How To Get More Money From Your Google AdSense Ads
Over the past few years I have experimented with Google AdSense ad placement. Google themselves actually gives you a heat map that shows how visitors interact with your website. This is helpful in many ways and helps describe user patterns. Judging from what the heat map shows, Ad blocks in the left sidebar, And the top do very well. I myself use The three allowed ad blocks and place them both left and right sidebar and top content.
Matching Ad colors To Your Blog
I have varied the types of ads in these locations from text only to text and image ads. I find that for my blog the left sidebar ad block is usually all text. The top content ad block is also usually text only and I vary the colors of the top block and see which does the best. In my tests I have found that all-black ads in this location do well. The left sidebar is usually Google default and colors. I do however change the background color to match the blog template. I usually put the ad blocks in a widget and if the widget color is anything other than white you should match the ad background color exactly to the blog. The hexadecimal code can be matched using color picker. This is a free tool that I use to hover my mouse pointer over the background color and copy the hexadecimal code to the Google ad block. This matches the ad block exactly to the blog template.
Blending Your Ads
Having your ads blend into the blog makes it more appealing to the visitor. You can experiment with different styles or colors of the text in the ad. I have tried using blue title, and all the rest of the text being black. This usually works pretty well and makes the ad look like a navigation link within your blog. Blending your background in your ad requires two changes,you must change the border and the background color to the same hexadecimal code. Another tip is to make the solid block that is showed if no ads are available to be the exact same hexadecimal code. We don’t want blank spaces where ads should be, but if it does happen to you then having it match the blog is better than a great big white block showing.
On the top right sidebar I haven’t experimented with image only ads and a combination of text and image ads. These have mixed results and it depends on your blog layout, template style, and color scheme. Some of these stick out like a sore thumb and they won’t get many clicks. It all depends on the content of your blog and what advertisers are available to fit your niche and your content.
Using Plug-Ins To Display Your Google AdSense
There are lots of plug-ins that will serve your Google AdSense ad’s. I use WP insert and it seemed to do pretty well. At the current time the only ad block being served by this plug-in is the top content ad block. The other ad blocks are being served up via widgets. You can just add the code to a text block and save it in the widget location that you want to show the ad. You have less control this way on where the ads show. WP insert has more control and you can disallow ads to show on certain pages of your blog.