Adsense optimization - surprising results	1.3/5.0 (3 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
Barry Goggin January 14, 2009

I have read before about optimizing your AdSense ads including position, color etc and read the stories of big success mostly on the AdSense website. I always passed it off as not being terribly important to the bottom line but when redesigning one of my websites recently, I decided to play with the position. The results were surprising.

Five fold more income

In brief, my income went up 5 fold and people were clicking on the ad panel I always thought of as the secondary ad. I learned that:

• color matters
• complementary colors but not completely blended colors worked best
• A wide skyscraper ad on the right of the page got 80% of the clicks
• A large rectangle in the center of the page with content wrapped around it did not perform as well
• A banner ad at the end of a content page did not perform well

Using the AdSense heat-map

Inside AdSense provides a heat-map showing where the best generic placement positions are.

The darkest orange color is the best performing position on a generic page and this was where I placed my large rectangle. The banner was placed just above the page footer as shown above and the wide skyscraper was placed along the right side which is shown as a low performing position.

More on AdSense optimization and position

Using AdSense Channels

“Channels enable you to view detailed reporting about the performance of specific pages and ad units. By assigning a channel to a combination of pages or ad units, you could track the performance of a leader-board versus a banner, or compare your motorcycle pages to your automobile pages.” I created custom channels for each ad so I could track the performance of each one separately.

This allowed me to track the performance and to experiment with colors and positions to see which worked best.

You can learn more about AdSense channels here

The results were not intuitive

So my results did not match the heat-map shown above but the AdSense team does note that this heat-map is a generic one and you have to determine the best positioning on your own webpage. The biggest increase in click through rate came from positioning with a more moderate increase by changing colors in my experience.

Try AdSense optimization for yourself

If you already run a website with AdSense or if you are planning to develop a website with AdSense, then it is well worth spending the time optimizing your ad presentation. I put this off too many times but now it will be an essential part of my work-flow when developing domains.

It has also got me thinking about ad placement on this website since most blogs tend to place ads where it is convenient rather than test for optimal positioning. I am curious if the same placement rules hold for blogs as for other types of websites.

If you want to learn more, I recommend you read the Adsense team’s optimization series.

If readers are interested, I will probably talk some more about domain development this year perhaps showing specifically what I have done with my domain development since it is a question I am often asked.

Has anyone tried to optimize their AdSense and if so, how did it work for you?

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