My ultimate adsense layout

After a couple months of testing and experimenting with all different kinds of ad units and layouts etc, here is the ones that works best for my site. There are 2 different types of pages on my site: article pages, and video clip pages.

So here is the layout I use for both of these 2 types of page.

As you see, on top of my website is the title of the website itself with a navigation menu below it. Underneath that is a link unit, which happens to blend perfectly in and look like a subesction of the websites menu. The text of the menu links are blue, so are the link units text links. The font of the menu text is slightly larger than that of the link unit below.

Below the link unit I have placed a search box so people can search through articles etc on my website. Many people seem to like this as its used a lot.

On the left of the pages I have a skyscraper which generates a fair CTR

On the rigt i have a large rectangle which has very good CTR. Only difference between article pages and video pages is that on the article pages the rectangle is put all the way to the right, with article text wrapping down below it, and on video pages I have put the rectanlge right next to the video clip, and having the videoclip same size as the rectangle.

On bottom of all pages I have placed a leaderboard, but have also used a banner now and then instead of leaderboard.

The CTR of this website is around 4-5 % which Im pretty satisfied with for this type of website. I have 1500-2000 unique visitors a day.

When it comes to the background colors and text colors of the ads, I usually have had a white background on both website and ads, and blue text for links on my website and title of ads. Text in the ads are black, same on my website. I am still experimenting with the color schemes though, have had nice results from making the skyscrapers background light grey too which makes it look like a menu that is easier to notice.

Anyway, hope this information can be useful to some of you here And also, if you have any suggestions on how I can make it even better, dont hesitate on letting me know

 

Nice. I have used the text link below my nav before, and I think it works well. I like the idea of the grey bg for the skyscraper, I may try that soon!
Thanks for sharing!
DD

 

Nice. I never used link units before, but perhaps I should use them the same way you do.

 

Thanks for sharing. This is important things.

 

can you show us the site you use this strategy on, mate?

 

thnx for sharing your experience with us

 

Excellent.

[sarcasm to google] Give it time before google requires 300px between a link unit and navigational bar. [/sarcasm to google] The whole images next to ads went the way of the dinosaur.

 

Excellent Layout, but it was better if you could give us a live preview of it

 

Sorry, but I've decided to not share this site publicaly in this forum because of the niche and concept it belongs to. Thats why I made those illustrations in the first place, instead of just showing the site

Anyway, those illustrations and description I gave above should be more than enough to get the idea... Its exactly the way I have shown here. If you have more spesific questions about the adsense layout etc feel free to ask And shout out any suggestions as well, always interested in improvements

 

thanks for these great tip . i will keep your thread as a word file on my computer

 

Thanks for sharing those layouts!

Did you happen to play with the colors at all? Was it better to blend the colors with your site, or have them stand out a little? How about white background vs. dark background (for your site and the units)? Borders or no borders?

 

Well at this moment I am running the skyscraper unit with light yellow background (color code #FFFFCC ). This change I made today though so will have to wait a while before I know how it will affect the CTR.

I have been running the skyscraper with grey background for a while, and had good results with that, with white borders so it blends with the white background of the site as it splits up the ads in the skyscraper with a white line between each ad making it look kinda like a menu.

On the large rectangle ad units I have the same bright yellowish background as mentioned above. The reason I use this color is because I have the same color as the background of the websites main navigation menu, as well as on some other navigation units I have on my site such as the article index and video clip index etc. This way it looks more like the ad unit is a similar type of menu on the site as well as makes people actually notice it and look at it since they are used to navigate my sites other menus with this appearance.

 

I think having 5 units per page is way too much. It can overwhelm the user, but may work on some sites, though.

 

Thanks a lot for sharing great tips
that are working for you Darkbreed

Wishing you a Happy and Very
Successful New 2007!

 

I use one ad unit per page and fill the rest of the page with content. Yes actual content that will be of use to the visitors. It is an amazing concept.
I must be crazy to give some useful information instead of cramming 5 ad units down the visitors throat.

 

Trippen & Quest: Trust me , I got a lot of quality content on the site too, the returning visitors are high. But, as my main goal with the site is making money, I've tried to take advantage of as many adsense units as possible to try get as much revenue as possible. I have tried with fewer, but that hasnt generated as much earnings as many does. If you have any good suggestions on how to implement few ad units but still have high ctr and good income, feel free to share your tips

 

Nice post.

That said - I'm really surprised you are only pulling 5% CTR with that sort of layout, because it's very aggressive to have everything below your title and menu to be completely related to advertising. I would have thought you would at least pull 10%+.

Do you get very relevant ads? What is your major source of traffic? What bounce rate do you get?

 

Yeah but its hard getting above 5% CTR, tried most layouts and stuff now.

About 30 % of my visitors come directly from google searches, another 30% are direct, 20% from places like shoutwire, digg, stumbleupon, and the last 20% from other sources like forums and people who link to me from their own sites etc.

I have about 40% returning visitors.

These are the stats I get from Google Analytics.

My ads are mostly relevant it seems, but on many pages its less relevant due to the different types of articles on my site, and I have hundreds of pages. Maybe I could make the ads become more relevant towards the theme of the site itself on such pages, but its a lot of work when I have so many pages.

I dont know what you mean by bounce rate, whats that?

 

I qote myself on something I was wondering about in a different thread but didnt get any response on:

Anyone have tried to use a script like that, and if so what was the results? And what did the script change on the ads? (like background colors, or type of ad units, layout etc) I've noticed they are using a color-changing script for the ads here in DP

 

Well I was more wondering about the traffic to your article pages themselves. Like is most of your Google traffic received to your homepage or does the majority of your Google traffic go straight to you article page?

I just find that when traffic from search engines is directed straight to your article pages you get a significantly higher CTR in comparison to when someone reaches your homepage then starts looking over a number of your article pages. If you know what I mean.

In regards to bounce rate, you can normally get details of this in your Google analytics account and it basically where people go to your site from whatever source then pretty much just leave the site after viewing the first page.

I mean don't get me wrong or anything 5% is far from a terrible CTR, I just would have thought you would get a better CTR with the configuration you have.

I think this sort of method is probably more effective for gaining the attention of users that use your site frequently and visit hundreds of pages but are ad blind, which is the case for DP and for many forums. That said I think in the case of article pages you would be much better off just doing as you are currently - creating well blended ads that wrap nicely around the content. Your users are more than likely only visiting your site infrequently and only viewing a couple of pages at a time. But that said I have never personally tested this method.