If you missed my previous post on my Major Blog Renovation, please take a look at the “before photos” to see how my blog used to before today. After watching Michael Cheney’s AdSense Videos (AdSense Videos review coming soon), I realised I wasn’t maximizing my blog’s Google AdSense earning potential. Therefore I made the following changes to my Google AdSense ads:

1. I dumped the leaderboard ad at the top of the blog

I wonder why I put this up there in the first place. I guess it was convenient to do so at that time. The clickthrough rates for this type of ad sucks pretty bad because it looks too much like an ad.

What I have right now is the 336 x 280 large rectangle ad you see on the top left of every screen below the post titles. I embedded the ad seamlessly into the content without using any HTML tables. You can resize your browser window and the text around will “wrap” perfectly around the ad. I suggest you view the source code of this page to see how it is done with a simple “div” tag around your Google AdSense code. It’s much easier than using a HTML table and it looks prettier as well.

I had to do a little bit of PHP programming to show this ad only on the the first post of the page to prevent it from displaying an ad at every single blog entry. If you’re interested to know how it’s done, contact me and I will send you the WordPress template source code. You can’t tell by looking at the HTML source code.

2. I removed the Google AdSense affiliate ads

I used to have these square Google AdSense ads at the bottom right of my blog. If someone registers after clicking on my ads and makes $100, I get $100 from Google AdSense too. I also randomly shuffle between this Firefox with Google Toolbar ad and I get $1 when someone installs Firefox with Google Toolbar.

The earnings from the Firefox ad was too pathetic to justify taking up space over there. Furthermore, I haven’t seen any of my sub affiliates make over $100 yet.

I replaced the ads with a tiny 160 x 90 link unit. Check out the “Vincent Rich’s Network” box and you will see the ads over there.

3. I am finally tracking my Google AdSense ads

I didn’t want to pay money to get a Google AdSense ad tracker so I didn’t track my ads for a long time. Then I stumbled on the open source AdLogger script while I was browsing some Google AdSense related forum. I bet some of the paid scripts are actually AdLogger modifications.

I can now track how many clicks were made on my site and which ad they clicked on. The default Google AdSense tracking ability can only track how much money you made on your web site but it doesn’t track which ad or which page the click came from. You can even prevent click fraud by limiting the number of clicks on your ads. If the number of clicks exceeds your desired number of clicks, your ads will automatically disappear to that click fraudster.

The road ahead…

I will have to monitor my Google AdSense earnings and my AdLogger logs to see if my current setup is actually more profitable than the previous one. I am confident the large rectangle will work better than the leaderboard but I have doubts about the adlink unit ad. Only time will tell….

Tagged As: Blogging, google+adsense, internet+marketing, make+money, vincent+rich

Categories: Blog Updates, Blogging, Google AdSense | Leave A Comment | Trackback |

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