Optimizing the Adsense ads is important in order to maximize profit, and although the basic optimization methods are very easy to implement I still see many of my colleagues who do not follow them. This post will include a quick review of the most basic optimization steps. I take no responsibility for the information provided here, it is based on my experience only (post re-edited with more tips on 03/02/2007).

Consider this following ad I found yesterday on an Israeli site ran by an Israeli blogger which is quite known to the Israeli bloggers :

I thought I’d email the site owner with 5 quick observations and tips :

• Don’t irritate your users : Change the ads’ background to fit the site background or vise versa. Ads that look bad as if they’re disturbing the site will probably not get many clicks. In this case, just putting the ad in a white box would do the trick.
• Reduce ad blindness : Consider rotating some sort of unrelated irrelevant graphics next to the ad, preferably separated by a line and in accordance with Google terms of usage. Further more, use multi-palettes colors to randomly change the ad colors.
• Make your ads relevant : Optimize your page content for Adsense by highlighting the important content and the content that Adsense should ignore. Put your content between the following tags (consider one to two weeks till the Google Crawler updates with your new settings) :
  • To highlight content:
    <!– google_ad_section_start –>
    <!– google_ad_section_end –>
  • To ignore content :
    <!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>
    <!– google_ad_section_end –>
• Don’t let your readers struggle with reading the ads : The site is in Hebrew, which is a right-to-left language, so why make it difficult for the readers to follow with a left aligned code? First step - localize the ads and change those into Hebrew right-aligned by adding google_language = “he” to the ads’ script.
• Make your ads count: Consider blacking out (or whitening out) the ad address so that a user can only get to that site through your ad.

Here are a few more important tips for using Ads on your site:

• The ads that appear on the main page are the ads that matter the most. Don’t hide your ads, don’t make your users scroll to view the ads, don’t hide your ads between endless sidebar sections. Ads should either be there or not. Having ads that don’t count frustrate both the visitors and the site owner.
• Use channels to track your ad performance. Create a unique channel for each ad and add a channel to indicate a group or a page. This way you can get a sense of how your page or ad-group is behaving as well as your specific ad.
• Textads seem to generate more revenue and bother the users less than image/video ads. If you use image/video ads, make sure it’s not positioned to annoy the user and blends perfectly with your site’s design so it wouldn’t annoy the visitors.
• Track your ad-clicks using Google Analytics. A good guide is available on SEOBOOK.
• Filter sites that don’t pay as much for clicks or that are Adsense-built and annoy visitors who click them. Visit Adsblacklist and add the list provided for you to your Competitive Ad Filter.
• Configure alternate ads.