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This is a 3-part series of Tips for Make Money Online with Google AdSense. If you are new here, you may want to refer my previous post, Tips for Make Money Online with Google AdSense Part 1. For this part, I am going to discuss about simple optimization steps to take to maximize your AdSense income.

I guess if you are interested to signup for AdSense, then your ultimate goal is to make at least a reasonable income from it. Right?. If you are really serious to make the most out of AdSense then you got to learn some basic steps to tweak your AdSense ads for maximum effectiveness. If you are blogger then you might be familiar with this term “blogtimize“, which are steps to take to Optimize the ads on your blog. Here are some simple tweaks to make your ads more targeted and more attractive for users to click on. The rule is simple, more attractive ads will lead to more clicks and finally the outcome : MORE MONEY, yea!

The three basic steps are:

• Blend ads into your site
• Track your ad performance with ad channels
• Make sure AdSense ads serve most relevant ads

Blend ads into your site

Before tweak

After tweak

This should be the first step that every AdSense publisher should take. In order, to increase the likelihood that your readers will see and click on your ads, you should always try to blend your ad units into the background of your site. One of the most common mistake made by many publishers is simply putting up ads by using the default color settings.

Research shows that unobtrusive ads can boost revenue. Hence, you should try to tweak your ad colors setting to be similar to your site. For example, choose a bold color for the ad title to help draw attention to your ads, then make sure that the background and borders of your ads are the same color as the background of the area where the ad is placed. (refer to the examples given above) You should also change the link color of your ad to be same color as the links on your site. Give your site a cleaner look and feel that your visitors would appreciate.

It is actually not that hard to change the color settings of your ads. To tweak your ad colors, just login to your AdSense account, and create a new ad unit with the required new colors for heading, text and link for your site. Again, your mission is to make your ads as unobtrusive as possible. Experiment with the settings till you found the best settings that suit your site.

Track your ad performance with ad channels

After you have implemented the best color settings for your ads, then the next step is to keep track of your ad performance on your site by using channel. You can customize your channel by using custom channels. With channel, you can track the performance of individual ad units on your pages. Custom channels are the ideal way to determine how a recent change in ad placement or ad format has resulted in improved performance. With Channels you get to view detailed reporting about the performance of specific pages and ad units (refer to the AdSense report figure below).

In order to track your ads with channel, you got to create one. After that, assign a channel to a combination of pages or ad units to enable you track performances of your sites and format of ads that bring the most income. You can even create a channel to track each of your separate domains, so that you can see where your clicks are coming from.

If you’d like more information about setting up channels, just visit the AdSense channel help center.

Make sure AdSense ads serve most relevant ads

Lastly but not least, as we all know, AdSense ads are contextual based ads. It means that AdSense will try to display ads that are most relevant to your content based on texts content found on your site. However, that is not always the case. Sometimes ads displayed at your site are not that relevant. Therefore, it is best if you can optimize your ads by having a Section Targeting. Section Targeting helps AdSense to understand your content better and then display more relevant text ads. This is important as relevant ads will help a lot in increasing Click-Through Rate (CTR). Remember, more clicks will lead to more $$.

If you are a WordPress user, you can tweak your site by adding just a few lines of codes.

1. Login to your WordPress account, and go to Presentation. Look for the single.php file. Search for this line:

<?php the_content(); ?>

2. Add the following section targeting codes before and after this line, making it something like this:
<!– google_ad_section_start –>
<?php the_content(); ?>
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

3. Save your file.

And if you are not a WordPress user, then you have not choice but to switch to WordPress now. Haha. Just Kidding. Actually, you can do the same for Blogger too.

1. Login to your Blogger account, and go to Layout.

2. Select Edit HTML.

3. Make sure “Expand Widget Templates” is ticked to enable you to view the whole HTML file.

4. Add the following section targeting codes before and after this line, making it something like this:

<div class=’post-body’>
<p><!– google_ad_section_start –><data:post.body/><!– google_ad_section_end –></p>
<div style=’clear: both;’/> <!– clear for photos floats –>
</div>

5. Save your template.

In summary, AdSense optimization is an on-going process. To maximize your AdSense ads performance, always make sure that your ads are seamless integrated within your site, track performance of each ad by using channel and make sure your AdSense ads are relevant to the content of your site.

So how about you?. What is your experience with AdSense optimization?. Please share your experience with me.

OK, that is. Stay tune for final part of Tips for Make Money Online with Google AdSense. Have fun optimizing your AdSense ads.