This concise guide outlines the strategies that will ensure you make money with Google AdSense by optimizing the tool’s potential for your website.
Google AdSense can be a brilliant source of revenue, but only if you know how to use it properly. Installing it is relatively easy, but maintaining its success rate is, unfortunately, less so. Presuming you’ve already started with this display advertising network, we have a few insider tips on how to boost it.
How to make money with Google AdSense
To begin with, we’ll need you to look at your AdSense more closely. Don’t just install it and leave it as-is. AdSense has a host of optimization settings that allow you to make the most out of your display ads, so start by getting familiar with all the nooks and crannies of your account. From there on, tweaking your AdSense will take some work, but it will pay off.
Make money with Google AdSense: Set up a strategy for increasing traffic
This lesson comes before our AdSense 101 course, and it’s key to display ad success. For AdSense to do its magic, your website must have a steady influx of visitors. Optimizing ads makes little sense if there’s no one to see them. Make sure that you have an effective strategy for increasing website traffic in place first, and then start fine-tuning your AdSense settings with our tips.
Otherwise, nothing you do will make any difference.
Make money with Google AdSense: Experiment with different types of ads
There’s another reason why traffic awareness goes hand in hand with AdSense – the harder you work on getting new visitors, the more familiar you’ll be with their on-site habits and behaviors. Using this insight, you will be able to determine the most clickable possible layout, size, and color for your ads. AdSense allows you to experiment with all these visual aspects.
Different display ads will have different clickability rates depending on your target audience, so start experimenting with suitable ad formats. Try text-only ads, image/rich media-only ads, or text & image/rich media ads and split test them to see which type looks the most attractive on your layout.
Make money with Google AdSense: Play around with the colors and fonts
Once you’ve found the winner format, repeat the split test for different combinations of background colors and fonts in text ads. Use marketing tricks that rely on the psychology of colors to make your ads more attention-grabbing. Clickable ads have to stand out from the bulk of your website content.
Make money with Google AdSense: Choose the right size and location
The most popular sizes of AdSense ads are currently the 160×600, 720×90, 336×280, and the 320×100 mobile banner. Once again, don’t trust recommendations blindly since these one-fits-all solutions might not work in your specific case. Instead, use Google AdSense experiments to find your best fit.
Other guidelines are more universal and guarantee maximum ad visibility. The most prominent location on your website is the part of the page above the fold that is visible without having to scroll. Since this is the focal point of your landing page, use it for displaying high performing ads. Don’t cram it with ad units, though, as it may look gaudy and overwhelming to users.
Make money with Google AdSense: Pick your own target audience
Google makes the executive decision when it comes to ads that will be displayed on your website via the AdSense network. You cannot change the mind of Google’s algorithm, but you can help it find you a more relevant match by allowing certain ads and blocking those that your visitors don’t want to see.
Make money with Google AdSense: Employ Google’s Best Practices
Google offers a list of best practices for ad placement, but the list also includes a couple of rules that AdSense users must follow. Break any one of them, and you’ll risk getting your account penalized. The problem is, it’s precisely these rules that prevent bloggers from monetizing fast from AdSense ads:
- Don’t click your own ads
- Don’t beg for clicks
- Don’t change the AdSense code
- Avoid invalid clicks
- Don’t use forbidden content
- Avoid using copyrighted content
After some witty bloggers got incredibly rich using VPNs to mask their IP addresses and click on their own ads, Google made sure that something like this never happens again. Make sure to use even the best VPN you can find for your website’s security.
Make money with Google AdSense: Link AdSense with Google Analytics
After you’ve made all these tweaks and optimized your AdSense account the best you could, there’ll be nothing left for you to do but relax and track your progress. For that, connect your account to Google Analytics. The integration will allow you to see which pages get the most traffic and ads clicks.
Conclusion
From there on, it’s all the same old routine. It takes time for AdSense to start paying off and this is because it takes some time for you to figure out what type of ads your audience responds to. Stay on top of Google Analytics and see what works and what needs to be improved. And then, keep split testing and tweaking one milestone at a time.
