Blog DIY – Where to Put Your Adsense Ads for Blogs!

by max on Friday, August 7th, 2009

UPDATE: See my latest Adsense CPC Optimized Placement Heat Map here!

Long time ago, I released my Adsense optimized heatmap for increasing your CTR (Clik Through Rate).

Well, I have some more great news for you, I have further optimized my Adsense ads and here’s bunch of quick tips that will help you make more money with Adsense, all the while making your regular visitors happier.

Don’t put ads on your homepage and index pages. These are the main pages of your blog, particularly those from index.php. The reason is that the homepage of your blog isn’t “targetted” content since you might have more than 1 blog post in the same page. Thus, your Adsense ads won’t be as relevant so your CTR will be a lot lower than your single pages. (single.php) I’ve started removing all ads from the homepage and has increased my overall CTR and CPM. Plus, another great benefit for you is that site visitors in general don’t like a website cluttered with ads.Furthermore, you don’t want your first-time visitors to click away from the homepage, you want them to stay longer. By having zero ads on the homepage, you guarantee that the first-time readers will at least click once within your site to an interesting blog post they like.
Put your ads on single pages. These are the pages that receive most of your Google organic traffic. The single pages are highly targetted because they contain one blog post.
Test the different Adsense ads provided in my Adsense heat map and take out any ads that don’t perform. As a general rule of thumb, I remove any Adsense ads that do less than 1% CTR. I rather put another affiliate banner or private ads in those less performing spots. You want to increase your overall CTR, that makes your site more valuable for advertisers on Google. This is simply common sense. If you were an advertiser, you would want to advertise on ad placements that get most attention and most clicks. Even me, if I want to sell an affiliate product, I place it where it gets the most attention/CTR, not bottom-right sidebar banner that no one will look at.

For now, that’s the 3 tips that can change your Adsense earning as much as whopping 25% based on my testing. Results may vary but if you keep testing, you won’t regret any positive results you get while you can always go back to your old format if it doesn’t work out.

You don’t make more money because you bring more traffic, you make more money by bringing in higher “quality” traffic. The only way you can prove that to Google Adsense and advertisers is to optimize your ads and improve your overall CTR.