Test everything!
Google AdSense offers you, as the publisher of their ads, about a gazillion ways to customize the color and styling of your ad (if you’re not familiar with all these customization settings, I encourage you to log in to your AdSense account and check them out). On top of that, you have an almost infinite number of ways that you can tweak the website or blog that you have wrapped around your ads (I know that’s an odd way to put it, but I think that it’s important to think that way, especially when you are looking for ways to improve your ad earnings). Combine these two and you end up with a situation where you have an infinite number of possibilities.
But how do you choose the “right” combination of ad style and presentation to your site?
Well, there are a number of sensible steps that you can take, such as placing your ad in a conspicuous spot and making sure that it blends in, but beyond that, much of what you do depends on your site and the look and the look and feel that it has.
So what do you do?
Simple. Test everything! If you think (or someone tells you) that your ad would be better on the left instead of the right, see for yourself. Make the change and watch the stats for a week or so and see if there’s an improvement. If not, roll back the changes. Same with color tweaks and changing ad sizes and layouts. Test everything. If it works, good. if it doesn’t revert.
Test! Test! Test!
Don’t just limit testing to new things, but try old settings with new parameters (for example, if you found that one ad size outperforms another with one color scheme, this might not be the case when you use different colors).
Keep detailed notes of the changes you do to your site, along with the date you made the change. This way you’ll be able to identify what caused the change in your earnings. Also, if at all possible, keep a copy of any code you change so that you can roll back your changes if they don’t work.
Whatever you do, don’t go with your gut – I did this once and it cost me thousands!
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