I was pondering upon the sizes of the ad units.. If I have understood things correctly, google shows the highest paying ads first right? So if I use smaller ad units, such as a vertical banner instead of a full skyscraper, and a rectangle instead of a large rectangle, this means it will show fewer ads, and thus remove low paying ads? So if the CTR is not majorly affected from this I should be able to get a better adsense income.. anyone have experience with this, done some experimantion allready? I just changed my ads like described here, will try see for a couple days how it affects my income and ctr. Also, if users had a tendency to click on lower displayed ads, which means lower paying ones, they now have only the choice to click higher paying ones, guess that can be a good thing. Oh well, guess I'll see soon how it turns out. Also, I changed the background colors of the ads some too, to see how that affects the ctr. Anyone here have found a good pallette that works best for white background pages? And do you usually remove the borders or just blend them with the background?
It depends on the audience. Every site is different and the only way to know is to do some checking. On some sites I have background color that is different than the site's and sometime I blend if. It will pay to switch it around while watching your stats by channels and see what works best for you.
I only use the small half banner at the top, between the first article and the rest of the article, and a 336 box at the bottom. That's it. The conversion is excellent. Whenever I see people slapping every single Adsense product they can find on their site, I shake my head. Can you say, "Overkill"?
jackburton: interesting, I might give that a try myself after the current test with smaller ad units. Sounds like it could be worth a try
I was just thinking, what about a script that changes the background colors and /or ad-unit type each time a page is loaded? anyone has some experience with that? And would it be hard to do such a thing? This way it would look like different content for every page, and maybe not be ignored so easily as ads tend to be when its clear they are ads
i have used this technique as well. i have seen revenue increase. keep testing and see how ctr is from the change. as far as blending for white background. use white bg ads, no border, default link color text and the description text in your add should be the color of your website text.
And if someone have the script code needed for such a thing I mentioned in my last post above that would be great
I would say that keep testing until you find what works for you. However I have found that an ad unit like 234X60 with just one ad works best. I think when you have a large banner like 728, it looks so much like advertisement and people now tend not to click on what is so obviously an ad. A small ad unit looks so much like a link with more info.
My conversions have been best with the adunits google advises: the wide scyscraper (below the menu) and the wide banner at the bottom (when there are few ads, I change that last one to a large link-unit). That's basicly it for me on most content pages.
Thanks for the tips : ) Will try experiment some more and see if I can get my ctr higher. Check my new thread "My ultimate adsense layout" which I just made, I have more detailed information on how I have placed my ads etc there. Skweb: where on your pages do you place those units?