Maximising Adsense CTR and best paying Ads

To get the best income from Ads when using Adsense ( or any other Ad serving programs) you must regularly monitor which ad units are getting the best CTR ( Click Through Rate) and also monitor which ads are earning you the most per click. With these two pieces of information you can make sure that you are getting the best from your Ads.

People sometimes think that Adsense automatically matches the best paying Ads to the Ad unit on your page which has the best CTR. You may be surprised to hear that this isn't the case. lets see why this might be important by looking at an example.

Consider a web page which has two ad blocks. A and B. Ad block A comes first in the HTML of this web page - so Adsense delivers the best paying ads to this Ad unit and lower paying ads to Ad unit B. Lets imagine that Ad Unit A is a banner ad unit at the top of the page and Ad unit B is an ad unit at the bottom of a post. So far so good then eh?

Hmm. What if Ad unit B actually has a better CTR than Ad unit A? If you think about it this is a real problem. What you want is that the best paying ads are shown in the ad unit that gets the best CTR - but this is not what happens!

Because Ad unit A comes first in the page HTML code Adsense will serve the best paying Ads to that ad unit - so you could be losing out on significant ad revenue!

So that's the problem - what is the solution?

What you need to do is to ensure that the Ad Unit with the best CTR is the first one that appears in the actual source code of your page. If your ads are placed inside

 <div> 

elements then you can make sure that this ad block appears first in your ad code but then use CSS positioning for example to make sure that when the ad displays it appears in the position that you want.

This is a really important tip to get the best of your AdSense so if you want to maximise your income from AdSense using this tip then you must understand CSS positioning.

Getting targeted Ads for "negative review" posts

Reading a recent post got me thinking about how you can ensure that you get the right Ads served to you if you are writing posts which are negatively reviewing a product or service.

The Negative post Problem
Now articles which negatively review a product may be of great interest to your readers. It may serve to warn them about the pitfalls of a product or service or tell them that its a scam or advise them of things that can go wrong and that they should be careful about. The problem is that the Adsense bot will look for keywords and won't understand the negative context of the post/article.

The result is that you will end up seeing Ads that are triggered by the keywords relating to the product and so your page will be filled with Ads for the very products that you are negatively reviewing. The problem of course is that this may reduce your potential income from Adsense.

The Negative Post solution
The solution is to use a combination of techniques.
First - make sure that within your post you include a section where you make some positive comments or discussion about some alternative products or services.
Second - use section targeting to highlight those sections so that Adsense targeting gives more weight to those parts of your post. (remember that section targeting needs a reasonable amount of content to work so your positive section needs to be of reasonable length.
Third - if section targeting alone doesn't work then you can use the competitive filter to weed out those ads that persist.
Fourth - don't sweat it too much. Some visitors will click the negatively reviewed products anyway just to see what the fuss is about!