Harnessing Google’s AdSense is one of the
more preferred methods for bloggers and web developers to earn some
extra revenue from their online presence. Many have created entire
businesses from AdSense alone, meaning that there truly is a ‘method to
the madness’ in how to utilize this service. Unfortunately, there are
quite a few mistakes that can be made when trying to get AdSense off the
ground.
So, here are 3 ways that you can get
AdSense working for you, while avoiding the pitfalls that often decrease
clicks and ultimately the cash you could earn.
The One Thing You Should Never, Ever Do With AdSense
Have you ever been to a website that is unbelievably cluttered with ads? Not only are there popup ads lurking about every single time you navigate to another page within the site, but also there are countless ads lining its pages.
It’s probably something along the lines of
“I’ve got to get out of here. I can’t find what I’m looking for, and
there are probably 100 other pages that are easier to understand.” If
this sounds like you, you’re not alone.
In fact, according to various experts in the field,
the average amount of time anyone spends on a page is 10 seconds. This
average is called “bounce rate”. This means that if your site is
difficult to understand, difficult to navigate, or is badly designed,
then your bounce rate will increase –and your site visitors will
‘bounce’ in under 10 seconds.
To avoid this one major pitfall, it is
important that you don’t overuse AdSense. The common misconception about
ads online is that the more you have, the more clicks you will receive.
The key here is avoiding a bad website design, and designs often bite
the big one when there are far too many ads.
Tip #1: It’s Not About Quantity, It’s About Quality
One of the best ways to increase your AdSense ‘click-through-rate’, or CTR, is to decrease the number of your ads on the page. We know that Google only allows 3 AdSense ads per page, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to display all of them. In fact, Ryan Scott from HackYourBlog.com gives an interesting take:
“Sometimes having one dedicated, highly
visible area for ads can increase AdSense clicks easily. If you’re not
getting enough click-throughs, try removing all of your ads except for
one. Put it in a highly visible area of your blog. See if you get an
increase in clicks per impressions.”
For instance, say you’re trying to buy home furniture,
but you see 10 ads about 3 different types of furniture. Now you know
that your ads didn’t get you anywhere, and you only confused the
visitor.
Instead of displaying all 3 ads, you might
want to consider only displaying one. At the same time, concentrating
on having a sleek, streamlined, easy-to-use, effective website design
will be what increases your CTR.
Tip #2: Where the Money Is, Ad Placement
One of the biggest factors that bloggers and developers often don’t consider is layout, especially what equates to valuable real estate on the page. What you should do is decrease the number of your ads, while at the same time, placing these AdSense ads squarely where people are going to click. You’re looking for prime real estate location here.
One of the best ways to figure out where
to place your ads is through using ‘heat maps’. These applications will
actually track where people are clicking on your site, meaning that you
can pinpoint exactly where your prime real estate is.
ActiveMastermind.com gives a few suggestions: “There are also a few cool
plugins/scripts to use like HotSpots plugin, ClickHeat, Crazy Egg, very powerful…”
Tip #3: Good Content
It’s no secret. People simply stay on pages that provide some kind of value. While your website may be easy to navigate, ads do not clutter the page, and you’ve tracked your clicks through heat mapping –if you still don’t have the content that the visitor is after, then they will simply leave your site and never come back.
Having good content is extremely
important, because it ties into the most important principal, that a
well-designed website will have a good CTR. It’s not the ads that
increase your CTR, it’s the fact that you were able to attract traffic
and keep visitors glued to the page.
AdSense is a wonderful utility for
increasing revenue, and sometimes it’s the simplest tips that can cause a
rapid increase of clicks. However, it is also important to understand
that much of this has to do with time in addition to trial and error.
One more under-the-table tip that you might want to take away from this
is that having useful and effective site analytics and tools that track
what your traffic is doing is going to teach you a lot about how to
increase your revenue.
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