Making the AdSense Ads suit your website – Part 2 (Color of Ads)

Making the AdSense Ads suit your website is an easy job that can really enhance the effectiveness of your AdSense Ads (and hence increase the AdSense revenue for you). The four properties that contribute towards making the AdSense Ads look in-place on your website are – size,  shape, color and positioning of the Ads. Though none of these properties can be regarded as more important than the others, the color of Ads is surely one thing that can help a lot in making the Ads blend with your website or making them stand out. Let’s take a closer look at this Ad customization option that Google provides to all the webmasters who use the Google AdSense program for earning revenue.

Color of your Ads:

This is one property of Ads that is fully customizable. You can easily customize the color of your Ads using the color palettes provided by Google; and there are more than 200 colors available. You can choose from several different colors that are available on the color palette (and 200 colors are enough for any website). You can choose colors for Border, Title, Text and URL. You can also set a background color for your Ads. As you select various options, you can see how the ad looks in the preview tool that is shown on the same page as the options; and you can accordingly make adjustments. The color combinations for the various parts of the Ad and for the background should match the color combinations used in the other parts of the website. To make the Ad blend with the website, you can use the background color of your webpage as the background color and the border color for your AdSense Ad. If you want to make the Ads stand-out, you can use contrasting colors for your Ads; however, this is generally not preferred unless you have other elements on the website that use similar colors too e.g. you can have the same background color and text color as the menu options. Once you have the right color combinations, you can save them as custom color palette which you can use later.
Similar color customization options are available for Google AdSense search results page too (as in, Google AdSense for search).

Misuse of Google AdSense

Google AdSense advertising system stands like a star among the other advertising system. The popularity of Google AdSense program can be judged from the fact that most websites today serve Google AdSense Ads. In fact, some of the websites are just so full of Google AdSense Ads that the rest of the content on the website is much dwarfed. These are the websites that are especially targeted at earning revenue through Google AdSense system.

Some website owners use wrong/ illegal tactics in order to increase their revenue from Google AdSense program. One example of misuse of Google AdSense program is websites that do not contain any useful information but, instead, have a lot of keyword based content that is targeted at fooling the search engines. Such websites are categorized as “AdSense Farms”. Sometimes website owners might use a large number of websites in order to create even bigger “AdSense Farms” that have completely useless content. However, this might lead to disqualification from the Google AdSense program.  Another misuse of Google AdSense program is seen in the use of free content e.g. content from Wikipedia to attract traffic to the website. Google is always on the lookout for such websites and they keep upgrading their technology in order to bypass such websites. So, never use such methods that can get you barred from Google AdSense program. And remember, it’s difficult to outsmart Google on this front.

There are sufficient tricks and legal tactics available for getting more traffic to your website and for increasing the earning potential from your website. Use those tricks and track the performance of your websites in order to increase your revenues.

Making the AdSense Ads suit your website – Part 3 (Positioning of Ads)

The four important properties that help in making the AdSense Ads look good on your website are – shape, size, color of the Ads and their positioning. While the first three can be customized using the customization options provided by Google, ‘positioning of Ads’ is something that Google can only give you advice on. You are the best judge of what position would be best suitable for your AdSense Ads.

The positioning of your Ads relative to the rest of the content is important in order to adequately emphasize the Ads. However, positioning of the Ads is also dependent on the size and shape of the AdSense Ads. Though shape and size are customizable too, large size Ads are generally preferred because they help increase the number of Ad impressions you can get. However, sometimes the structure of your webpage might not allow a big size Ad. In such a case you would need to strike a balance between the size of your ad and the best positioning for it. A number of website owners use other properties in order to make the big size Ads appear smaller e.g. they might use the background color of the webpage for the background and border of the AdSense ad thereby making it look smaller than it actually is (besides achieving the blending effect, of course).

Position your AdSense Ads in such a way that they look in-place with the general flow of content on your website. You can even position a block in the middle of the content in such a way that it adds value to the content (while it also serves your purpose of increasing the AdSense revenue through clicks) e.g. you could add an AdSense Ad block just after a statement that points to resources for a particular task – and your AdSense Ads could possibly form some such resources. Placing the Ads just above the heading of an article or just after the end of the article is another good way of positioning your AdSense Ads.

So, position your AdSense Ads intelligently and you would be in for a party much earlier than you would have expected.

Online advertising and Google AdSense

Soon after the advent of internet, it was realized that the website real estate (or the space on websites) had commercial value in the advertising world. The simple reason behind this was the soaring popularity of internet and the increasing number of eyeballs received by various websites. Thus, internet advertising (or online advertising) came into being. Today, internet advertising is treated as one of the most effective and most economical means of advertising. In fact, a lot of businesses, especially small businesses, use only this (affordable) medium for advertising their products and services. As technology progressed, so did the online advertising methodologies. Graphics based banner Ads and text Ads got their due recognition and were used quite extensively for online advertising.  Even now banner advertising is one of the most popular forms of online advertising.

However, the real breakthrough in online advertising came with Google AdSense advertising program. This program helped in connecting advertisers to several website owners who were ready to offer advertising space on their websites. Through Google AdSense program, the advertisements were floated on the websites that had some relevance to the products or services offered by the advertiser. This type of advertising is also called targeted advertising since the Ads are served only to the interested audience and not just anyone or everyone. Soon, Google AdSense became a very effective form of targeted advertising. On Google AdSense program, webmasters are paid on per-click and per-thousand-Ads-displayed basis. And the advertisers can control the amount of money they wish to spend on advertising through Google Adwords program that works in conjunction with the AdSense program.

Google AdSense program has caught the fancy of a lot of advertisers and webmasters and its popularity continues to soar everyday. Until another, better advertising program comes into being; Google will continue to hold its place at the core of online advertising.

Performance tracking through reports

Google AdSense program provides you reports which you can use for tracking the performance of your AdSense Ads. There are certain basic reports which are as such available on all AdSense accounts. These reports will show you the total number of page impressions, ad unit impressions, ad clicks, cost per thousand impressions (effective CPM), click through rate (CTR), and your earnings of course. You can view the reports for the date range of your choice.  However, do not expect the report to be updated every second. Typically, the data is updated by Google AdSense program after every hour.

You can customize these reports for advanced performance tracking. Though simple customization of basic reports is useful too, it’s the ‘channels’ that really help in conducting a detailed performance analysis. Using channels you can get data broken down and presented in a number of different ways e.g. you could compare the performance of one set of pages against another, you could compare the performance of one ad format against another etc. There are various options available with channels and it’s just a matter of exploring them and using them to your benefit.

Besides viewing the reports online, you can even download your reports (in CSV format – comma separated values format). If you don’t want to login to your AdSense account very frequently, you can set up email-able reports which automatically get emailed to you or whoever you designate.

Setting up your Google AdSense account – Part 4 (AdSense code)

Once you are done with all the customizations, your AdSense code is generated in the AdSense Code box. You just need to copy this code (which is in the form of a programming script) from the AdSense Code box and paste it in your website as per the guidelines from Google. Since Google allows only three ad units per page, you can add the code at more than one place in your html code.

The next step is to save your web page to the designated web server (as per the instructions from your web hosting service provider). Please note that Google AdSense program does not require you to send over your website’s html code to them; neither does it ask to load it onto their servers or do anything else with it. The addition of AdSense code to your website’s code is the only thing that you need to do. Separate procedures are available with Google for people who want to use AdSense Ads with their blogs (you can check these on Google’s website for AdSense program).

Now that everything is done and dusted, you need to wait for a few hours (might be lesser than that) before Google’s web crawlers find your web page or blog that has AdSense code on it and you start seeing AdSense Ads on your web page or blog. You might see some PSA (charitable Ads) initially (almost immediately) but these will soon get replaced with the AdSense Ads that will earn revenue for you. If the content on your website violates the AdSense program’s policies, you might keep seeing PSAs even after few hours. In all such cases (or if you find objectionable Ads that don’t go even after you have applied appropriate filters), you will need to contact Google who will sort out the problems for you.

Setting up your Google AdSense account – Part 3 (Additional customizations)

Besides the essential customizations like selecting the Ad type, Ad layout and colors, there are some other customizations that you can apply to your AdSense account. In fact, some of these can quite easily be treated as essential customizations (based on the context of your website) e.g. ‘filters’ is one such customization that is quite important. Let’s take a look at what these additional customizations are:

Filters: Google allows you to set-up custom ad filters for your website (note that this is in addition to the screening of ad content that Google does by default). By setting up filters you can block competitive Ads and other Ads that you don’t want to display on your website.  In fact, filters are a must if your website sells a product or a service (unless you want to promote your competitors through your website).

Alternate Ads: This is something that can help you in preventing underutilization of the ad space on your website. Alternate Ads are the Ads that you would want to show up on your website in case sufficient content-relevant Ads are not available. If you don’t specify alternate Ads and if there are insufficient content-related Ads available, Google AdSense program will serve charitable Ads to your website (Ads which don’t earn revenue for you).

Reporting and performance tracking: You can even customize the reporting and performance tracking options for your AdSense account. One important tool in this regard is the use of channels to study the performance of AdSense Ads from various perspectives. However, you might decide to take this up later down the line (maybe 1 month after setting up your AdSense account.