AdSense: First Impressions Are Important

AdSense is a complex animal. And publishers should know this. Because of the contextual nature of the ads being delivered to your site, blog or portal, you are sure that the ads generated by AdSense are relevant. But they don’t always pay out the same in terms of per-click earnings.

Some advertisers bid high for a certain keyword, while some bid lower. And those that bid higher usually get the top spots and appear more often on relevant webpages. What does this tell us? We should lay out our sites such that the first AdSense unit that appears would be the one that readers tend to click the most.

In simpler terms, make sure that your highest-earning ad units appear first in your site’s HTML, to ensure that the clicks would have higher payouts.

Do consider that with today’s web design technology–meaning CSS–it’s not always the code that comes first that appears first when the browser renders it. Conversely, not everything that’s on the top of a webpage appears on top in the HTML.

How to make sure the highest-paying ads appear on the best-clicked parts

If you’re new to contextual advertising, you can first use the AdSense heat map to try good placement of ads.

But if you’re more experienced, you should use custom channels to identify each ad unit on your site, so you can learn which areas of your site attract clicks more.

Then after a few days (weeks, or months) of data gathering, you can then design your layout such that the code pertaining to the highest-clicked ads are positioned first in your HTML. This can be a little tricky, since you would need some knowledge on CSS–maybe you can ask for help from a designer friend.

Take the case of two-column blog themes, for example. Let’s assume that the ad on the left sidebar is clicked more often than the ads on the main body (the right wide area). In some themes, the actual HTML code for the left area would come before the right (and this is intuitive), but in some cases, the wide area on the right comes before the left narrower area. This means the ads on the left area, which you would think to come first, would actually come after those on the right area.

Same goes with floating design elements, that might include ads. Being positioned at top doesn’t mean it’s actually on the top part of the HTML code.

The trick here is to make sure that your best-clicked ad unit comes first, so that AdSense also generates the highest-paying ads. It’s a good combination of high clickthroughs and high per-click earnings.

You’re tired of $0.01 clicks, aren’t you? Well, go and improve your per-click earnings!