Experimenting With Adsense

If you seriously want to monetize your blog, that is, make some money from blogging, you'll probably go with Adsense Contextual Advertisements, or a similar ad provider program.

Adsense makes it easy to control your advertisements look and feel as well as placement on your pages, as long as you stay withing their guidelines.

Key to success making money from Adsense is experimenting with your ad placements, colors and designs. I say experimenting because even though studies have shown various placements and colors do better than others, it is far from an exact science and some sites do better than others with the same ads.

The Adsense help and optimization pages do give you a good idea of where the best places for advertisements are, and good color combinations etc, depending on your pages colors and designs, but, again, not an exact science.

That's where experimenting and tracking come in, using the Adsense Channels feature you can design ads, label them a channel and then track the performance of that channel (ad placement) to see how it is doing in comparison with others. This is very helpful to page design and optimization. But you can't stop there, you need to try different combinations, and different color schemes to see what's best.

If much of your traffic is returning traffic, that is, regular visitors, it pays just to change the layout or color to reduce what is referred to as "ad blindness" where return visitors get used to seeing the ads in the same place, same colors etc and essentially ignore them. Changing the color scheme will result in return visitors seeing them again, perhaps as something new worth checking out.

Try it today, change your Adsense colors and perhaps even the layout on the page, and then track your ad performance, watch it for a week and see if it makes any difference. If it does, great, but don't stop there, record what happened and then perhaps try a new color scheme and monitor it again, you may be surprised at the results.

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