3 Terrific Spots to place Ad Units on your Website

This is the fourth article in the CTR Wednesdays series. You can find all the articles in this series here: CTR Wednesdays

By now you know what ad units to use. Today we will see where to place these ad units for getting the maximum CTR.

Like for every other thing on the internet, here too, there is no solution that fits all - ad placement for blogs, websites and forums can be significantly different. While we discuss ad placements for a standard website for today, we will soon have posts dedicated to placements on blogs and that for forums.

Google Golden Triangle
It has been a long time since the Google golden triangle got widely known on the internet. The google golden triangle says that the top left corner of the google results page is the part most looked at. This holds good for any website and placing ads in this area can get them better noticed. Ad unit placement for the maximum CTR is most often based on the good old Google golden triangle, though not always. This space in my opinion can accommodate and monetize most of the ad formats including Leaderboard (728 x 90), Banner (468 x 60) or the Large Rectangle (336 x 280).

The Google Golden Triangle


Sample Placement derived from the Google Golden Triangle

Food for the Curious
This method specially holds good for long pages. On these pages, users would read till the last line and then look for more information. At this point, placing ads (that are relevant) at the bottom of the long text can serve as food on which the curious readers will feed. They get the needed info and you get paid! The 336x280 large rectangle would just be fine here.

Placing ads at the end of long pages

Wide Sidebars
Sidebars commonly accommodate links and other short text and have a large number of users looking at them. They, with their high potential to double up as ad space are the hot favorites of advertisers. Make the most of them by using a (or two) Wide Skyscraper (160x600) on it. A sidebar can overlap the google golden triangle if it’s on the left and can prove to be more advantageous. That said don’t bother to change your site’s right sidebar to the left for placing ads. Consider this for your nest site at least.

Sample placement for the sidebars

NB: This post is exclusively for ad units on a standard website. Stay tuned for ads units on blogs and forums. Also on the way are articles on link units and search box placements.
So stay tuned!

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2%, 34%, 7% - What CTR is Good?

This is the third article in the CTR Wednesdays series. You can find all the articles in this series here: CTR Wednesdays

This is a common question in the adsense forums today. It has been the same, almost since adsense was launched. So let me try to add my own two cents to it.

CTR highly varies between sites. A CTR that is considered high in a vertical may be close to nothing in another. So we can’t say what CTR is good and what CTR is bad. So what should be the benchmark for comparing your CTR?

You may not be well aware of the CTR that other similar sites have. The web masters are not always ready to share it. And it’s against the Google ToS to discuss CTR too. So the only CTR that you will ideally know is your own.

Compare your present CTR with the past CTR as the bench mark. How is your present Click Thru when compared to the past? Is it high, low or the same?

You should continuously do this comparison. Say every month or every quarter. Watch it closely, experiment with your ad formats, colours, positions etc. Use channel to evaluate their performance and select the best one for your site. Do educated selection rather than making wild guesses.

Say you have a CTR of 1% and you do all tweaking and manage to increase it to 2%. This small increase will effectively double your income!
So keep trying – it’s worth spending time on!

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3 Best Ad Formats for maximum CTR

This is the second article in the CTR Wednesdays series. You can find all the articles in this series here: CTR Wednesdays

Why would your users ever click on an ad? The answers that just came to your mind includes – the ads are targeted, they are looking for more information and so on… Right?

Now tell me what good is laser targeted ads for if a user is not going to see it? If the user is going to ignore it completely?

Can you do something about it?
Yes! You can. You can do a variety of things to make your ads get noticed (be sure that you don’t end up doing any of these things that can get you banned). Among these, we will today discuss Ad Formats.

The most read tip on this topic would be to use wider ad formats.
Now, why should you use wider formats? Is it because Google said you so? Ever thought why does Google say that?

They have done extensive research on it and found that readers absorb information in thought units (that is, several words at a time) and the wider format lets them comfortably read more text at a glance. Many of them won’t bother to fully read an ad with 5 line breaks. By now you know that to generate interest in a user to click, they should first read the ad!
Also, wider formats are not fully avoided by users.

Hope this gives you enough reasons to include the wider formats. Now let’s see what the wider formats that are supported by Adsense are.

336x280 Large Rectangle
300x250 Medium Rectangle
160x600 Wide Skyscraper

When the space available is limited, link units come handy. Thoughtfully placed link units can get you a lot of clicks. In fact, they can be money mills.

That said; use only ad formats that go along with the design of your site. Don’t try to squeeze large formats where they can’t fit well and finally don’t clutter your site with ads and ads alone!

Apply this to your blog and see the results for yourselves, it will start to show almost immediately.

Stay tuned for the next post in the series - What CTR is good?

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Link Units: Good or Bad?

We all are aware of the fact that link units need to be clicked twice before we can earn from them. Ie; once the user clicks on your link unit ad, they will be presented with a whole page of Google ads. Then they will have to click on any of these ads for you to get paid.

Why bother to place a link unit when an ad unit can do this in a single click?

Wait, Don’t just throw away your link units!

When used in the right way, these are small money mills, here’s why:

• They take very little space and can be used to monetize even the smallest spot on your page.
• The wide link units (728x15 and 468x15) if placed optimally would look like menus and have a better chance to be clicked.
• The button link units (*x90) when placed on the side bar and other hot spots on your pages would look like your own links and get clicked easily.
• Now a blessing in disguise – once clicked the link units would open up a page full of Google ads. When a user clicks on one of these ads, goes to an advertiser’s site and doesn’t find what he’s looking for, there is a high chance that he will press the back button to come to the page full of ads and click another ad. This can happen many times at a go.

So you folks out there, grab those little units, let them work for you!

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Using Allowed Sites in Adsense: Pros and Cons

Continued from How to implement Allowed Sites in Adsense?

This is the third part of a 3-part long series on preventing getting banned from Adsense even without knowing about it. In case you haven’t read the previous parts, you can read it at:

Part I- How to get banned without even knowing about it?
Part II- How to implement Allowed Sites in Adsense?

Pros
You are effectively saved from your competition using your ads in unlawful ways for getting you down

Cons
You are not paid for clicks that originate from your ads shown on other sites that what you specify. If you forget to specify one of your old sites that you don’t actively maintain, go gotta lose money!
A missed spelled domain name can take away all your money. So be careful while doing this.
When a user opens your site from Google cache and then clicks on your ads, you are not paid!

Summary
Here is the summary of the three part long series on Allowed Sites in Adsense.

• Allowed Sites is a feature adsense to tell Google about the sites on which your adsense ads are displayed.
• Ads are displayed on other sites (not specified in Allowed Sites); you are not paid for the clicks.
• Try alternate ways depending on the type of your visitors.
• Keeping vigil and an open eye on your reports is the best way to keep the villain at bay.
• When you find something abnormal, being fast in notifying Google can go a long way in helping you.

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How Competition can Get You Banned?

A real story:
You are the hero and you are an ethical Webmaster. You start your new web site; work all day and night to generate content. Your efforts start to pay in the form of back links and organic traffic. You keep on adding fresh original content and your position in the SERPs shows that. You out rank the not-so-original site that used to rank #1.

The owner of the not-so-original site, the not-so-ethical guy (and the villain in this story), gets frustrated. He wants to out rank your site. But you keep adding new stuff regularly and stick to the top line of Google golden triangle. He tries out many ways but he can't out rank you, as his site is a not-so-original site. His frustration grows!

Now he starts to think differently - not to become ethical, but to harm you in a different way. He decides to cut short your main income stream - Adsense!

What can the villain do to your adsense income?

Multiple clicks?
This is easy to track if you can keep an eye on your CTR. Once you find that there is something unusual, you can report it to Google through this form.

But this was not what I wrote this for. There is still another way he will try that can get you banned even with out you knowing about it!

Using your ads on sites that are not allowed
He may place your ads on a site that does not comply with the Google policy. Google will hold you responsible for your ads, no matter where they are placed. So this is what you need to look out for. Now, how can Google spot that your ads are on a non-qualifying site? They have a report to the advertisers at Adwords with all details of sites on which the ads were displayed. This data combined with the fact that they can filter off sites with adult content when you switch-on the safe search gives you the answer.

Now what can our hero do to guard this?
Google’s answer to this question is - Allowed Sites

This feature in your adsense account allows you tell Google about the sites on which your adsense ads are displayed. By doing this you are only held responsible for your ads displayed on the sites that you fill in the Allowed Sites – effectively protecting you from a misuse of your ad code by the villain. Just specify all the sites where you want your ad code to be displayed and you are done!

Let the villain display your ads on any site that doesn’t comply with the policy, you will no more be affected. The ads will still be displayed and the visitors will still be directed to the advertisers web site when they click.

Where does the income from these clicks go?
How to implement Allowed Sites in Adsense?
What are the pros and cons of using Allowed Sites?

The story continues… implementing, pros - cons of using Allowed Sites and summary...

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Increase CTR: Use Section Targeting

I have often been told by friends that the comments their users left were bringing in some ads that were in no way related to the original post. What can you do to attract ads that are better targeted to your post rather than user comments? Read on…

Higher Relevance – More Clicks
What makes your users click? What is special to Adsense that made it so successful?
You guessed it right; it’s the contextual nature of ads! When people find a link to something they are already interested in, it’s only natural that they click. Though publishers do a lot of testing on their ads, many of them overlook this. If you don’t, you definitely have an advantage!

So it’s clear that when you have a highly relevant ad, your users would like to click. The more relevant the ad, the more the number of clicks!

How do I bring in highly relevant ads to your pages so that I can sky rocket my CTR? Can I do something about it?
Yes you can! This is exactly for which Section Targeting was introduced. Let’s have a deeper look at it.
Section Targeting
For emphasizing a section
To give added emphasis to a particular section on your page, you need to include that particular section between the following tags. The parts of your article that speaks about the core topic can be placed between them.
<!-- google_ad_section_start -->

<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

For de-emphasize a section
To de-emphasize a particular section on your page, you need to include that particular section between the following tags. User comments / the general talks can go between these tags.
<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->

<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

You can emphasize / de-emphasize as many sections on your page as you want. It may take around 2 weeks before you start getting results from the section targets.

All said, you should have enough content for this to work well.
Google also warns you against misusing this to bring ads that are not related to your page, which would be a violation of the Google TOS.

Give it a try and let me know the results.
And Stay tuned for our next article in this series - CTR Wednesdays!

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Increase Your CTR Every Wednesday!

We are launching a series on increasing your CTR. We will have a post here on increasing your CTR every Wednesday. We will call the series - CTR Wednesdays!

We will also label all posts in this series as ‘CTR Wednesdays’ so that you can later refer to all the posts in this series through this label.

Let’s start the CTR Wednesday series right away with the next post.
Stay tuned!

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14 Simple Mistakes that Will Get You banned from Adsense!

"To err is human, to forgive is devine"
But when it comes to these mistakes, Google seems not to be divine!
Are you doing any of these by mistake? Google won't spare you either!

Google wants all adsense publishers to follow their program policies and they are pretty strict at that. Once a publisher is banned means he is banned for life!

Did you know that you get banned from adsense by doing any / all of these? Are you doing any of these by mistake?

1. Clicking your own ads
Most of the publishers who start off new do this. It’s like killing the goose that lays golden eggs. It’s simply not worth the risk!

2. Using tools that artificially increase clicks / impressions
There are tools and browsers that can do this. Keep away from them.

3. Asking friends to click
Again, one of the most common mistakes. I have seen it posted at many forums, ‘Click mine, I will click yours’. Friends, you have got a long way to go. Think long term. You can earn huge with Adsense.

4. Joining click exchange sites
As you may be aware, there are a number of such places on the Internet. While they can give you some instant money, they are not advisable for long term. Stay away from them; they are against the TOS.

5. Giving incentives for users to click on ads
There are some sites that say, ‘you can download the stuff we have, but do us a favour by clicking our ads’ It takes just minutes before you get banned if someone from Google sees this. How does someone from Google see this, you thought, right? Imagine you are an advertiser with Adwords, will you report such a site to Google if you happen to see one?

6. Support us by clicking
Asking users to support a site by visiting their sponsors is yet another way to get you banned.

7. Placing ads under confusing heading
Placing ads under a heading? Are you using a different heading than the ones that are allowed? Sponsors and Advertisements are the ones that are allowed. One of the mistakes is to place it under a heading like ‘Suggest resources’

8. Inviting unwanted attention towards ads
Using gimmicks to invite attention to your ads is against the TOS. You may use a different colour for your ads to make it stand out!



9. Displaying ads in sites that do not comply with TOS
Do not place your ads on site pages that has any / all of the below content!

10. Displaying ads on pages that have look alike ads
Users should not confuse other ads that look alike Google ads.

11. Placing ads next to images
While this would have worked wonders some time back, you should not do this as it's against the TOS now. Users could confuse the ads as the description of the images and click on them. A click should arise from genuine user interest.

12. Making ads look the same as your own links
While you need to take care to blend your ads with the site, be careful that it shouldn't be confusing for the users. They should be able to distinguish your own links from ads.


13. Placing ads close to navigation where they can be accidentally clicked.
Keep ads away from points in your site where the user interact with clicks. This can include a point that is very close to a navigation menu, near a java script menu that passes over the ads and anything similar.



14. Editting the Adsense code!
Editting the adsense code that you have copied from the Adsense account can also get you banned!

While this list is not exhaustive, these are the easiest ways to get banned from adsense. Stay tuned for that article that shows how you may get banned without even knowing about it.

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3 Strategies for Using High Paying Adsense Keywords

As every adsense publisher is aware, the internet is flooded with sites that sell high paying Adsense keywords. Many publishers jump into buying keywords from these sites but the number of them who make full use of these keywords are a bare minimum. In this post we will discuss some of the ways of effectively utilizing those high paying keywords.

Using High Paying Keywords on Existing Sites
Apart from optimizing your adsense ads, this is one of the easiest things you can do to sky rocket the earnings from your existing website. As you already have a website with decent traffic, it’s easy to funnel the traffic to the pages you want. Write articles around these high paying keywords (make sure that you filter the keywords before you write) on those pages. Now, how do you funnel the traffic? Use some gimmicks to invite your users attention to the links that point to those pages and you are almost done! A tricky anchor text should serve as the icing on the cake.

Filtering Keywords
A keyword list that you buy will have high paying keywords from all walks of life. But that doesn’t mean that you can write pages around all of them on your site and start monetizing! Always keep your users in mind. They come to your site as they are interested in the topic of your site. So writing about body building on a gardening site would Greek and Latin to them. Here lies the importance of filtering keywords.

Browse through the keyword list and hand pick the words that relate to your site, the keywords that may be of interest to your users. Now, this is something where your creativity should work. Some words may be related to your site remotely. For example, if your site is on body building, you can still add pages that relate to insurance (a high paying key word). Write a page on Insurance for body builders and that would do the trick! Set your imagination on fire and find related words, build pages around them, drive in your existing traffic and monetize!

High Paying Site from Scratch
Now, you know that building a site is easy. But getting quality traffic for a new site is a bit difficult (unless you already have an established web site). Most people seem to be confused when it comes to choosing a topic to build a new site around. This is where a bit more knowledge on the keywords that you have got comes in hand. Look for the competition on the keywords and the number of searches for this keyword per month. There is no need to look for advertiser competition since you know that the high paying keywords became high paying only due to advertisers bidding for it! They keywords that have most number of searches will also have big competition. (If you are lucky enough to find otherwise, you are the next millionaire!) So choose the words that have a decent number of searches and less competition. Start building your site around them. Use the long tail to add new pages and keep promoting your site. You will be rewarded for your effort.

And here is something for you- 20 high paying adsense keywords. Make good use of it!

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