Thread: Improve Your AdSense Performance

Originally Posted by bogart

Whereas, the wordpress site is a lot more demanding in terms of maintenance.

That's only because the WordPress development team has refined the annoying habit of releasing about 20 updates every year. I stopped doing updates unless it includes a security patch or some useful new function. Most WordPress updates are a waste of time.

Nice tips, Thanks Will!

Originally Posted by dmi

Do link units count as ad blocks you are referring to? (i.e. the first code which appears in the source is a link unit, then an in-content ad and then a siderbar ad)

Good question. On the face, I don't believe that the link-units would effect the earnings on the content related ads. Because, they are different type ads.

Anyone else have any information about this?

Originally Posted by TopDogger

That's only because the WordPress development team has refined the annoying habit of releasing about 20 updates every year. I stopped doing updates unless it includes a security patch or some useful new function. Most WordPress updates are a waste of time.

Drupal is a good solution "out of the box" to publish reference articles. It wouldn't make sense to publish a 1000+ articles on wordpress of the "how to" or technical nature. Wordpress wasn't designed to provide a robust site architecture. Now that's out of the box. Someone like yourself can easily make the modifications required. Drupal really wouldn't provide you anything extra that you don't already have.

Drupal also has an issue with javascript. So you need an adsense module. In order to blend ads into the content, you will need to create a template file or otherwise publish the ads in blocks. So this is a lot more complicated than intergrating adsense ito wordpress.

Originally Posted by dmi

Do link units count as ad blocks you are referring to? (i.e. the first code which appears in the source is a link unit, then an in-content ad and then a siderbar ad)

Hmm... that is a good question... to which I do not have an answer.

Wheh, hard to believe its been a year since the last post on this thread!
Anyway, on one of my projects I was seeing a < 2% Adsense CTR in a niche that I should have been seeing > 3% from other related work and I was trying to figure out why.

Turns out, to be "cute" I had used a red colored theme (WP) that was almost identical to another seeing the higher CTR (same niche). I switched to a blue color base on the theme and changed the ads to match. CTR jumped to the expected 4 ish range. eCPM remained steady for both themes. No change in ad placement made and the CTR remains steady.

i was doing a mistake of keeping ad units on right widget... will move it to left... thanks.

Originally Posted by javanx3d

Turns out, to be "cute" I had used a red colored theme (WP) that was almost identical to another seeing the higher CTR (same niche). I switched to a blue color base on the theme and changed the ads to match. CTR jumped to the expected 4 ish range. eCPM remained steady for both themes. No change in ad placement made and the CTR remains steady.

Blue themes FOR THE WIN!

Good thread and tips! From my experience the best performing ads are the ones that blend in (of course within adsense guidelines).
Also while blue is usually best, on sites where all your links have a different color, e.g. green - make your ad link green too.
There also exceptions from any rule, optimal ad layout may vary based on niche, site and audience, so test to find out the best performing one.

I decided to crank up my Adsense earnings. It was nice to read through this thread again.

For my latest web page I put 2 x 336x280 Ad units in the main content, a 468x90 text unit at the end of the page and a 728x90 link unit in the footer.

Also, I came across an interesting blog post about Ad unit sizes The Best Performing Banner Sizes for AdSense which is very interesting!