Blogs have a specific type of reader, a specific layout and specific content more often than not – and with those specifications they have specific needs when it comes to optimizing AdSense/YPN ads on the blog.

We’ve been experimenting across a couple of blogs lately with various AdSense strategies and these are some of the tips we’ve come accross/discovered for ourselves.

Please feel free to comment on our tips or leave your own! Let us know if you’re CTR/CPC went up!

Blacklist MFA Sites

Firstly, I’m sure you’re aware of a thing called a made-for-adsense site. These are sites which pay 1cent a click to get users through AdSense, and do nothing but advertise high paying keywords to earn more.

Having these ads on your site is useless as almost no one will click them, and if they do you’ll be paid out very little. You can manually blacklist ads that you suspect are like this, usually by blocking ads with your Competitive Ad Filter for places that give free hosting.

An example list would be starting off with blocking blogspot.com, wordpress.com, geocities.com etc. Alternatively you can have a service generate you a list such as AdsBlacklist.com

Blend

Blend your ads into your pages – make the background and the border colour the same as the post it will show in. Make your links colour the same as the links on your page. This will help keep your look and feel nice as well as get users to read the adverts, increasing CTR (click through rate).

Don’t show images next to an ad in an attempt to mask the fact that its an ad as you will get banned! Blending however is fine.

Position

Blocks have specific layout and you should not forget where you users eyes will be going when positioning ads. Included below is a the best layout for the front page or categories/archives pages on a blog

Naturally, this isn’t designed for a single post though which is where you’ll make most of your earnings! Don’t forget that! The reason for this is that users from search engines won’t often come to your front page, but to a specific post. In that post make sure you think of where their eyes will be and position your adverts within.

The most common strategy with blogs is to have a large square (300px) at the top of the post as these are the most clicked. If you engage your users and get comments also have one near the comments.

Link Units

Use link units wisely – these are typically best placed by navigation links on your blog. One click on a link unit can result in many clicks on the page that shows after that! Also remember you can have 2 link units and that doesn’t count against your 3 ad limit!

Section Targetting

You want the ads that show to be about the post you have written – not about your blogroll or your sidebar content etc. For that reason you need to use section targetting!

This means editing your theme, and inserting comments before and after your post content from Google. What that does is tell adsense to base your ads on what you have written inside the tags – focussing your adverts automatically! To learn how to do this read Googles Section Targetting page.

Popularity: 15% [?]