Bad ad placements and colors will not get you the money which you could be getting out of your website if you would place them correctly…. colors are important as well – however placements are even more crucial. In our previous post about the best AdSense placements we discussed various placements and ad designs including colors – using case studies and theories as our backup.

Update: It seems that the discussed site’s layout and css has been fixed. However our optimization tips still apply apart from the site’s design changes.

Bad AdSense Placements

How to Fix bad Ad Placements

As always, this will be included in our complete AdSense guide and it will serve as an example for other webmasters who publish ads. We made a list below which includes all the implementations suggested by us. You can use this a reference for your own website(s).

• Footer Advertisements

Probably the most infamous placement for an ad – the footer. Placing your ad here will not only get it NOT noticed, it will also take 1 contextual ad away from the 3 you can have per page. We can understand why people place their ads there, thrown away in corners. The ads are ugly – and in most cases destroy the layout and design of your website. We can only agree, however if you joined an advertisement program, you want to make money online – which won’t be possible if you tuck the ads away in the bottom. Do a little reading on the best adsense placements post we blogged earlier this week and you’ll understand why.

• Sidebar Placements

The sidebar has many placements for any kind of ad, be it direct advertising, affiliate or CPC ads. The problem with the sidebar is that CPC ads will only perform if they are placed above the fold. In this case we talk about AdSense, so blending your ad in the sidebar is important as well.
“Sponsors” and “Advertisement” is often used as a title above the ad in the sidebar. This is used because the site has a large readerbase and it will be easier for them to distinguish content from advertisements. Other sides which get a lot of search traffic would benefit more from removing the title above the ad, making the ad looking more like content, resulting in higher CTR.

Also be aware, the more down on the page you place your ads (especially skyscrapers) the less they get clicked because most visitors don’t scroll down that far. As you can see on the heatmap, placing them above the fold will get you the most clicks because they are placed in the hot zones.

• Coloring your Ad

Red title color, black text and a violet url color. Awesome combination to draw the attention to the ad. However it will most likely scare away the visitor from clicking it because it looks like an ad. Visitors do not like to get monetized, do you? That’s why we need to blend it with our content, making it not look like an ad. Picking a red title color while every other link on that site is blue/black is definitely a good way to make an ad outstanding but not make it perform.

As part of our complete AdSense guide on DuoBlogger we devoted several post – each more progressively detailed – to coloring your adsense units.

• Different Ad Formats

Leaderboards are, although under performing, still as popular as in web 1.0. It is important to understand why leaderboards died several years ago since the internet made it’s big boom. The average internet user got used to anything banner related advertising, making them not click the banners anymore. Have a look on Jakob Nielsen’s Banner Blindness research, and scroll down to the images. What can we see here?

Banner Blindness - notice the ads outlined in green

The people that took part in the experiment all took a little peek at the leaderboard and skyscrapers but weren’t interested in it at all. Now let’s get back to this – the main reason people visit your website is because of the content you share. Now wouldn’t it be smart (note: image) to insert ads inside your content, making it more likely people won’t read over them because all their attention is focussed there.

As of web 2.0 – rectangles and squares are the new and best performing ad formats.

You gotta decide between PPC (also known as CPC, stands for Pay per click), PPA (also known as CPA, stands for pay per affiliate and CPM (PPM, pay per impression). Some blogs tend to work better with CPA programs, others with CPC programs and others with CPM programs.

I made the experience that CPC programs run best when you have a niche blog. Your blog should not be about different topics, only about one. That way the CPC-programs can easily put related advertisements on your website which then tend to be clicked by your visitors more often. One very good advertising program is Google Adsense (you probably know it, if not you must be a newby lol). Because of the intense amout of advertisers Google is able to put extremely relative ads on your websites. As said before, the advertisements are appealing to the visitors and will consequently get clicks. To make it a little easier to understand: Let’s say your blog is about lawyers in a district of New York – there is an advertiser interested in putting advertisements on websites about exactly that topic. The ads are shown the user and they click on them because they were looking for a lawyer. Always keep in mind that the success to Google Adsense is the niche relevancy and the amount of clicks. The more clicks, the more money. The relevanter the better earnings per click (general sites suffer from smart pricing). I have mainly worked with Google as CPC program, but alternatives are Yahoo, Bidvertiser and some others of which I currently forgot the names.

The next category of advertisement are CPM ads. Those advertisements will get you money per impression. Sounds great because it is independent on clicks, however, those advertisement programs usually tend to pay out less. They do not have as targeted ads as the CPC programs, therefore do not have a large ROI (return on investment) for the advertiser. For me they pay out around 50% of what google-adsense pays. Usually you are forced to use those programs simply because you either got banned on adsense, or notice that your money per click gets lowered drastically. I worked togehter with some of them and made best experiences with: Adsdaq and Tribalfusion. If you need wellpaying pop-unders then Valueclick is the network to go. Their pop-unders pay out like on no other network. Cpxinteractive is good if you want income without really doing something. Just place their code and you can expect medium-earnings. The prior networks pay out well if you dedicate some time to play around a little. I will be writing a post about ad tiering for more money soon (helps to get more money out of CPM ads).

An alternative might be CPA advertisements for you. There some niches that are known to payout very well with affiliate advertisements. The dog niche for example will make you rich with CPA ads… You probably ask yourself why – in fact I did so too… It is fairly easy to understand – look at the audience of people that are interested in dogs. Most of them are 30+ and already have an income. Those people have money and usually (at least in Western-countries) do everything possible for the health and good of their pet. Those people are eager to buy products, the conversion rate is extremely high. An example: A dog is suffering from a disease – the person owning the dog searches for help on the internet and then finds your website. The person sees an advertisement related directly to her problem. The chance is high that she will click it and perhaps buy the product. So if the product costs around 500$ (some people pay that for the good of their dog) – then you get around 15% – what is 75$. Some friends told me that their sites where extremely well converting with a conversion rate of almost 5%! Wish I had such a blog and could run CPA advertisements hehe. Popular ones are the Ebay Commission Junction, Amazon-ads or Google Adsense. I have once been trying Zanox – but they scammed me around 200$. I am still waiting for a payout. Would love to know if you made better experiences with them.

CPA advertisements really depend on the niche – for example on my main website (it is about computer games – D3scene.com) – I would not be able to make any profit from Affiliate advertisements. The audience is maily around 15 years old. Most of the users do not even have a credit-card or paypal account. The chance that they really buy the product is very low. And the money behind a computer-game is not higher than 50$ – making it unattractive for gaming niches to run CPA ads.

Another possibility if your blog is about a specific software would be to use Pay-Per-Install advertisements. Those advertisements get you money whenever someone installs software. However, you will need to merge the software’s .exe with some kind of sponsor program .exe – which will make the audience of your blog never come back. Trust me, if a website tries to install crap on my computer I will NEVER even open them again. Zangocasg is the most popular one.

All in all you need to experiment – there is no 100% perfect advertising solution for your blog. The advertising niche changes every year and has new products which might increase your money. I recommend you to try out different advertisement programs and to see which one performs best for your blog. Not that I know everything, but I already know a decent amount – still – there is so much that influences your advertisements and I can not tell you the perfect solution. As stated above – experiment.