Placing your Adsense code

In my last post I pointed out the importance of tracking the performance of your Adsense blocks through channels.This is very important because you might be losing lots of money because of bad ad block placement or because of too much ad blocks. If you are thinking what the hell ? How can I earn less from more blocks let me explain it for you.

You see Google places the highest paying Adsense ads in the top most ad block and that is the logical thing to do as well according to me , but the thing is Google places them in the first block that they find in your themes HTML not the first block you see in your theme , let me explain further with a diagram.

Below is a typical layout of a theme with Adsense

Header

Navigation

Posts ( Adsense code just after post )

Sidebar ( Adsense code added as a widget )

Footer

Now Google goes through your HTML and places the highest paying clicks just under the posts because that’s where they found the first Adsense block. But if you look at the theme you will find that the best displayed Adsense unit is the one in the sidebar with less value for clicks. Keep displaying this theme for a while and you could be losing lots of money. The theme would look something like below with the Adsense code in red. So the people who click on your top most block are actually earning you less .

Be Careful with the Google Heat Map

Now some of you will argue that if you place a leaderboard ad block according to the Google heat map none of this would happen , because the leaderboard block is normally defined first in the HTML as well , But you must remember that leaderboard channel doesn’t always perform best for blogs. If you are getting lost of traffic from sites like Entrecard , Digg , Stumbleupon ,leaderboard unit might be the lowest performing block since social media users are normally blind to the leaderboard ads. So remember to test your blocks till you find the perfect combination.

Placing and aligning Adsense blocks

After my previous post about tracking Adsense with channels I got some mails asking me how to place Adsense code in different places. You can check this article about how to to place Adsense code in different places, where I have shown with examples how to

• Add them easily in blogger
• Add them inside your blog posts so your users cannot miss them
• how to align them center , left using the div tag

Got any great Adsense tricks to share with us ? Be sure to share them in the comment section.If you comment often enough you get a PR2 link back