Lots of good practical tips from the recent Google AdSense Optimization Webinar last June 30, 2005 . From ad unit size, to position and color…if you’re really serious about raising your AdSense revenues, you shouldn’t miss this article.

AdSense Ad Position Tips
Phoebe Ho, a member of the Google AdSense Optimization Team begins the webinar by going over the previously released Google AdSense heat map.

As you can see, the middle, above the fold location performs the bets, and that kind of makes sense. The idea is to think about what your user is looking at. Since most of the content is in the middle of most pages, the ads that are in the middle, near the content and towards the top of the page is the location that gets most of the attention.

Phoebe also provides exceptions to the “heat map” rule:

For example, if you have an article page with a long body of text, the bottom of that article is actually pretty successful because they’re reading the text and when they want more resources, they can take a look and see, oh, look. There are some ads. I can find out some more information about this particular topic.

I would have to agree with the “heat map” rule. From experience, ad units “above the fold” and close to relevant content perform better.

Adsense Ad Unit Size Tips
Phoebe gives the top three ad unit sizes:

The next optimization tip that I’d like to focus on is ad format. … You see our best performing ad format. It’s the large rectangle, 336×280. So the wider ad formats are doing better than the other ones and the reason is that they actually take up fewer lines. And so with every additional line, you have a chance of losing that interested user.

So the wider formats do best so specifically, the top three formats are the 336×280 that you see on the page; the 300×250 medium rectangle; and then the 160×600 wide skyscraper.

From my own experience, the top 2 are the 336×280 and the 728×90 ad units. But then again, this is because the layout of the page “required” that these units be used. Use the format that best complements the page. As JenSense points out, “the best performing ad unit size will not perform well on a site if it does not suit the page layout.”

Adsense Ad Color Tips
Phoebe gives tips to overcome ad blindness:

You can see with the colors that they’ve chosen that it blends well with their site. It matches the background and it looks like it provides additional content and compliments the site rather than contrasts against the site.

The reason the color palette is so important is because it adds to the content and not separate from the content and what happens is, something that we call ad blindness; so the more you blend in with the site, the less chance that ad blindness will occur.

Another thing to decrease ad blindness is rotating your color palette. We have a feature in the AdSense account where you are able to multi-select different color palettes that blend with your site to add some variety and freshness to the ads. And that also will help decrease ad blindness.

The “blending” idea really makes sense. To get the most out of AdSense, ads shouldn’t appear as ads at all. They should blend with the rest of the page, especially the page’s text content. After years of vicious popups and popunders, the average surfer’s knee-jerk reaction to ads is to NOT click, hence the need to “camouflage” ads.

Adsense Page Placement Tips
No hard rule here. Phoebe says to “experiment”:

Another important tip is what pages you might want to place your ads on. And what’s important is placing your ads throughout your site. As you can see here, Spine…com placed their ads on forum pages, reference pages and articles pages. And if you look closely, they actually chose different formats for different pages. So don’t be afraid to try out placing the ads on different pages and seeing how it will do for you. As long as they fit into our program policy, you can place the ads on any page of your site, any domain that you have. So I would definitely recommend that to you to kind of give you another boost into your revenue.

If you still haven’t, track your ads’ performance through channels. You will not only gain a lot of insights into top performing ads, but top performing content and keywords as well.

The webinar then goes on to the Q&A phase with three AdSense publishers: Brad Berman of Hybridcars.com, Mauricio Fridas of GeekZone.co.nz and Tim Carter of AskTheBuilder.com.

You can view the complete webinar transcripts here. There’s also a slow-moving discussion about the webinar over at SEW.

Recommended Readings:

Make Easy Money with Google : Using the AdSense Advertising Program

Pay-per-click Search Engine Marketing Handbook: Low Cost Strategies to Attracting New Customers Using Google, Yahoo & Other Search Engines