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Split Testing Your AdSense Ads
June 2, 2008
Hey everyone today I want to shed some light on AdSense ad optimization tactics. Google AdSense is the largest, most popular pay per click network to date. Others beg to differ, but stats rank it on top, whether or not someone thinks there is a better pay per click network is their own opinion. Ad optimization is very important. Simply trying to place ads in the places they “look” the best won’t do the job. Just because an ad looks pretty in a certain spot and makes you some money doesn’t mean that it’s the BEST spot, or the spot that can generate the most income.
Another variable responsible for how many MORE clicks you get, can be the ad unit size and color. In my opinion (and many experts agree) it’s best to have an ad with no border that blends with the background of the site, as well having the links on the ad be the same color as the links on the site. A very big variable is location – whether the ad is in the content, header, sidebar, or footer of the site. A mix of all these characters is what can determine which ads generate more clicks. Give all your ads channels, then collect and analyze all date retrieved.
A speedy process to testing different ads in the SAME location to save you time, is displaying 2 different ad units in the same spot – one showing 50% of the time and the other showing 50% of the time or whatever you desire.
How can you do this? Well let’s all thank Darren Rowse from ProBlogger for providing us with a very helpful script that can help you test and compare your ads faster then you normally could.
The best way to do this is to test the same size ad unit but with different color schemes to see which gets a higher CTR (click through rate.)
It’s called A/B testing. Here’s the code you need to do it.
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var random_number = Math.random();
if (random_number < .5){
//your first ad unit code goes here
} else {
//your second ad unit code goes here
}
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”></script>
note: you need to replace the bolded lines with your 2 different AdSense codes.
Place this in your template in the spot where you want the ads to show and rotate. This will allow you to rotate 2 different ads, one will be shown to one visitor and the other will be shown to the following visitor- 50/50. If you would like to change this and show a new ad less/more simply adjust the “.5″ in the code which represents the % of how often the ads are shown, i.e if you want your new ad your testing out to show 60% of the time you would change it from .5 to .6 – Something else you might want to do before selecting your ad code is giving each ad it’s own channel, so you can track which ad is performing best.
Doing this greatly benefits you in determining which ad unit will do better for you. This also saves you a ton of time and prevents you from having to go back and forth all the time. It practically automates ad testing.
Remember to back up your templates in case you make an error,so you can quickly revert back to the way it was before. Hope you guys discover which ad makes the most money for you, put it to use it’s definitely worth figuring out!
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