Garry,

I have Google Adsense on my website, with little success. To date, I’ve got about $50.00 owed to me, which means I’ve never seen a penny of my earnings (they don’t pay out until $100.00). After 4 months with Adsense, my all time CTR is a little low, as I write this. This can be contributed to a few things.

My ad placement is less than stellar, but I’ve not had enough time playing with the theme to get everything where I want it. The bigger problem for my site, I believe, is that I run a technology blog, and my readers aren’t the type to click ads. Someone running, say, a celebrity gossip blog, might get tons of clicks from readers that aren’t internet savvy and don’t know any better.

From what I’ve read from John Chow, Darren Rowse (ProBlogger), and others, it seems that Adsense should be used as supplement income, not primary income. You can make a lot of revenue through our sources (Text Link Ads for example).

For success with Adsense, though, placement and color scheme, etc. is definitely the key!

Kyle,

Thanks for taking the time to share your experience with Google Adsense. I agree with technology blogs not being as successful compared to a celebrity gossip blog, as you mentioned. However, I do believe that there are a few quick and easy things you can do that will eventually lead to you seeing the minimum $100 payment every month. Definitely! Making a minimum of $100 per month using Google Adsense is well in your scope. And if you like, I want to offer some suggestions to you that will take less than an hour to implement. Again, I am not saying that I consider myself a full blown expert, but I do have experience with this, and I am getting very close to seeing a $100 check every month from Google Adsense. By next month, I should be hitting it consecutively every month. I have spent about ten minutes looking at your site layout, here is what I would do:

1. Get Rid of your Link Unit located below your search bar. Just remove it completely. This will bump up the most popular post section which is fine. These are links to your most updated pages in your site. Googlebots love to crawl pages and see content changes and updates.
2. Remove the 160×600 from your far right sidebar. This will raise your category section which will put it into a better indexing position.
3. On the individual post pages…  relocate the 468×60 ad from the bottom and put it directly below the title of the post. Ideally, you should swap the 468×60 with a text/image 336×280 or at least the 300×250. The reason why I suggest doing this, is because it will trigger Google Video Ads… which even I click those! They are fun!!! And its sometimes even hard for me to tell the difference between the Google Video Ads and just embedded Google Video / YouTube Video. At a bare minimum, put the 468×60 on the top of the post, directly below the title. But again, I strongly recommend going with the a 336×280. Insert the code into the single.php file (if I am not mistaken).
4. On the home page: show only three posts per page instead of five. Simply show more of your content per post before using the more tag to balance the length of the page in relation to the length of the sidebar. Modify the file that will cause adsense to display below the titles of the posts on the index pages. (might be your index.php file or you loop.php file … not sure depends on the theme, I can help you with that if you want.) and add the 336×280 or at a minimum the 300×250. Again for the same reasons as above. It will trigger Google Video Ads as well as put the ads in a much better placement. You really increase the changes of people clicking and also raise the amount paid per click, when people do click.

There you have it. In summary. Show three posts per page. Keep it simple and display a total of three 336×280’s or 300×250’s… remove all other Google Adsense from your sidebars, and better utilize this space for selling Text-Ad-Links (which is an awesome program!). I would bet the farm that you would see a performance increase within a month. Also Kyle, I have helped you in the past, and I have no problem helping you again, if you need me to assist you with making these changes. Just let me know.

Thanks again for commenting. Again, I agree… technology blogs are not as effect as other blogs… but you still can make the minimum $100 payment per month. Once you implement these changes, then focus on traffic… which of course, I can help with that too.

Best Regards,
Garry

I am still a learner with adsense. So far (in 3 months) I have made $25 with adsense alone. Of late, I deployed many strategies by experimenting a lot. Now, I have great CTR. What I need now is big traffic. Some tips:

1. Match the background color with your adsense color.
2. Best placement would be just below title
3. Sky scrappers dont work well. Waste of space.
4. Section Targeting is important to get relevant ads.
5. Take advices from seniors like Garry.

My implementation of adsense at my site works well.

Ramanathan,

Thanks for commenting… and you know what… I do believe we are on the same page here. What you said in your comment is overall what I communicated to Kyle. 160×600 typically aren’t as effective as the squares and rectangles. And yes, I do believe this in my experience to be true. Less effective = wasted space. And space that can be used for other programs such as Text-Link-Ads. Displaying 336×280’s or 300×250’s directly below your post title is the way to go! Matching backgrounds, and colors is an enhancement… but positioning is totally the key.

Ramanathan, can you talk more about your experience with Section Targeting… can you define that for use and explain more about how to utilize this… please feel free to provide references to direct pages if you like. I know that I would be interested in viewing these examples… so I am sure other readers would to.

Also, everyone… I have been visiting Ramanathan’s site off and on, and honestly… if you want a great example of what I am talking about and what Ramanathan also reiterated in his comment, go ahead and take a minute to check out his site. His site is an excellent example of how a technology blog site can be successful with Google Adsense! Add 1000 visits per day, and we are talking about some nice extra cash you could be bringing home every month.

Google Adsense works! Naturally through the years as the dust has settled down, the likelihood of bringing in thousands of dollars every month is rare… but still today, here in 2007, Google Adsense does work, it can be a very big source of income for you.

Ramanathan, thanks for sharing your experience! Please comment back and talk to us more about Section Targeting.

Best Regards,
Garry Conn

Garry,
So far it’s been 4 months and I made roughly $80 and waiting for my first check. Getting click from a tech blog is a tough one, agreed with Kyle on this. As far as adsense is concerned, my blog is not fully optimised as I’ve another content ads that I could put at my frontpage. Anyway, I’m happy for you as you are almost making out $100 every month.

Garry, Thanks a lot for your comment on my comment. ok, Section Targeting is not as difficult as it sounds to be. You just need to add a couple of HTML tags. Here it is:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

You can use these set of tags any no. of times on a page. But dont over do it. Do it wherever its appropriate.

Place the title of the page between these two tags.

Next, place your post title and content between another set of these tags.

If you add these in your template carefully, it can do wonders.

Note: Google is very very clever. If you try to misuse these tags with deliberately added keywords, it may backfire soon. so pls be careful in using it.

As Garry said, Adsense is a great program. Understand it better and use it carefully with other programs.

Using Adsense with Adbrite sometimes causes troubles. I wrote to google and they clarified it. The basic idea is not to use any program that places contexual ads in a page along with Adsense. Google folks reply differently for different sites. So, its always better to write them personally.

Another thing about placement:

The small link unit on the left side bar on my site brings good result. The trick is to place it near the About US details. It will surely be noticed.

Guys, I will add many tips (whatever i know) here in this thread. Subscribe to Garry site to stay up to date.

Garry, i added those tags but it is not displayed above. Why??

May be it treated it as commented line. Here it is:

(’Less Than’ symbol)(Exclamatory symbol)(hyphen)(hyphen) google_ad_section_start (hyphen)(hyphen)(’greater than’ symbol)

(’Less Than’ symbol)(Exclamatory symbol)(hyphen)(hyphen) google_ad_section_end (hyphen)(hyphen)(’greater than’ symbol)

Just a quick heads up… unless google changed it in their last TOS update ( which I may have missed ) , they frown upon disclosing CTR. Giving rough generalizations seems to be ok, but they don’t like hard numbers floating around. Just don’t want to see anyone kicked out of the program!

Garry,

Thanks for the tips and thorough analysis. I went ahead and made most of the changes you suggested. I tried the Google Video Ads at the top, but it was just to much for my tastes and I don’t think readers will want to scroll through all that to get to the content, so I moved the smaller one up top, and placed the Video one down between the comments and the post. I also removed the ones in the sidebar for now. Hopefully there will be an improvement!

Due to my theme setup, I had to put it in the loop so it shows on the front page also, but the Ad one below is only on single pages. I may at some point modify the width of the sidebars to accomodate a video ad there possibly. I’ve also considered switching to another theme that I have and somewhat enjoy, but I need to figure out some of the colors and stuff before it permanently goes live.
Thanks for the tips. I will be monitoring this post closely.

Garry
I feel adsense works well if you have a good flow of traffic to your blog as well as good ads placements and the selection of a good color scheme . Initially when i started my blog i used to get around 5$-6$ a month but now as i am getting good traffic it has increased to 40-50$ a month .

Madhur,

that is cool. I am glad to see it increasing for you and also at the half way mark! You should spend some time and closely review your layout and see if there are some things you can do to better optimized the service and work towards increasing your CTR. I haven’t been to your site in a few days, so I am going to head over there right now and check things out and get up to date with your posts.

@Garry
It would be great if you can check out my site and give me few tips on layout and optimization . I am also thinking of trying diffrent sources of incomes . Lets see how they turn out to be .

Hey Madhur,

Good to talk with you again. Take a look at Kyle’s Cove. He just made changes to his site and is reporting back that he does notice a difference. It just so happens that the two of you guys have the same theme, so better optimizing your site should be a snap. I like your header using the Adsense Link Unit… If it has been worth your while using this, I would align it to the left instead of centered like it is. Ideally if were to position it directly under your main navigation, that might help.

If you look at Kyle’s site, you will see that he has put the code directly below his post title. I would strongly suggest doing that. Also, I would recommend (if you feel good about doing it) to use the 336×280 or at least the 300×250. Kyle considered doing this, but for his site he made a strong decision to balance things out a bit by not over doing it. He locked in on using a 468×60 directly below the post title, and then used the 300×250 at the bottom of the post, or rather directly above the comment form. I think his decisions were very wise.

Also you can check out my site, How Do I Make Money Online. This is a new site that I just launched. I will be using this site as a reference from time to time on this site for the fact that pretty much everything I write and talk about here, I have put into effect on that site. How Do I Make Money Online is an example site or a live example site of putting everything I know into practice. You should check it out.

Let me know if there is anything else I can help you with. If you make changes to your site, let me know in a few weeks if you report an improvement.

Talk to you soon,
Garry

@Garry
Thanks a lot man , i will check out the sites you mentioned and make changes and will tell you the result .

Excellent. I think you will find some improvements. Based off what you have already told me as well as looking at your current PageRank thing should improve for you a lot.

Also… if you would like to exchange links with me on my other site, let me know… anyone that adds my link to my other site will get their link added as well as a banner featured on the top of the pages.

I currently making around $150/day with adsense and have a CTR of around 33%

I use mainly link units, that’s why the CTR is high.

Im glad that there are some people speaking out about this! I have tried many different tactics on my Cell Phone Accessories site as well as my blog. I get about 3,000 unquie visitors a week but only like 35 clicks! So Im making barely a penny a click. How can I help get this up? My online store only has one ad, and its poorly placed only because I dont want customers thinking its an advertsing site. But my blog on the other hand had many adword campains. But the link to my blog is zstorez.blogspot.com (Hope this isnt spam here) . What can I do better to increase clicks? Any ideas? Thanks all for the great comments, keep them coming!

This is an older article, but I found it from your CPR suggetion. I was running only 468×60’s on my site. Based upon your suggestions, I changed to the 336×280. I was getting maybe 1 click per day, but with my traffic it was only 1-3% conversion. We’ll try the new format and see how it works.

I’m a web journalist and I just got adsense for my new blog. I just put it up yesterday and it will be me talking about general anything and everything…but any advice on helping use adsense would be appreciated

I am really interested of earning money online just to earn for my living…

I am a Filipino living in a country of poorness…

Everyone seems here in the Philippines wants to get rich but one thing you wouldn’t miss… the greediness of almost all Filipinos - the Crab Mentality…

They never wanted anyone else to be on their on top… It’s a big lose for them…

Certainly, I would like to earn more from Google AdSense but how?

Hi - I don’t think I’m maximizing my income from Google Adsense. Can you take a look and let me know if you have any suggestions? I’m thinking of adding some image/text ads in the upper left sidebar - any thoughts? Thanks

Check out Kim’s last blog post..Spark Your Dinner Party Conversation with Party Rox!