AdSense Method 2 of 3: How to Design Your Ad Campaign

By Unknown - Thursday, August 7, 2014 - No Comments

1
Analyze your content. In designing any kind of ad campaign, it's crucial to know who your target is. If you're writing a food blog that caters to single men on a budget, for example, you've narrowed the scope of who you will be appealing to. You've also got a very good focus point for your ads. What are things single men who cook drawn to? Here are some possibilities: dating, cars, movies, politics, and live music.
- Think about who frequents your website, write down what you feel are the most important characteristics of your viewers.
2
Fine tune advertisements. While AdSense will auto-populate your page with what they feel are relevant ads, use their tools to provide tighter controls.
- Set up channels. Channels are like labels that let you group your ad units your way—by color, category, or pages. By setting up channels, you can get detailed reports on the performance of your ad units, and use that to your advantage. For example:
  - Use one style of ad on one group of pages, and another style on another group. Track and compare the performance of the two styles, and pick the best performer.
  - Compare performance on pages that focus on different things. For example, if your pages about gardening perform better than your pages on cooking, you might consider adding more to your gardening pages.
  - If you have separate domains, set up a channel to track each of them to see which is generating the most clicks.
3
Optimize your ad placement and site design. Google has found there are places where ads are more effective, and places where they are less effective.
- Ads that appear when you first arrive at your page (i.e., "above the fold" as they say in the newspaper world) tend to be more effective than those that are below the fold.
- Ads on upper left tend to perform much better than ads on the lower right.
- Ads directly above the primary content, and ads that appear at the bottom of the page and above the footer tend to perform very well.
- Wider ads are generally more successful, as they are much easier to read.
- Ads that display images or video perform very well.
- Using colors that complement your website colors will make them more readable, and so more effective.
4
Learn how AdSense works. AdSense automatically sends ads to your site based on a few different criteria:
- Contextual targeting. AdSense crawlers scan your page, analyze your content, and serve up ads designed match your content. They do this using keyword analysis, word frequency, font size, and the link structure of the web.
- Placement targeting. This allows advertisers to choose to run their ads on specific subsections of a publisher's website. If your website matches an advertisers criteria, their ad will appear on your page.
- Interest-based advertising. This lets advertisers reach users based on their interests and the user's previous interactions with them, such as a visit to their website. Google's Ads Preferences Manager allows users themselves to choose their interest categories, which further helps advertisers focus their ad campaigns. This method is good for monetizing your site more efficiently, as it increases the value for advertisers and provides a more relevant experience for users.