How To "Tweak" Your Ads To Make Them "Click"!

1.1 Ad Formats: “Dress” your ads for success!

How would you like your ads served? Banners? Skyscrapers? Rectangles?
Squares? What about borders and background colors?

The choices can be overwhelming. Many people let Google decide for them-
preferring to stick with the default settings. Big mistake! From my own
experience I can tell you that it’s like swapping a hundred-dollar bill for a
ten-dollar one.

For almost one year I settled for just a tenth of what I could have been
making — just because I didn’t bother to control the looks and placement of
my AdSense ads.

The various ad formats, colors and their placement on the web page can be
done in thousands of combinations. You can literally spend hours every day
experimenting with every possible combination. But you don’t want to, do
you?

Let me give you a few ‘ground rules’ that have sky-rocketed the CTRs on my
top-grossing pages:


1.2 Don't "Look" Like An Ad

People don't visit your website for ads. They want good content.

If you make the ads stick out with eye-popping colors, images or borders,
that makes them easy to recognize as ads — and people work extra hard to
avoid them.

The same goes for ads that are tucked away in the top, bottom or some
other far corner of the page. So easy to ignore!

If you want people to click, make the ads look like an integral part of your
content.

Today's visitors are blind to banners, mad at pop-ups, weary of ads and
skeptical of contests and giveaways. So how do you win their confidence?
Simple. Don't make your ads look like ads!

Let’s begin by reviewing each of the different types of ad available from
AdSense and explaining their uses... then I’ll introduce you to a few simple
choices that zoomed my CTRs to incredible heights.


1.3 Meet the AdSense Family

Google serves its ads in several flavors, with each of those flavors coming in
a range of different shapes and sizes. It is very important to understand the
differences between each of these ads. Some are ideal for particular
locations. Some should never be used in certain locations. And some should
be used very rarely—if at all.

The sample page at www.google.com/adsense/adformats lets you see all of
the different kinds of ads at once. It even has links to sample placements
that demonstrate how the ads can be used.

For the most part, I’d recommend that you ignore those sample placements.

I’ll talk about location in more detail later in the book, but for now just bear
in mind that many of the ads in the samples are just too out of the way to be
noticed.

You can use them as a starting point if you want but you’ll save yourself a lot
of time — and money — by taking advantage of the experience of myself and
others, and following the recommendations here.


1.4 Text Ads — Google’s Finest

Text ads are probably the types of ad that you’re most familiar with. You get
a box containing one or a number of ads with a linked headline, a brief
description and a URL. You also get the “Ads by Google” notice that appears
on all AdSense ads. (Google changed this notice recently and it now blends in
much better than it used to.)

source : www.joelcomm.com