Making Sense of AdSense
I've shrunk the annoying ad to a small box now. I personally don't like web sites oversaturated with ads. I know this is a very good opportunity for many sites to make money with their ads, but it also decreases the value of appeal of the site. I usually ignore ads when I see them. But many sites are making money with ads now, it would be a wasted opportunity not to gain some revenue. However, you would want to make the ads subtle and non-intrusive. Like Cap@StopBuyingCrap.com says, have your ads "blend in your site template or layout" to make a compromise between appeal and revenue. I tried my best to match the ad background color to my blog's. I can't seem to find the exact code for the color palette, but it's close enough now. I hope it's all easier on the eyes now. Also, I can't add the ads on the right side of my blog, under Sponsors. Does AdSense limit the number of ads you can put up? I'll report the AdSense revenues tomorrow.
posted by Sean @ 5/16/2005 10:00:00 AM
6 Comments:
Google limits you to three AdSense panels per page, regardless of their size.
Also, I don't think you're making a tradeoff between appeal and revenue by making them blend in. As far as I'm concerned, blatant ads are a lot easier to ignore, which reduces clickthrough rates. Also, I don't often return to overly-ugly, unwieldy sites (not that yours is/was ugly) -- certainly retaining your visitors is a step toward increasing your revenue.
Stop by my site if you'd like to see an example of what is (hopefully) well-blended ads.
Also, take advantage of AdSense 'channels' to track how your various ad designs/placements perform.
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fivecentnickel.com
By the way, the easiest way to figure out your color scheme is to view the source code of you page and look for stuff like this:
color: #474B4E
These are the hexadecimal color codes in use. You may be able to figure out which color apply to which aspects of your page, or you could just change ad colors by trial and error until you match the background of your ad to the bacground of your page (you can enter these codes directly when you are managing your ad color palettes).
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fivecentnickel.com
How do you use the AdSense 'channels'?
Go into Ad Settings to create a new ad. Not far above "Your AdSense Code" you'll see a section for channel. You can create a named channels, such as GrowingMoneyTop for the top ad on your page. When you select this channel, it will stick a line of code into the "Your AdSense Code" section with a numerical identifier of which channel it is. Copy your ad code, drop it in your page, and you can then choose to view your reports either in aggregate or by channel.
This is a nice little utility for grabbing colors from your screen, and it's free.
Okay, I got the channels set up now. It's easier than I thought. Much credit to Nickel. I added Nickel to my link list.
Thanks Jennifer for that neat utility.
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