Google AdSense Tips

Many of the pages on this site display text ads from Google's AdWords program. To display these ads, a site must join Google's AdSense program. Joining is free, but not all sites are eligible to join. Once you're accepted, however, it's very simple to place the ads on your pages and to start generating revenue for your site. AdSense will serve ads that are generally very relevant to the content of a particular page. Here are some tips based on my experiences so far with the AdSense program.

Tip #1: Don't put ads on empty pages.

When I reworked my site, I built a skeleton set of pages that had no content, just titles and some meta tags. I displayed ads on those pages, however. Although all you see are public service ads at first, the very act of displaying ads on a page causes the AdSense web crawler to quickly fetch that page for analysis. A page with good content will thus begin showing relevant paying ads fairly quickly.

If you don't have any content, then, Google will have to guess as what your page is about. It may guess wrong, and so the ads that it displays may not be relevant. You'll have to wait until Google re-crawls the site for the ads to correct themselves. Here is what Google had to say when I asked them about how often the AdSense crawler updates a site

Tip #2: Don't be afraid to ask questions

If you're wondering about something, don't be afraid to ask Google. So far, they've always responded to my questions within a working day. There are two email addresses to use, depending on the type of question

Tip #3: Avoid non-English characters on English pages

This one is a bug, to be honest. My surname is French, and I prefer to write it out correctly with the accent grave on the first "e". Every page on my site would then include at least two accented letters, because my name shows up twice in the footer. On some pages my name shows up two or three more times.

Normally, this wouldn't be an issue. But on some pages the presence of the accented characters is enough to cause AdSense to display non-relevant ads in French. This happens whether the browser indicates a preference for French or not. When I reported this to Google, this is the answer they gave me

Tip #4: Check your keyword density

Although Google doesn't release exact details as to how they determine the ads to serve on a given page, they do tell us that it's the text content of the page that matters, not the meta tags. Before serving ads on a page, then, you might want to check its keyword density. A good, free tool for doing this is found here

Increase Adsense Revenue By Reducing Out-Bound Links

We all want to increase our Adsense revenue, squeezing every last cent out of our traffic. We tweak our ad placement, ad colours and pore over our Adsense statistics.

We work like maniacs to get back-links, promoting our sites, tweaking our code to give the search engines what they want.

We slave over content, punching out page after page of keyword rich content, testing our keyword combinations, trying every little trick we can to bring in as much revenue as possible into our Adsense account.

We pore over site stats, seeing where traffic comes from, which pages visitors leave our site from, how many page views we get per visitor, and try to work out ways to increase our eCPM......

But are we missing something? Site visitors come, and go, without clicking an Adsense ad. We can see where they go, but why?

Could it be that you are providing them with too many options to leave your page? Logic would suggest that if you are in a room with 10 doors, each door has a 10% chance of being the door you leave by.

By following this logic, we should reduce the number of ways a visitor can leave our site. If we only have one or two outbound links, plus a couple of Adsense ad units, we are greatly reducing the number of options the visitor has to leave the site, thus making the odds that they click an Adsense ad greatly improved.

And we all know what higher click-through rates mean - more Adsense income from the same amount of traffic!