This article will soon be posted on www.iNetwk.com --------------------------------------------------------------- More website publishers use Google Adsense to earn revenue with their website(s) than any other service. Unfortunately, most don’t properly test and track Adsense banner ads. This is equivalent to tossing $20 bills into the garbage. If you website is already generating traffic and revenue through Adsense, you should be performing extensive testing and using channels to track all your ads. Eventually you will find the most profitable combination and style of Adsense banners and you will be laughing all the way to the bank. There are two schools of thought about how to design Adsense ads to encourage visitors to click on them. One can design the banners to blend into the site, making the links within them look like content. Alternatively, one can make the advertisements stand out by using bright colors; the idea here is to get the visitor to notice the ad. In my experience, designing ads to blend into the site is often more profitable. If your website offers quality content and the ads are well targeted to each page, your click through rate will probably be quite high. Of course, the best way to determine which ad designs and placements work better on each particular site is to test them. There are two methods of testing. The first is consecutive testing, where you place one style of ads on your site for a certain period of time (a week) and then try a new combination the next week. You should be able to see which placements and designs bring in the highest CPM figure (revenue per thousand ad views). The other method for testing is simultaneous. This involves placing different ad styles on different pages within the same site and using channels to track the particular ads. This allows you to compare results side by side. Of course, Adsense channels should always be used on all of your sites. It is critical to track how each of your websites is performing, not just so you can adjust ads on sites not earning sufficient revenue, but also so you can give specific and accurate stats about a particular website if you eventually choose to sell it. It is much easier to incorporate Adsense channels into your sites when you are first building them. However, if you have already published sites without channels built into them, I strongly suggest you spend a few hours adding them. They are one of Adsense’s greatest tools and I’m shocked by how many publishers fail to use them. One final technical tip: try using PHP or SHTML includes to display your ad codes. Instead of repeating your ad code dozens of times within a site, simply place your ad code into one file and then load that file (using an include) wherever you want your ads to display. This means you only need to edit one or two files to change your Adense ads across the whole site, instead of running a find and replace query on hundreds of separate pages. If you don’t know how PHP or SHTML includes work, a simple Google search will give you all the information you require – they are really quite straightforward to use and will save you tons of time.