I posted the following tips in response to a user in another thread. I thought I'd post it here and open it up to everyone. Everyone add your tips after mine. Here is my advice: 1. Read the Optimisation Advice on the AdSense website. 2. Look at the Google Heatmap to improve your ad placement (in essence move your ads to centrally located above the fold) 3. Use wide ads - the wide rectangle and the leaderboard pay best in most situations. 4. Use AdLinks as well as Ad groups. 5. Blend your ads in with content by matching the Ad background and border colors with the background color on your site. 6. Change the font of your site to match the font in the Ad groups (smaller + Aria or Verdana depending on the ad groupl) 7. If you are putting Ads in the middle of text, indent the ads by up to 50 pixels to make them stand out. 8. Stick to blue for the Title of the ad (it's still the most clickable - I tested it) depending on your site color scheme. 9. Make sure the keyword density of your website text is encouraging ads that are relevant (and interesting) to your visitors. 10. Use channels and/or dynamic generation of Ad code to test your changes. What is everyone else's tips or secrets?
Those are some great tips... i was wondering about the Blue Title in ads the other day, you made things clear now
Yeah, was suprised about this one - I thought something that stands out more like red would increase the CTR, but when I tested it, blue outperformed red by 100%. Any one else have any tips to add?
Yes, I am glad you brought that up. I have tried using an image to draw attention to a whole ad group (like a bullet) and that improved my CTR by about 5-10%. I am not sure how you can have images that each line up with an ad in the ad group (given that Google now varies the number of ads in an ad group). But maybe even misaligned images draw attention to the ads. How is this working for people?
I like the red, if it's a 780 leaderboard on a colorless site.. But, yes, definitely blue links are the best (As long as it's not a dark background.)
I am currently using images with adsense... someone else pointed out to me that now google requires that if you have images beside the ads, make sure you put it in some other frame or make a border arround it. Bottom line is, it shouldn't look like adsense is serving those images. On my other sites, i see now that even adsense has images sometimes, its like around 120x120 image, its bordered but its not related to the ads. I think if adsense is serving those images, there must be something to it... it does grab attention... how would i tell you this thing otherwise?