Google Adsense Tips, Tricks, and Secrets

You can build your website around general topics or niche ones. Generally speaking niche websites work better with ad-sense. First off the ad targeting is much better. Secondly as you have a narrow focus your writing naturally becomes more expert in nature. Hopefully, this makes you more authority in your field.
If this is your first try at building an ad-sense website, make it about something you enjoy. It will make the process much easier and less painful to accomplish. You should however make sure that your topic has enough of an ad inventory and the payout is at a level you are comfortable with. You may love folk dancing, but the pool of advertisers for that subject is very small.
Everyone wants ads on their website that make $37 or more a click, however the number of advertisers who are willing to pay that much is pretty limited.

New Sites, Files and Maintenance:

When you’re building a new site don’t put ad-sense on it until it’s finished. In fact I’d go even farther and say don’t put ad-sense on it until you have built inbound links and started getting traffic. If you put up a website with “morel gypsum” dummy or placeholder text, your ad-sense ads will almost certainly be off topic. This is often true for new files on existing websites, especially if the topic is new or different. 


TIP: If you start getting lots of traffic from a variety of (IP’s) you will speed this process up dramatically.

I put the header, footer and navigation in common files. It makes it much easier to maintain and manage. I also like to put my ad-sense code in include files. If I want/need to change my ad-sense code, it’s only one file I have to work with.

TIP: I also use programming to turn the ad sense on or off. I can change one global variable to true or false and my ad-sense ads will appear or disappear.

Managing URL’s and channels:

Ad-sense channels is one area where it’s really easy to go overboard with stats. You can set up URL channels to compare how one website is doing to another. You can also set up sub channels for each URL. If you wanted to you do something channels like:

• domain1.com – 728 banner.
• domain1.com – 336 block.
• domain1.com – text link.
• domain2.com – 728 banner.
• domain2.com – image banner.
• domain2.com – 336 block.
• domain3.com – 300 block.

This is great for testing and knowing who clicks where and why, it makes your reporting a little wonky. Your total number will always be correct but when you look at your reports with a channel break down things will get displayed multiple times and not add up to correct total.

TIP: At the very least you want to know what URL is generating the income so be sure to enter distinct URL channels.

Site Design and Integration:

Once you know you are going to put ad-sense on your website you’re going to have to consider where to put it. While every website is different, Google has published some heat maps showing the optimal locations. No surprise that the best spots are middle of the page and left hand side. Now I’ve done really well by placing it on the right, but you should know why you’re doing it that way before hand, and be prepared to change it if it doesn’t work out.
Google has also has published a list of the highest performing ad sizes:

• (336×280) large rectangle.
• (300×250) inline rectangle.
• (160×600) wide skyscraper.

TIP: When working on a new site or new layout you may want to give each location it’s own channel for a little while until you understand the users behavior.

Another (Way) OR ‘trick’ that can increase your CTR is by blending your ad-sense into your body copy. 

TIP: Try changing all of your page hyperlinks to a high contrast color (like dark red or a bold blue) then change the ad-sense title to the same color.