How To Make Online Money

Blending your AdSense ads into your website’s appearance can have a powerful impact on the number of clicks you receive.

Even Google itself acknowledges this. The diagram below is taken from their site, showing what are the ‘hot zones’ that generate more traffic.

People surfing the web become ‘Ad Blind’…that is, they learn how to glance at a web page and pick out the content they are looking for, and how to ignore the ads. The better blended your ads are into your page, the less likely they are to ignore it.

Be sure to follow the AdSense program policies. For example, I read an article by a guy who increased his click-through-rate (CTR) by 200%. He had aligned small pictures to go directly over each ad in a particular adsense block. People were clicking the ads thinking that it was more information about what was in the picture. Google has since made that practice off-limits. (And think about it…if you were an advertiser, would you want to pay out for a bunch of clicks that brought people to your site when they weren’t really looking for what your site has to offer?)

The keys to blending are:

• ad placement
• content-wrapping
• color matching
• font-style matching
• keeping within policy guidelines

Ad Placement – refer to Google’s heat map. One of the best practices is to keep ads ‘above the fold’. That’s a newspaper term for the articles that appear on the top half of the newspaper’s front page, since that’s the part that is displayed in the news stands. That’s what you want people to see right away. Ads that appear ‘below the fold’ on a website (ie: you have to scroll down to see them) get far fewer clicks than those that are above the fold.

Content-wrapping – This is the practice of having your content wrap around an adsense block. Tests have shown that it helps reduce ad-blindness…visitors notice the ad when it’s right in the way of what they are reading.

Color matching – Usually you want invisible boxes (borders and backgrounds of the ad that match the background of the page they are on). You want the text blurb and the url of the ad to match the text color of your font. The title of the ad could match whatever link color you are using on the page so that users might click it thinking it’s a link to another part of your site.

Font matching – Try to get the fonts to match closely. If your site uses a large-size font and you have an AdSense block with 5 ads in it, the text in that ad block will be small…and people will probably ignore it. Go with a san-serif (like Arial) type font since that’s what Google uses.

Keep within policies – Enough said. If you try to cheat, you will get caught, and banned for life. And it is very, very difficult to get another Google account once you’re banned. (If they find out you had been banned before, they will ban you again automatically.) Avoid aligning images next to your ads. (I’ve seen templates that actually make it look like each link ad across the top of a page is a different tab. Deceitful and bannable.) Make sure there are no pop-ups or anything that will cause users to click on the ads trying to navigate around the page or close a pop-up.

Most importantly – NEVER click on your own links!!!

Lastly, make sure to create a different channel in AdSense for each of your ad positions. That allows you to test to see what percentage of clicks are coming from which ad block, and adjust accordingly.

For more info on this, visit Google’s Adsense Help Center.