Improving AdSense revenue on established site

[cfrey]

Greetings! InnovationTools (http://www.innovationtools.com) has been in operation for 3-1/2 years. I have been in the AdSense program for almost a year, and have benefited greatly from the tips in Joel's e-book (both versions). I now use borderless ads that blend in with my site's content and are strategically placed on most pages of my site. And I've always been committed to adding a steady stream of top-notch content.

However, I've reached a point where my revenue has leveled off and has declined somewhat. I think there's more potential, but I'm not quite sure how to realize it. My best performing page is focused on a particular type of software (mind mapping), BTW.

Any tips on how to further increase the performance of my AdSense units? I know I should include them within individual articles, but my site is database driven, and it's hard to insert AdSense code in the middle of articles. Any suggestions?

Thanks!

[tweetannette]

Greetings! InnovationTools (http://www.innovationtools.com)
Any tips on how to further increase the performance of my AdSense units? I know I should include them within individual articles, but my site is database driven, and it's hard to insert AdSense code in the middle of articles. Any suggestions?

I have the same trouble on this site, which is also database driven.
http://LocalHS.com

It was tough getting the ads to display in the middle of the data. :)

I didn't find any ads - at all on your site. Perhaps, you might want to try inserting adwords above the content, like we have done on this site?
http://BloPops.com

The adwords ads are on the line above the content and under the regular ads at the top of the page.

The site has only been up a couple of days, no I'm not certain how effective the ads will be yet. LOL but it's worth a try.

~Annette M. Hall
http://12PointDesign.com

[Matthew]

Ah, here I can definitely help! My site free-articles.gms3000.com has about 11,000 articles in its database, so going through one by one with Google ads would have been a nightmare.

Now you are using ASP and SQL databases, so the code that I used will be slightly different as I use PHP on my pages. Here is the code to start:


$pos = strpos($article_text, "<p>", intval(strlen($article_text) / 2));
echo substr($article_text, 0, $pos);
include("midad.php");
echo substr($article_text, $pos);


Basically $article_text is the entire article with HTML code and everything (including paragraph tags). This code searches for the paragraph tag nearest the middle of the text and then inserts google ads (midad.php contains the Google ad code) in its place.

Also, I would strongly recommend putting the large box ad at the bottom of every article.

My articles get me the highest eCPM of any of my pages (about three of four times higher to give you a good idea) so you have a lot of potential on your article pages, especially if you get a decent amount of traffic.

[Matthew]

Also, I would strongly recommend removing the text "Please click on the links below for additional resources:" at the bottom of your articles as this goes against Google's TOS.

[Julie Hood]

Hi, Matthew,

Thanks for sharing your code. I went to visit your site and the two articles I looked at did not include the ads in the middle (it was just a big blank spot). I am using Firefox if that makes a difference. The ads on the left did show up.

I'm curious. Do you get lots of organic traffic since you have so many articles?

Best,
Julie

[Matthew]

Actually, the site is relatively new, so Google isn't doing a great job of displaying ads yet. Hopefully in about a month's time I will be able to see ads on every article.

[cfrey]

Great suggestions! I removed the "click on these resources" text and added a 250x250 block ad to the bottom of my article pages. Hopefully this will work well!

[Bobette Kyle]

cfrey, I remember your site ... you wrote me a while back asking if you could use my brainstorming article ... I still think you have a wonderful Website (great example IMO of how to take a topic and build a site full of quality, useful information).

sidebar---->Julie, I should have figured I'd see you here. :D Hi! <----sidebar

OK, now that I got the chit chat out of the way...

Only you know where the line is between "effective AdSense" and "AdSense that overshadows the content too much" for you, so take the following for what it's worth (maybe not much :) )...

As I click through the site, the AdSense doesn't seem to be very prevalent...a single ad unit above the fold on some pages, none on others. My site also has a lot of information articles, and I found a dramatic improvement when I put a 336x280 box top left in the article area (in other words, start of the article is just to the right of the ad unit...no border, of course)...I put the code in a one row by one column table and float the table to the left so the text comes up and fills in the white space on the right of the ad. That way, the ad unit is above the fold and is where people naturally start reading the content.

ALSO - and this will work better for you than me since you have a few thousand more pages than I do - I put an AdSense for search box (with my site as the default search) above the fold, just below that left-floated AdSense unit, it reads "Haven't found what you want? Search below." Then the search box. It really increased my searches and helped people find other pages on the site they might have missed otherwise.

I tried putting an ad unit at the bottom, where there is a "hot zone" for a lot of people. Didn't work at all for me. My page eCPM went down. Goes to show you never know for sure unless you test. :)

As far as the database-driven content goes, there is a way to do that with includes (similar to the code Matthew gave). For people experienced in that sort of thing, I don't think it's very hard. Seems it would be worth paying a programmer to set it up initially...then tweak it yourself.

hth!