How To Make The Most Of Google Adsense

Google Adsense is the reason behind the increasingly enthusiastic interest shown in blogging and website development in the past few years. Since Adsense catapulted itself into the market, people have realized that making money on the internet is not only possible, but also easy and generally feasible.  Adsense allows you to design and incorporate advertisements on your website or weblog, thereby allowing you, as the owner of the said website or weblog, to make money out of it.

Not everyone, however, is making the most of Google this. For every massive success story, like this, there is nothing short of an ocean of failures. The fact is, most people really never get past making a few dollars with Adsense. Why? Because people seem to over complicate things, which is typical when you take a look at the society we live in today. Sometimes it pays to look at the fundamentals – so here it goes!

Place your ads right where visitors can see them.. Right? Wrong

When it comes to placing ads, you have to be careful not to be too obtrusive on the reader’s area of interest. In my experience, placing Adsense in areas in which the visitor is about to leave your website (like the footer) has worked for me. The problem in allocating prime real estate to Adense is that your competitors websites are typically displayed before the user has an opportunity to browse your site. From experience, this has been a terrible in terms of retaining visitors.

You want people to have an opportunity to browse through your website in the hope that they may become regular readers. You should be seeking to create a loyal visitor base, and subsequently profit off them when they’re ready to leave by providing them with a list of relevant websites in the form of Adsense ads. If for example you own a website based on fitness, your Adsense ads should be geared towards something like sporting goods, nutritional supplements and/or gym equipment. Please do keep in mind that this is really a long term thing, and will probably deflate your short term earnings but simultaneously allow you to hold onto more visitors and therefore increase your long term profits.

This draws me to my next point.

Use section targeting for relevant ads

A common mistake many webmasters make is opting for higher paying ads which bear little to no relevance to their site content. Section targeting is absolutely fantastic in ensuring the ads displayed on your site are in fact relevant and naturally attract a higher click through rate. There’s really no point wasting space in this post by rewriting what Google have already published. You can find Google’s explanation on setting up section targeting here.

There are a few points to consider when using section targeting.

• You should be focusing only on relevant content, and should therefore exclude sidebars, footers, etc..
• Google encourages targeting larger chunks of content in contrast to isolated paragraphs.
• According to Google, it is acceptable to use multiple sets of tags on any page.

Integrate the ads effectively into your website

There are two ways of integrating Adsense into your website – through design, and through ofcourse Google Analytics.

Integrating your ads into your design seems like such a simple tip, yet the amount of websites that attempt to ensure their Adsense ads are a completely different colour to their overall theme is simply staggering. Once again referring to experience with previous projects, implementing an integrated ad into your website typically yields more favourable results.

You don’t want to create the impression that the ads are in fact ads, but rather a list of helpful and related websites designed to ensure the visitors receives maximum value from your site.

The ease behind integrating Adsense and Google Analytics is absolutely fantastic, and a definite must for any webmaster interested in simply tracking what works and what doesn’t. Without being able to do so, you’re not just restricting yourself, but also setting yourself up for failure. You need to be able to adapt to the rapid changes of the internet, otherwise you simply can’t keep up with your competitors.

According to the Adsense Blog, once you have everything integrated you’ll be able to:

The Top AdSense Content report allows you to see more details about specific pages on your site and analyze ad performance. For instance, if you find that some of your pages generate a high number of pageviews but aren’t monetizing as well as other pages, you can focus your optimization efforts on improving these pages.

The Top AdSense Referrers report can help you see how different incoming traffic sources contribute to your revenue.

Last, the AdSense Trending report lets you analyze how your site generates revenue during different times of the day and different days of the week.

Setting the whole thing up is about as easy as labelling me crazy.

1. Click ‘Integrate your Adsense account with Google Analytics’ inside your Adsense control panel.
2. Place the code you receive onto the appropriate pages.
3. Give it a little bit of time, and simply jump onto Analytics and enjoy!

Is there anything I’ve missed? Let me know!