Apr 15 2007

The best converting adsense ads

Posted by visio in Google Adsense/Adwords, Seo Articles
0 Comments

From time to time I get the question “what is the best performing/converting adsense ad blocks?”. Some of you may have heard of ad blindness, if not read the article located in the right sidebar of this blog. There are different ad blocks that perform better than others. You can double, triple or even quadruple your adsense earnings by just changing the look of your ads but changing the type of adsense, the format of the adsense ads can even have a larger effect on your earnings. Some blocks just do not perform any longer yet are still used. In this article I will show you some of the ad blocks that are basically ignored now days, the adsense blocks that perform the best and how to best implement them into your site. These ideas can be used for Yahoo or msn advertising however I think they will work best with google.

First before we even go into the types of adsense blocks I think we really need to look at what type of site we have. This can have a large impact on whether or not the ads will perform well. A good way for blogs to get users to click ads is to review products/tools and the ads will likely target those tools. If your review is good they may click the ad and you can make a decent profit that way. Make sure your reviews are always accurate and unbiased. If the tool is bad, review it as such. Your reputation is worth more than a click.

One thing you must really think about is the type of information you provide. Good blogs that provide the information the visitor wants tend to not get many adsense clicks, afterall if the user got what he or she wanted why would they click the ads? I am not recommending providing useless information so that users will click ads. Some sites do this and they will never make it to the next level because of it. Webmsaters will link to the good stuff so provide the good stuff. Use Google Analytics to track these sites and identify whether the users spend alot of time at the page reading the article or if they bounce fast. If they tend to stick around a while you may want to implement ways of selling products/tools/services to them instead of adsense. Of course you can’t please everyone and there will always be those who don’t like your article and will click the adsense ads anyways.

Okay, okay just give us the info on what ad blocks convert the best…
First let me point out ads that perform very low, ads I highly recommend you DO NOT use.

468 x 60 (banner ad)
160 x 600 (wide skyscraper)
120 x 600 (skyscraper)

The above ads have the lowest CTR(click-through-rate).

The following are the best CTR(click-through-rate) adsens ads

336 x 280 (large rectangle)
300 x 250 (rectangle)
250 x 250 (square)

I find these perform the best if placed inside content. For instance in the middle or end of an article. Afterall if they read the article and are still looking for info instead of clicking the back button they may click an ad. I implemented these type of ads into a couple of my sites and have seen marked increase in CTR.

Do the colors matter?
Should my ads blend into the content or stick out? My answer is usually neither. You don’t usually want your ads to stick out or to blend in too well. With content ads such as the above mentioned it is good to have a color that flows with the rest of the scheme as the title of the ads. I also find borders and backgrounds lower CTR.

If you place the ads near middle or the end of your article and use a color which makes the user realize its not part of the article but the color still flows with the site I find that the conversions are much higher. Of course the type of site also plays a major factor in whether or not a user will click under certain conditions. The middle tends to be best because if they don’t read the whole article they may never see the ads, likewise ads at the bottom of sites tend to have much lower CTR then ads placed at the top of the site. I also find that the following as perform very well at the top end of alot of sites.

(468×15) Displays up to 5 links


(468×15_4) Displays up to 4 links


(728×15) Displays up to 5 links


(728×15_4) Displays up to 4 links

If you place these ads near your banner they can have a very high CTR. They also seem to pay a little more overall than the other ads tend to.

This is a short article and I will probably be writing more on adsense later but I do have a few good articles on the subject already on this blog in case your interested. This is the most popular: How to make money with google adsense