What is your best Adsense tip?

Hi,

I am always asked "what is your best Adsense tip?". Here is my five best and most important Adsense tips:

- Less internal and external links on the page
- Having the ads with the same background color as the page background
- Having ad links color blue (the default color of hyperlinks in html)
- Having one leaderboard 728 x 90 text ad at the top and one at the bottom of the page
- Having one 300x250 text ad at the middle of the page somewhere among texts
- Well optimized pages with a good title, description, h1 headline and ... .
- Good and fresh content.

Can you add more tips?

I will strongly agree with the blue color and the 768x90 format.

Another thing that worked for me, is to have one - or even two side by side - big boxes (eg. 336x280) after the end of the content. That will work best for article type of content (eg. blogs)

so this (ugly) blue link color is the magic?
I changed the ad format and colors here:

http://www.finalwebsites.com/snippets.php?id=10

and have much more clicks since used a different color theme (this blue is diff. from the default)

Yes, ordinary users are used to blue links. They click on them automatically.

like the blue link in my signature? (I will try that) thanks...

Yes like the link in your signature. Default html links. Blue: 0000FF

I have noticed something very strange lately: I have a few websites that are exactly the same, I thought that would be a nice way to test out some different AdSense settings to find out what works best. The number of clicks are very different on all sites while the sites are exactly the same. Its not like the sites have a very low number of visitors causing the numbers to be inaccurate, I'm talking about CTR between 2.5% and 18.8% measured over 10,000 impressions... The CPM on the sites are between $3 and $33 and are not directly linked to the CTR, meaning that the average earning per click can also greatly differ.

So, how can you optimize your AdSense ads after seeing such a large difference? And I forgot to add that these earnings are not constant either, the biggest earner of this month could be the lowest earner in the next month. It seems there is no best set of colors to use for your ads, I'm even starting to think that the so called 'optimization' could be a complete waste of time...

Nico,

I think I know what you're talking about, I have nearly the same situation, the high earnings happends most of all on new websites with a lot of traffic. and after the first month (or weeks) the impressions are the same and also the click but not the earnings.

I think that ad formats and the ad placements are very important but the colors (I will test it)

Well it looks like those identical sites have different sources of traffic :)

This difference probably has some relation to the smart pricing thing.

I think its maybe the origin of the traffic...

Niks right. its smart pricing.