with the right colors
Just as ad layout issues split opinion in the AdSense publishing community, so
does custom coloring of the ad unit. Many Webmasters simply don’t bother
with the detailed HTML tweaking necessary to fully integrate an ad unit into
the look-and-feel of the host page. Others deliberately let their ad units stand
out garishly on the page, to attract attention and defeat ad blindness. (Whether
garish ad displays defeat or encourage ad blindness is debatable.) And a small
minority of Webmasters carefully insinuate their ad units into the page design
until they are nearly indistinguishable from editorial content.
You have three basic customization choices:
 Don’t do anything. This is the choice of many Webmasters, and you see
a lot of the default Mother Earth palette in the AdSense network. (See
Figure 13-9.)
 Create custom palettes in the AdSense account. I describe how to do
this in Chapter 12.
 Fine-tune colors using HTML hex values. This option integrates ad units
into pages with complex designs or pages using background colors not
found in Google’s custom palette section.
Figure 13-9:
Many Webmasters
use the
default
color
palette.
Here, blue
ads contrast
with a redthemed
page.
Changing the colors of the ad unit is an acceptable alteration of the code, but
no other tweaking is allowed. Do not squash the ads, enlarge them, or attempt
to change the dimensions of the ad unit. Doing so violates the AdSense terms
of service.
To fully customize your ad unit colors, you need a reference source of hex
codes, which are six-digit numbers that pinpoint colors in HTML code. All
browsers understand hex code. If you use a WYSIWYG (what you see is what
you get) page builder, you can probably check the hex codes of the colors
on your page by looking at the HTML view of that page. When customizing
Google ad units, finding the page’s background color is especially important.
You can also use an online chart such as the one located here:
hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/reference/color_codes/
Each customized hex code is plugged into one of five lines of the Google
AdSense code. Here is an example of those five lines:
google_color_border = “25314C”;
google_color_bg = “25314C”;
google_color_link = “FFFFCC”;
google_color_url = “008000”;
google_color_text = “999999”;
You can recognize these color lines by the word color in each of them; that
word doesn’t appear anywhere else in the AdSense code. When you create a
custom palette in your AdSense account, Google fills in those lines with hex
code. Here, you’re manually changing the hex code to better match your page
design. Note that each line corresponds to a different element of the ad unit.
You can customize five elements:
 border refers to the bottom bar and thin border extending around the
ad unit
 bg refers to the background color of the ad unit
 link refers to the ad’s headline, which is linked to the destination URL
 url refers to the display URL below the ad text
 text refers to the one- or two-line (depending on the display) ad text
In my experience, altering the border and bg elements makes the biggest difference
when integrating ad colors with page colors. If you match both those
colors to the page’s background color, the ad unit seems to sink into the page.
Figure 13-10 illustrates a page displaying the AdSense banner layout, displayed
with the default Mother Earth colors. The border is light blue against the
page’s dark blue, and the ad background is white (although you can’t see this
in the grayscale screen shot). The ad unit stands out boldly against the page.
Chapter 13: Enhancing Your AdSense Revenue 247
248 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
Figure 13-11 shows the same page with customized ad colors; the border and
background elements now match the page’s background color. The ad colors
in Figure 13-11 match the code in the example; the background color’s hex
code is 25314C. I altered the other elements too, but they don’t matter as
much. Making the border and background disappear into the page creates
the important effect.
Be creative! If you combine customized colors with a specially prepared table
cell, you can construct an ad display that blends in (and even enhances) your
page’s look-and-feel, while subtly calling attention to the ads. Figure 13-12
shows such a page; the ad unit sits in a specially built table cell with complementary
colors. The ad’s headline color matches the background color of the
column below, and the background color exactly matches the overall black
background of the page.
The question remains: Do slickly customized ad units work as well as uncustomized
units? That question can be answered only by experimentation on a
site-by-site basis. If your site pulls extremely relevant ads, and your visitors
respond to ads best when they seem to blend into editorial content, customize
away. If you prefer grabbing your visitors’ attention forcefully, perhaps the
ugliest possible ad display works best for you.
Figure 13-10:
Uncustomized
ad units
stand out
boldly from
the page.
Figure 13-12:
The ad unit
blends into
the page
yet looks
distinctive,
thanks to
color management
and a
special
table cell.
Figure 13-11:
A customized
ad
unit, with
border and
background
colors
matching
the page’s
background,
seems
to sink into
the page.
Chapter 13: Enhancing Your AdSense Revenue 249
250 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
Don’t be afraid to mix customized ad units with uncustomized units on the
same site. (Only one ad unit per page, of course, per the AdSense terms of
service.) Remember, part of defeating ad blindness is surprising your visitors’
expectations.
When CTR doesn’t matter
Some AdSense publishers don’t give a hoot about
CTR. To them, it’s all about total revenue. This
approach works well when the Webmaster adds
new pages regularly. If the CTR slips downward,
the deficit is made up by higher click volume.
Rob Arnold, Webmaster of www.linear1.
org, shares his experience:
“AdSense complements my content well. My
readers clearly find it useful; the clickthrough
rates reflect that. I had a significant body of text
to begin with, and coherent navigation and layout.
If you’re starting up a site you’ll need a few
hundred thousand words of content, organized
coherently, to achieve good results. I also spent
a short time in the early stages investigating the
impact of ad placement and color changes. But
what has proven to be the most effective use of
my time is producing quality content. If you can
add a page a day of quality content to your site,
that can matter more than tweaking your ad
layout or positioning.”
Rob Arnold’s total AdSense presentation includes
highly color-coordinated palettes and abovethe-
fold leaderboards, as shown in the figure.
Custom colors can make ad units blend into the
page as if they were part of the editorial content.
Filtering Ads
Understandably, you might not want to display AdWords ads from your competitors.
If you and your competitors operate information sites, the competition
doesn’t matter as much — if a visitor clicks away from you to a competing
site, you gain a bit of income without losing a sale. But if you sell products
through your site, losing a sale for a clickthrough might not be good business.
In that case, consider blocking your competitors’ URLs. This type of filtering
targets the destination URL of an AdWords ad, not the display URL. You have
two basic methods at your disposal:
 Make a list of your known competitors, and filter out their home-page
URLs.
 Systematically check the destination URLs of ads that appear on your
pages, and keep adding competing URLs to your filter list.
Your best bet might be to combine the two methods: Start with a known list
of competing URLs, and then keep your eye out for others.
When it comes to the easiest way of determining the destination URLs
of any ad unit, disregard the complicated procedure provided in the
AdSense Help section. Instead, just click the Ads by Google link at the
edge of any ad unit. (You can do this on any AdSense page, not just your
own.) A new browser window pops up with an explanation of AdWords
that includes the URLs of the specific ad unit you clicked, as shown in
Figure 13-13.
However you come up with your list — through your own knowledge of competitors
or by vigilantly watching your ads and clicking Ads by Google — use
the URL filter page in your AdSense account to maintain your list of blocked
URLs. Follow these steps:
1. In your AdSense account, click the Settings tab.
2. Click the URL filter link.
3. Click the Add/Edit sites button.
4. Type URLs into the box, one per line.
As shown in Figure 13-14, you add the URLs of sites whose ads you want
to block from your site.
5. Click the Save changes button.
New filters should take effect within a few hours of adding them to
your list.
Chapter 13: Enhancing Your AdSense Revenue 251
Figure 13-14:
Add URLs of
sites whose
AdWords
ads you do
not want
appearing
on your
pages.
Figure 13-13:
You can see
the destination
URLs
of specific
ad units.
252 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
When adding site URLs to your list, you can block the entire site by eliminating
the www. prefix. Using the www. prefix tells Google to block that distinct
page location, which is usually the index page of the filtered site. In that case,
AdWords ads that point to an inner page as the destination URL can still be
displayed on your sites.
Using Alternate Ads
In rare cases, Google can’t deliver ads to an AdSense page. You might want to
signify a stand-by ad source, or even a noncommercial image, to slip into the
spot normally occupied by Google’s ad unit. You may indicate that alternate
source at any time in the AdSense account. Here’s how:
1. In the AdSense account, click the Setting tab.
2. Click the Ad layout code link.
3. Scroll down to the Alternate Ads box, and enter the http:// destination
of your alternate ad or image source.
4. Click the Update code button.
5. Copy and paste Google’s updated script into your HTML document.
Even though the Alternate Ads box is located on the Ad Layout Code page,
along with choices of ad layout and palette, this setting has nothing to do with
the ad layout or palette. But you must make the settings of the Ad Layout Code
page conform to the ad settings used on your site page, so that the appearance
of your ad units doesn’t change when you paste the new code into your page.