Number of Ad Units

The Adsense rules for publishers, (that's you a blogger or website owner) limit the number of Adsense ad units you can place on a webpage to three ad units and one link unit. On one hand, this doesn't sound like much, but in reality, depending on the units sizes you choose, it can be quite a lot, in fact in some circumstances and in some opinions, it's too many.

I myself struggle with how many advertisements to run, and to decide how many is too many. I can't help it, if I see an empty space in my blog, my inclination is to fill it up. Unfortunately this can have a negative impact on my earnings.

Too many advertisements can result in what the experts call "ad blindness" or quickly identify your page to surfers as a spam page, signaling them to click the dreaded "back" button, or "Next Blog" and move away from your page. Although I don't completely understand it, too many advertisements can also lower the cost per click and therefore reduce your income.

Although others will try to tell you otherwise, blogging, and advertising on blogs, is not an exact science. There is no one method that consistently brings in the money, and as soon as there is one discovered, it changes as more and more bloggers start to implement it.

Try as I might not to do it, I find I'm not happy unless I have at least two and better yet, all three advertisment units on my blog and a link unit somewhere. In other words, I like the maximum number allowed. It's just the feeling that otherwise I might be missing someone who would otherwise see an ad and react to it. However, I am trying to do some experimentation these days in an attempt to optimize the results. That means I am trying some new formats in different locations and in different colors. I am also trying to reduce the number of ad units to see what if any impact that has on the cost per click, or earnings per click.

Although ad placement is also highly important, I am not going to go into it in this post, but I will direct you to the Google Adsense Heatmap which is a pretty good guide to the best places for an advertisement unit. Of course you have to consider the heatmap over your own individual blog to select the most appropriate placement.

All of the above notwithstanding, as I, and others, have said so many times, ad revenue, or blog monetization is a symptom of traffic. If you have enough traffic you will make money. That said, remember to focus your early blogging efforts on building traffic first and foremost. If you are only getting small traffic numbers and therefore few clicks, you cannot accurately decide which units are working the best. As with any survey, or study, it takes high numbers to give you accurate, usable results. This is also the time to make sure you are using Adsense Channels to track which advertisements and blogs are creating the best financial returns. One mistake I have made is not to use channels enough, and therefore I am sometimes left wondering which blog made me the money. This is especially true with the new Blogger which lets you place ads directly through your blog template, unfortunatly it doesn't create channels when you do it this way. I intend to go back and spend some time putting my ad units into channels just as soon as I have time.....maybe today....

As your traffic grows it will become more apparent which advertisement units work the best on your blog.

Technorati Tags
blogging success
contextual advertisements
make money