Changing the Look of Your Ads

Tweaking your ads so that they blend into the page and look like content begins with altering their appearance. While you can’t hack into the code itself, Google does provide AdSense publishers with a range of options to change the way an ad unit appears.

In addition to the format, you can change the colors used in the ad; the fonts chosen for the text; and the corner styles of the AdSense unit. The general principle is always to match the characteristics of the ad unit
with the characteristics of the Web page on which the ad unit will appear.



Using Colors To Increase Your Clicks

Log in to your AdSense account, click the AdSense Setup tab, select Get Ads from the menu, and you’ll be offered a page load of options. You can choose to see each of these options one at a time using the “Wizard” or you can go through them all on a single page. I find that a single page lets me see everything at once but it makes little practical difference. If you’re using the new interface, which is Google is currently rolling out, you just have to click the My Ads tab, followed by New Unit.

To create an AdSense for Content unit, you’ll first have to choose between an ad unit and a link unit, and — if you choose an ad unit — whether you want both text and image ads, just text ads or just image/rich media ads. Once you’ve made your choice (just text ads is a good place to begin) you’ll have to pick a format. This is a whole issue in itself which I’ll discuss in Chapter 5, but it will depends on where you’re planning to put the ad. In general though, big is good.

You’ll then choose your color palette. An AdSense unit has five elements whose colors can be changed: the border; the title; the background; the text; and the URL.

When it comes to the border, the basic principle is simple:

Make the border disappear!

I’ve found that this one simple tweak can more than double clickthroughs! 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.

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.

Match the color of your ad unit’s border with the background color of your web page.

When the border matches the background, it disappears. The page instantly looks neater and the ads appear more inviting.

Disclaimer

This Blog is to guide the new Adsense user as well as all other users with different type of tips and solutions so that you don't face any problem with Adsense. The main thing about this blog is that the tips given here are taken from those Adsense Experts who are earning Thousands of Dollar with Adsense. In this blog you will find many tips taken from Joel Comm's Adsense Secrets 5.

If you follow this blog you can also Earn more with adsense because all the tips written very easily to understand.

If any one find any metrical in this blog that violates something then tell us. We will take action surely.

Thank You.

The Goal of AdSense Optimization

AdSense optimization — the practice of maximizing AdSense clicks and revenues — has a golden rule:
Don’t let your AdSense units look like ads! 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, they’ll be easy to recognize as ads — and people will work extra hard to avoid them. Today's visitors are blind to banners, block pop-ups, weary of ads and skeptical of contests and giveaways.

They know what an ad looks like, andthey know how to look away. If you want to win clicks, the ads that Google delivers have to look likean integral part of your content.

It’s a straightforward policy but it’s not as easy as it sounds. If it were, there wouldn't be so many grumpy people on AdSense forums complaining about
their low earnings.

It's not that they aren't doing anything about it. They simply aren't doing the
right things.

Let me assure you that in the time that I have been using AdSense, my earnings have only gone up — and so will yours, if you apply the right techniques seriously.

How To Tweak Your Ads To Make Them Click! — The Principles of Optimization

The choice of AdSense formats can be overwhelming. Many people let Google decide for them, preferring to stick with the default settings that AdSense provides.

Big mistake!

From my own experience I can tell you that’s like swapping a hundred-dollar bill for a ten-dollar note. For almost a year I settled for just a tenth of what I could have been making just because I didn’t bother to control the look and placement of my AdSense units.

The various ad formats, colors and locations on the Web page can make up thousands of different combinations. You can literally spend hours every day experimenting with every possible combination. But you don’t want to, do you?

In this chapter I’m going to explain the formatting rules and techniques that have sky-rocketed the CTRs on my top-grossing pages. Ultimately, there are three ways to increase your AdSense revenue.

1. Tweak the Ads
Even small changes to the appearance of your AdSense units can have a dramatic effect on the clickthrough rate;

2. Optimize your Website
The context in which the ads appear is important too. What Google calls 'content relevance' will affect the kinds of ads you receive, and the value of the clicks on those ads.

3. Track Visitor Response
If you don't know what works (and what doesn't work) in trying to increase your AdSense revenue, you're shooting arrows in the dark! Analyzing your stats can reveal a great deal about your visitors and
answer fundamental questions such as what they're looking for and what makes them click. Once you've figured that out, you're on your way to big AdSense bucks!

AdSense for Video

Most publishers though aren’t going to be using AdSense for Games, and even fewer will be using AdSense for Video. Back in 2007, Google did allow publishers to place YouTube videos on their websites and split the ad revenues with the company and with the video maker. It was never a great program and a year later it was retired.

Now if you want to place AdSense on your video content, you’ll need a minimum of 10 million streams every month. If that’s you, you can enjoy those revenues. Otherwise you’re likely to be using primarily AdSense for Content and AdSense for Search, and perhaps AdSense for Mobile too.

If you do want to earn advertising revenues from video content, you can either place the videos on an AdSense supported site (with enough text to trigger ads) or use another service such as Revver.com to earn from the ads.

One the whole though, video tends to be more useful as a form of promotion than a way of generating advertising revenue.

AdSense is simple… in principle. Ads go in, ads come out. Optimize the ads correctly and you’ll generate clicks. But the range of different ad types can be confusing. With so much choice, it’s very easy to put the wrong ads in the wrong places and end up with less income than your site can generate.

That’s the mistake that many new publishers make. It was certainly the mistake that I made when I first started using AdSense.

That’s why it’s important to know about all of the different AdSense products and each of the formats and flavors in which AdSense can be served. Even if you don’t use them all — and I doubt if any publisher gets to use all of the different kinds of AdSense units — you should be aware of all the tools that
you have at your disposal.

And then you need to know how to use them. You have to know which units to use when, how to tweak them for best effect and what to do with them to maximize your earnings.

How much you earn from those will depend on how successfully you optimize
those units.

AdSense for Mobile Content

While RSS Readers are falling, a new trend is rising: the ability to consume online content on mobile phones. That isn’t entirely new. Mobile phone owners have long been able to surf the Web using WAP but it was expensive and slow, and few people were desperate enough for online content to do it.

Most users, except perhaps in Japan, were happy to wait until they got home to go online. Google offered AdSense units that fitted WAP content but few publishers saw serious returns with it.

Smartphones with big screens, like the iPhone, have changed all that.It’s now possible to surf the Web comfortably, from anywhere, and using a screen small enough to fit into the palm of your hand. In fact, according to one survey, owners of iPhones and iPod Touches now spend more time online with their mobile devices than they do in front of their PCs and Macs.

That’s a real challenge for Google — and for Google’s publishers. Google isrising to that challenge. Publishers need to, as well. AdSense for Mobile Content now places an AdSense unit optimized for mobile
phones on Web pages viewed on high-end devices like iPhones.

 You get one ad that appears at the top of the page, but you can choose from a wider range of sizes than before, and even include graphic ads if you want. (As Apple’s own iAds catch on, that might be a good idea. If users come to expect graphic ads on mobile devices to be that immersive, even simple AdSense image units may benefit from curious clicks.)

The implementation is simple, but you don’t need to do it. Google says that it’s capable of detecting when its ads are being served on high-end mobile devices and returning a large ad automatically. It’s also worth noting that in addition to AdSense for Mobile Content, Google also puts ads on mobile applications. That’s not done with AdSense though but through AdMob, a mobile advertising platform that Google bought in May 2010.

 Its main competitor is now Apple’s own iAds system. Advertising on mobile platforms is becoming a hot business and it’s something that AdSense publishers do need to learn about.

AdSense for Domains

All of the different forms of AdSense for Content have one thing in common. They rely on the presence of content. Google reads the text on the page and matches the subject to the ads. 

AdSense for Domains is unique in that it requires that a site contains no content at all. Targeting is done through a combination of keywords submitted by the developer and the search terms used to reach the site. Instead of content, when users arrive at the site, they see a page of sponsored listings. 

The product is intended for use on parked domains — websites that have yet to be developed. Instead of seeing a sign saying “page under construction” or a 404 error message, they get the chance to continue surfing and the publisher gets a chance to win some advertising clicks. 

But not many advertising clicks. A site that has no content is unlikely to have much in the way of traffic. Any visitors that do stop by will either come from users typing the URL directly into the browser or from people following old links to content on a site that no longer exists. If you’re lucky, you might just manage to generate the ten dollars or so a year it costs to keep the name registered.

You might increase that income by playing with the keywords, choosing related terms that have a low search volume, for example. But you’re not allowed to develop links or try to promote the empty site in any way. 

If you try to build content to attract visitors then you’ll need to use AdSense for Content instead of AdSense for Domains. AdSense for Domains is useful if you have a domain waiting to be developed or sold but don’t expect it to do more than contribute to the name registration fee.