Adsense Experiments: The Best Adsense Placement

Continuing on from the previous point, I though to myself "what's the limit of this addition of extra ads?"

5 – Going to the extremes

This is my Wedding Invitation tutorial. I chose this page for the experiment, as it had a reasonable number of visitors.

See if you can spot the five different ads on this page. (The sixth is a LU at the bottom of the page.)

I used the coloured box from a previous experiment, and made a "faux navbar" out of a LU. The real links were moved to the top of the new sidebar.

Here are some results, to give you an idea of how the experiment went.

Channel CTR
Tuts/Wedding/1-LU Navbar 3.06%
Tuts/Wedding/2-LR Above intro 1.41%
Tuts/Wedding/3-LU Menu 0.71%
Tuts/Wedding/4-WS Menu 1.03%
Tuts/Wedding/5-LB Intro box 0.89%
Tuts/Wedding/6-LU Footer 1.18%

(These values are illustrative only.)

The real values added up to a fairly high CTR. It was slightly higher than my current LR-Intro-LR setup for that page. However, the amount I was getting per click was significantly lower than usual. All the extra ads were letting in the low bidders (like Adwords bids of one cent), in addition to the presence of so many LU's. (Note that the highest-CTR ad is a LU.)

There's also the fact that this layout's strength is its spamminess and deceptiveness. This setup would surely put off lots of visitors, and cost me clicks on other pages. It also looks terrible.

All attempts at making a reasonable version of this layout were failures. Without any shenanigans persuading them otherwise, people will just skip big chunks of ads with no content between them.

Two ads is optimal for your introduction. (One above and one below.)

6 – Colours and Borders

I've tried various colour scheme alterations. I've changed the link text from normal blue to navy (darker) blue, and to black. I've made bright pink ads that stand out on the page as much as possible. I've made the ads match the colour scheme of my site header, with red link text, and green URL's. I've tried all the various border options.

None of it works. In fact it usually fails spectacularly. Even the small changes do non-trivial damage to CTR.

All you need to know is that the ad background colour should match your page background colour, and that the borders should be invisible (i.e. because they're also that colour.) Leave everything else as it is.

7 – List of miscellaneous advice and information

Thank you for reading my learnings. :) I hope this information helps you improve your Adsense layout.

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