(Photo Credit: Tomitheos) It’s time to kick it up a notch in the “$0.30 to $300 / Day on Google AdSense” series. Today I’m going to cover another important factor to increase you click through rate (CTR) from our Money Making Formula:  $ = V x CTR x CPC formula. If you’re not sure what this means or if you want a quick recap on the other posts in the series here is what we’ve covered so far:

V

1. The formula for AdSense success: $ = V x CTR x CPC
2. Have other people write the content for you

CTR

1. Location, Location, Location
2. Don’t Make Ads Look Like Ads!

Today’s lesson is…

Focus on Ad Relevancy

If the website content you’ve written focuses on working from home opportunities, for example, and the ads that show up on your AdSense are related to vacation deals you won’t get many people clicking on the ads because they are not relevant to the text around it. The bottom line is your CTR will fall off the cliff and you won’t earn very much money.

Now if you can get your ads to match up with your content you have a great opportunity to make some serious money. People who come to your website for working from home ideas expect to see related opportunities and they will click on the ads if you give them what they want.

“Again, if your ads aren’t targeted to the content on your page then you’re not going to get a high CTR which means less in your pocket.”

Here is how to help Google show only relevant ads to your readers:

1) Title Tag, URL, Headline Tag

The title tag, URL and headline tags are among the most important “onsite” factors that Google looks at. Why are they so important? Because you can only use so many characters in each. You’re not going to have a title that is a paragraph long – it’s one sentence or sometimes just a few keywords so what you use better have a high relevancy to the content on the page.

It’s best to keep your title, url and headline tag as focused as possible and not try to get too fancy. Using common expressions in these important areas, for example can hurt not only your relevancy but also reduce your search engine traffic.

2) Keep Articles Focused

With each article on your site you want to have at least 300 words (I always target 500 words) for search engine purposes and for ad relevancy it’s important that you keep your content focused on one topic. If you jump around from topic to topic within the same article Google’s AdSense filter will have a hard time determining which ads to show in your ad units.

Again, if your ads aren’t targeted to the content on your page then you’re not going to get a high CTR which means less in your pocket.

“A final tip is to use the section targeting option that Google gives you. Section targeting allows you to tell Google what you feel is important in your article that you want them to pay attention to.”

3) Text Around Ad

Another important element to pay attention to is the text that is around your ad. For example, if you have your ad at the top of the page next to your first paragraph of text and in the intro paragraph you talk about your summer vacation before getting into the meat of your post then there is a high likelihood that your AdSense unit will show ads related to your summer vacation and not the rest of the text.

Make sure that the text surrounding your ad is highly relevant to the rest of the article and is what you want Google’s AdSense filter to pay attention to.

4) Section Targeting

A final tip is to use the section targeting option that Google gives you. Section targeting allows you to tell Google what you feel is important in your article that you want them to pay attention to. For example, if you have a site structure that includes a header, sidebar, and footer you might want to exclude those from the AdSense filter so that Google is only seeing your article text when choosing which ads to display.

To use section targeting simply pop in this code:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

Article text

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

The start and end tags should go into your HTML and will never be seen by your users, only by Google. Make sure to replace the bolded “Article text” with the content of your page that you want the AdSense filter to pay attention to.

By using the title tag, URL, and headline tag effectively, keeping your articles focused, paying attention to the text around your ad, and implementing section targeting you will find that the ads that show up on your AdSense units are much more relevant to your readers.

Remember that relevant ads get clicked on – you have the ad space already set up and you’re hard at work writing great content and promoting your website. You might as well maximize the money that you can make through AdSense by improving your ad relevancy.

Have you thought about your ad relevancy before? Have you implemented any changes to improve your CTR? Please comment below – I would love to hear from you!

It’s time for Part 4 of my series on how to make $300 / day from Google AdSense. Today I’m going to focus in on another key strategy that can increase your click through rate (CTR) from the $ = V x CTR x CPC formula. In case you missed the first three posts, here they are:

1. The formula for AdSense success: $ = V x CTR x CPC
2. Have other people write the content for you
3. Location, Location, Location

Today’s lesson is…

Don’t Make Ads Look Like Ads!

If you think about your own experience in browsing through websites, you’ll likely not going to click on something that screams “I am an advertisement!” Most website owners who get started with AdSense use the default settings that Google provides and unfortunately those settings make the ad units look too much like ads. If you want to increase your click through rate, you need to blend your ads so they match your website and don’t stand out as advertisements. I’m going to show you a couple of ways to do this using an example:

This is an example where the website has optimized it’s two Google ad units effectively. What they have done includes:

Blended Background

Set the background of your ad unit to be the same background as the rest of your page. The ad unit in this example at the top left carries the same light blue background as the rest of the sidebar and the bigger ad unit in the middle of the page is not only in a great location, it also has the same white background as the rest of the article. Always make your ad background the same color as the surrounding information so it blends better and doesn’t stand out like a sore thumb.

Eliminate the Border

You might also have noticed that neither of the two ads have borders on them. Eliminating the border can have a dramatic increase on your click through rates because it again helps the ad not stand out as an ad. Removing the border is simple enough through AdSense but the default setting includes a border so you have to turn it off. To remove the border simply set the border color to be the same as the background color.

Blend Link and Regular Text

Within AdSense you also have the option to set different colors for the headline, description, and link text. Try to blend these colors so they match the rest of your site. The goal here is to make it look like part of your article so people will click through. In the example I provided the main text of the article is black so the description in the ad is black. The main links in the article are blue so the ad links are blue. Keep your colors consistent and your click through rates will continue to rise.

Make Link Text Blue

Website visitors are used to seeing links as being blue so changing the color around will often decrease the number of clicks that you get. For a normal website with a white background, blue is typically the default color that webmasters use. But what if you have an all green website where your links are green as well? The opinions are mixed here because by making the links blue it will counter my previous point about blending the link text. However people don’t always know that a link is actually a link if it’s in a different color. My recommendation would be to try and create a design where blue links are your default color choice so you can make your ad units have blue link text as well.

As is the case with any AdSense advice, the best part is that you can test test test all the results and get immediate feedback. Try a regular blue link versus a dark blue link to see which color outperforms. You can test background colors, border colors and blended text as well to gauge which combination pulls in the most money. Just make sure you only test one variable at a time so you can know which change is making the difference.

I always look forward to hearing what you have to say – have you been able to increase your click through rates by making your ads not look like ads?