Last year I started a little experiment with building small Adsense websites, I haven’t written anything about that little experiment in a while so I thought I would share whats happening with it now .
Originally the sites where very bland, no sidebars, grey background, no images, just a headline block of ad code wrapped in text and very, very ugly.
If I remember correctly the sites didn’t perform at all. I may have made a few cents, but apart from getting indexed and receiving about a half dozen visitors a day without doing a single thing to the site, I pretty much considered the project a..(I don’t think failure is the right word), lets just say I was expecting to see better results than I got.
After about three months of using the original grey template I decided to improve the look of the site a little, So I added a nice header graphic, a sidebar, a nice tabbed clickbank widget, another adblock in the sidebar, an Amazon shopping cart in the sidebar as well and I changed the original 300 x 250 adblock for a 468 x 60 Banner inside the content area.
And guess what? Nothing, I didn’t see a single improvement, In fact the Adsense CTR actually got worse, So if I thought the project was bad before, now I was really starting to consider it a failure.
So I pretty much gave up on it, until about a month ago.
I decided to give it one more makeover to see if I could improve the income coming in from Adsense.
I pretty much left the look of the site alone, I didn’t change the colors, graphics, or anything except for the Ad placement and the location of the Amazon shop.
All I did was remove the Adsense ad from the sidebar and placed it just under the headline, I took out the banner, so my page has only got the one Ad block, and I put the Amazon products under the article.
After making these few small changes my results improved immediately. I think it was the very same day that I re-arranged the ad postioning that I saw the income improve.
The site is now making between $3 -$10 a week, with the same amount of traffic as it had before, when it was making less than $1 in a month.
So it just goes to show how important the ad placement is when putting ads on your sites.
Thanks for this excellent tip about adsense ad plactment. Many people building websites could benefit by following this advice.
I am in the process of standardizing my websites and using a single ad placement, as above.
Hi, I’ve also played around with Adsense and other ad networks, in part, to justify all of the time I spend playing around with websites.
I haven’t noticed a huge difference in terms of color schemes like yourself.
The trend I’ve observed is to have the a banner ad at the top either 728×90 or 468 x 70, then a sidebar square ad 300x, and either a skyscraper banner or an in content square ad at the top of the post.
I found the 468×70 ad (standard size for Hybrid-News) to be completely non-revenue generating. The 728×90 has done much better. As well, I found that my websites don’t do well with ads above or below the content as some people recommend. Footer ads 728×90 also have extremely low CTRs on my blogs.
The best results I’ve had so far is with the 300 square ad, but lowered down to 3rd widget on the sidebar.
Either way, we’re still talking about enough money to buy a dinner at a cheap restaurant. It’s amazing to think that some people make a living with Adsense.
Hi Jeremy I found you on whitehatcrews blog. Great tips which I will try to do in few days to see if i will impruve my revenue. For now its poor
Im getting 1 click per 2 days 
on 60 visitors per day, 120 in 2 days 
Its low visitors but 1 click??? its too less… my ads are from 0,09 to 0,30
Can you tell me how many visitors you had per day to make 3-10 per week?
As far as I can remember those sites were only getting a handful of visitors a day, about 10 maybe 15 at most.
I had about five or six of those sites going, but I let most of them fall by the wayside and never bothered renewing the domain names.
I found after a while traffic dried up and so did the revenue.
I am getting back into building some new sites with a different outlook these days, I am more about building bigger sites and testing different ad placements.
I have also been looking at the most popular blogs on technorati and looking at were they have adsense. I have noticed, a lot have their ads in the same location as I had in these little adsense sites I had build.
I can only suggest you keep changing the ad positions until you figure out what works best for your site.
BTW…
thanks for the comment.