AdSense is the most popular ad network on the planet and for good reason: It’s technologically robust, has a great pool of advertisers, and is absolutely free. No wonder so many publisher sign up for it.
Unfortunately, for most, it ends right there — a vast majority of publishers make little effort to optimize AdSense once they’ve initially set it up with one or two ads units randomly placed anywhere on their website. This is a cause for concern because the lack of ad optimization equates to a direct loss of potential revenue. But wait, what is ad optimization anyway? Glad you asked.
What is ad optimization?
Optimization simply means taking the necessary steps to ensure that you’re making the most of your ad inventory by maximizing revenue while at the same time providing an optimum user experience to your visitors.
Why optimize ads?
Optimizing your ads is crucial when it comes to meeting your business goals whether that may be increasing your overall ad revenue, improving the usability of your website, increasing the visibility of your ads, or any other specific goal that you may have.
1. Test different ad styles
Choosing the right ad style for your text ad units helps improve the visibility of your ads and reduce the effect of banner blindness wherein users just skip right over your ads. There are three main recommended strategies to style your ads:
- To blend ads, make the background and border color of your ads match the background of the web page. This works well with pages with a white background.
- To complement ads, use colors that already exist on your site, but don’t match the background and borders exactly where the ads are placed.
- To contrast ads, choose colors that stand out against the background color of the webpage. This style is best suited for dark pages as it makes the ads more visible.
2. Test different ad sizes
While we are big advocates of meticulously testing the size, color, and placement of your ads to figure out the setup that works best for you… there are some form factors that almost always outperform others.
As a general rule, wide ads tend to perform better than tall ads. This is because readers consume information in “thought units”, i.e., several words at a time. Tall ad units break the flow of reading as the user has to move to the next line to read the complete text, this gives wide units an inherent advantage when it comes to conversion rates.
Based on extensive user interaction date, Google has found that the most effective sizes for ad units are the 336×280 large rectangle, the 300×250 medium rectangle, the 728×90 leaderboard, the 300×600 half page, and on mobile the 320×100 large mobile banner.
Tip: Last year, AdSense launched two new ad sizes, which are 970 x 250 Billboard and the 300 x 1050 Portrait. You should give these two a run because apart from the new bigger creatives that are especially designed for them, they also possess the ability to run text ads and smaller display ads within their larger frames — thereby increasing ad competition and increasing your revenue potential.
3. Test different ad placements
Apart from ad styles and ad sizes, the placement or location of ads is another factor that can have a huge impact on your overall revenue numbers.
The first step to understanding the best location for placing your ads is to figure out where your users are spending a majority of their time on your website. You can get some actionable user behavior data on this if you link your Google AdSense account to your Google Analytics account.
Another important thing to note is that an ad setup that may work for an online technology magazine may for work as well for, let’s say, a blog about football. Similarly, just because a particular ad setup is working great on your homepage doesn’t mean that it’s the best setup for individual web pages too.
The two areas where you’ll be placing ads are “above the fold”, i.e., the part of a web page that a user can see without scrolling, and “below the fold”, i.e., the part of a web page that a user has to scroll down to access.
Diving further down, you’ll typically be looking at placing ads in the header, sidebar, inside the content, or under the content. The only way to find out what works best is to setup ads once, rotate them, and then measure the performance of one configuration against the other.
4. Deploy multiple ad units
Whenever possible, you should opt to display more than one ad unit on your web pages as this increases the probability of the user clicking on at least one of them.
According to Google policies, you can put up to three standard AdSense for content ad units, three link units and two AdSense for search boxes on each page of your site.
Maximizing ad coverage in this manner is especially beneficial to website owners whose web pages tend to be longer than usual and require a fair bit of scrolling, giving the ad network the opportunity to serve more than one targeted ads to the user on the page.
5. Use link units for small spaces
Link units work a little differently from content ad units; they display a list of topics relevant to the content on your site, when a user clicks on a link unit — they are taken to a results page where they multiple ads from advertisers, payout happens if the user ends up clicking on any of these ads.
Although it’s a slightly more roundabout way of generating revenue, it’s a great option when space is at a premium because link units take the least amount of space compared to any other type of ad units.
They are also pretty distinctive and thus more likely to evoke action from the user. Three link units are allowed by Google and you should make full use of them by placing them in unusual and interesting locations throughout your website.
6. Show both text and display ads
In Google AdSense, you have the option to display only text ads, only display ads, and both text and display ads.
Google strongly recommends that you allow the network to show both text and display ads as a means to maximize your revenue potential. The reason behind why this works is simple: Each ad, whether text or display, participates in a bidding war to claim your ad inventory, and the ad space goes to the highest bidder.
If you disable the serving of either text or display ads, you effectively wipe out roughly half of the advertisers bidding for space — resulting in significantly lower revenue yields than what might have been possible with both options enabled.
7. Don’t filter ads too much
AdSense allows publishers to filter ads by URL or categories. This is helpful in case there’s a conflict of interest or if the publisher does not, for any reason, wish to display a particular creative or ads from a specific advertiser.
Although AdSense allows publishers to filter up to 200 different websites, it’s advisable to keep this list down to the minimum amount possible because reducing the number of ads that can bid for your ad space equates to a potential loss in earnings.
Filter only that what you absolutely must and let the rest run.
8. Use pagination for content
Since AdSense doesn’t allow auto ad refreshing (it has to be user-initiated, when anyone rarely does), publishers are left to their own devices when it comes to making the most of new and existing content.
If your text posts tend to run long, a great idea is to setup pagination so that the user can view the next page by clicking on a link. If your website runs on a content management system like WordPress, you can just install a plugin to enable pagination.
This has two benefits: From the user’s perspective, it eliminates the need for endless scrolling and breaks down the post into manageable chunks more suited for consumption; from an ad optimization perspective, this is effective because a new set of ads is served each time the page is refreshed — leading to a direct jump in revenue from CPM ads and an increased probability of click on a CPC ad.
9. A/B test your ad units regularly
With so many different ad styles, sizes, and locations… it can be difficult to determine which exact combination is the right one for your website and its users. A/B testing is a method that allows you to eliminate the guesswork from this and give you actual data that you can rely on to make a decision.
The A and B in A/B testing as simply indicators for two different scenarios that you would like to test out. For instance, you might want to test whether a text ad unit performs better with green as its background color or blue. Using A/B testing, you can set up an experiment, wait for a data, and conclusively know which color works better.
In Google AdSense, you can conduct A/B testing by defining your own testing parameters in the “Experiments” tab. Within the test, you also have the option of selecting how to split the traffic between the test variants, although it is advised that you let AdSense take care of that on its own.
10. Automate your ad testing
As great as A/B testing is, it can get cumbersome real quick when you need to go beyond testing multiple parameters instead of just testing one ad variant against another.
Taking the example mentioned above, if you need to test the performance of a text ad unit based on its background color being green or blue — that’s a simple enough test that you can just setup once and wait for the result to come rolling in.
Now imagine a scenario where you need to test out three different ad units for multiple ad styles, ad sizes, and ad locations, and you can begin to grasp the complexity you will encounter in manually running such a test simply because of the permutations and combinations of ad configurations involved.
This is where automated testing comes in. We envisioned and created AdPushup as a tool that helps publishers automate this entire process and run these tests on autopilot based on machine learning algorithms with minimal human intervention.
Once the initial condition is set, our tool automatically starts serving different ad variations, measures the performance for each one of them, and intelligently splits and drives the bulk of the traffic towards the winning variant — ensuring that the publisher’s ad inventory is always in optimum use.
中文：
Adsense是这个星球上最受欢迎的广告网络，理由很充分：它技术强大，拥有大量广告商，而且绝对免费。难怪有那么多出版商报名参加。
不幸的是，对大多数人来说，它就这样结束了——一旦最初在网站上任意位置随机放置了一两个广告单元，绝大多数出版商就很少努力优化Adsense。这是一个值得关注的原因，因为缺乏广告优化等同于潜在收入的直接损失。但是等等，广告优化到底是什么？很高兴你这么问。
什么是广告优化？
优化只是指采取必要的步骤，以确保您最大限度地发挥您的广告库存最大化收入，同时提供最佳的用户体验给您的访客。
为什么要优化广告？
优化你的广告对于实现你的商业目标是至关重要的，无论是增加你的整体广告收入，提高你的网站的可用性，增加你的广告的可见性，还是你可能拥有的任何其他特定目标。
一。测试不同的广告风格
为文本广告单元选择正确的广告样式有助于提高广告的可视性，并减少横幅盲的影响，用户只需跳过你的广告即可。有三种主要的推荐广告样式策略：
要混合广告，请使广告的背景色和边框色与网页的背景色匹配。这对白色背景的页面很有用。
为了补充广告，使用你网站上已经存在的颜色，但是不匹配广告放置的背景和边界。
若要对比广告，请选择与网页背景颜色相对应的颜色。这种风格最适合黑色页面，因为它使广告更明显。
2.测试不同的广告大小
虽然我们大力提倡仔细测试广告的大小、颜色和位置，以找出最适合您的设置…但有一些形式因素几乎总是优于其他因素。
一般来说，广告商往往比高告商表现得更好，这是因为读者以“思维单位”来消费信息，即一次消费几个词。高广告单元打破了阅读的流程，因为用户必须移动到下一行才能阅读完整的文本，这就给了宽单元在转换率方面固有的优势。
根据大量的用户交互数据，谷歌发现广告单元最有效的尺寸是336×280大矩形、300×250中矩形、728×90排行榜、300×600半页和移动320×100大移动横幅。
提示：去年，adsense推出了两种新的广告尺寸，分别是970 x 250广告牌和300 x 1050人像。你应该给这两个运行，因为除了新的更大的创意是专门为他们设计的，他们也有能力运行文本广告和较小的显示广告在其更大的框架-从而增加广告竞争和增加你的收入潜力。
三。测试不同的广告位置
除了广告风格和广告大小，广告的位置和位置是另一个因素，可以对你的整体收入数字产生巨大影响。
了解投放广告的最佳位置的第一步是弄清楚你的用户大部分时间都在你的网站上花在哪里。如果你将你的google adsense帐户链接到你的google analytics帐户，你可以从中获得一些可操作的用户行为数据。
另一个需要注意的重要事情是，一个可能为在线技术杂志工作的广告设置也可能为一个关于足球的博客工作。类似地，仅仅因为一个特定的广告设置在你的主页上运行良好并不意味着它也是单个网页的最佳设置。
你要投放广告的两个区域是“折叠上方”，即用户无需滚动即可看到的网页部分，以及“折叠下方”，即用户必须向下滚动才能访问的网页部分。
再往下看，你通常会看到在标题、侧边栏、内容内或内容下放置广告。找出最有效的方法是设置一次广告，旋转它们，然后测量一个配置对另一个配置的性能。
Adsense是这个星球上最受欢迎的广告网络，理由很充分：它技术强大，拥有大量广告商，而且绝对免费。难怪有那么多出版商报名参加。
不幸的是，对大多数人来说，它就这样结束了——一旦最初在网站上任意位置随机放置了一两个广告单元，绝大多数出版商就很少努力优化Adsense。这是一个值得关注的原因，因为缺乏广告优化等同于潜在收入的直接损失。但是等等，广告优化到底是什么？很高兴你这么问。
什么是广告优化？
优化只是指采取必要的步骤，以确保您最大限度地发挥您的广告库存最大化收入，同时提供最佳的用户体验给您的访客。
为什么要优化广告？
优化你的广告对于实现你的商业目标是至关重要的，无论是增加你的整体广告收入，提高你的网站的可用性，增加你的广告的可见性，还是你可能拥有的任何其他特定目标。
一。测试不同的广告风格
为文本广告单元选择正确的广告样式有助于提高广告的可视性，并减少横幅盲的影响，用户只需跳过你的广告即可。有三种主要的推荐广告样式策略：
要混合广告，请使广告的背景色和边框色与网页的背景色匹配。这对白色背景的页面很有用。
为了补充广告，使用你网站上已经存在的颜色，但是不匹配广告放置的背景和边界。
若要对比广告，请选择与网页背景颜色相对应的颜色。这种风格最适合黑色页面，因为它使广告更明显。
2.测试不同的广告大小
虽然我们大力提倡仔细测试广告的大小、颜色和位置，以找出最适合您的设置…但有一些形式因素几乎总是优于其他因素。
一般来说，广告商往往比高告商表现得更好，这是因为读者以“思维单位”来消费信息，即一次消费几个词。高广告单元打破了阅读的流程，因为用户必须移动到下一行才能阅读完整的文本，这就给了宽单元在转换率方面固有的优势。
根据大量的用户交互数据，谷歌发现广告单元最有效的尺寸是336×280大矩形、300×250中矩形、728×90排行榜、300×600半页和移动320×100大移动横幅。
提示：去年，adsense推出了两种新的广告尺寸，分别是970 x 250广告牌和300 x 1050人像。你应该给这两个运行，因为除了新的更大的创意是专门为他们设计的，他们也有能力运行文本广告和较小的显示广告在其更大的框架-从而增加广告竞争和增加你的收入潜力。
三。测试不同的广告位置
除了广告风格和广告大小，广告的位置和位置是另一个因素，可以对你的整体收入数字产生巨大影响。
了解投放广告的最佳位置的第一步是弄清楚你的用户大部分时间都在你的网站上花在哪里。如果你将你的google adsense帐户链接到你的google analytics帐户，你可以从中获得一些可操作的用户行为数据。
另一个需要注意的重要事情是，一个可能为在线技术杂志工作的广告设置也可能为一个关于足球的博客工作。类似地，仅仅因为一个特定的广告设置在你的主页上运行良好并不意味着它也是单个网页的最佳设置。
你要投放广告的两个区域是“折叠上方”，即用户无需滚动即可看到的网页部分，以及“折叠下方”，即用户必须向下滚动才能访问的网页部分。
再往下看，你通常会看到在标题、侧边栏、内容内或内容下放置广告。找出最有效的方法是设置一次广告，旋转它们，然后测量一个配置对另一个配置的性能。
8个。对内容使用分页
由于AdSense不允许自动广告刷新（它必须是用户发起的，当任何人很少这样做）时，出版商在充分利用新的和现有的内容时，将自己的设备留给自己。
如果您的文本帖子往往运行很长，一个好主意是设置分页，以便用户可以通过单击链接查看下一页。如果你的网站运行在像wordpress这样的内容管理系统上，你可以安装一个插件来启用分页。
这有两个好处：从用户的角度来看，它消除了无休止滚动的需要，并将文章分解成更适合消费的可管理的块；从广告优化的角度来看，这是有效的，因为每次刷新页面时都会提供一组新的广告-导致CPM收入的直接跃升广告和点击CPC广告的可能性增加。
9号。A/B定期测试你的广告单元
有这么多不同的广告风格，大小和位置…很难确定哪一个确切的组合是适合你的网站和它的用户。A/B测试是一种方法，它允许您从中消除猜测，并提供您可以依赖的实际数据来做出决策。
a/b测试中的a和b仅仅是两个不同场景的指示符，您想测试一个文本广告单元是以绿色为背景色，还是以蓝色为背景色，效果更好。使用A/B测试，您可以设置一个实验，等待一个数据，并最终知道哪个颜色更好。
在google adsense中，可以通过在“实验”选项卡中定义自己的测试参数来进行a/b测试。在测试中，您还可以选择如何在测试变体之间分割流量，尽管建议您让adsense自行处理。
10个。自动化广告测试
虽然A/B测试非常棒，但是当您需要超越测试多个参数而不仅仅是测试一个广告变体时，它会变得非常麻烦，而且速度非常快。
以上面提到的例子为例，如果您需要基于文本广告单元的背景色为绿色或蓝色来测试它的性能，这是一个非常简单的测试，您只需设置一次，然后等待结果出现。
现在设想一个场景，您需要测试三个不同的广告单元，用于多个广告样式、广告大小和广告位置，并且您可以开始掌握在手动运行这样的测试时会遇到的复杂性，这仅仅是因为所涉及的广告配置的排列和组合。
这就是自动化测试的由来。我们设想并创建了adpushup作为一个工具，帮助出版商自动化整个过程，并在基于机器学习算法的自动驾驶仪上运行这些测试，只需最少的人工干预。
一旦设置了初始条件，我们的工具就会自动开始为不同的广告变体提供服务，测量每一个变体的性能，并智能地将大部分流量分流并驱动到获胜的变体-确保出版商的广告库存始终处于最佳使用状态。