Whether you’re publishing on Wordpress, Blogger or TypePad (or one of the rarer platforms like TextPattern, Joomla, or Drupal), you might wonder how you can make your Google AdSense ads perform better. Although it’s easiest and most effective to use YieldBuild, if you enjoy a little code-wrangling and testing, it’s not terribly difficult to set yourself up for relative success by following these rules and making these basic tweaks to your templates.

Read our primers

First read the basics, so you understand the fundamentals on AdSense format and layout. It will put the rest of the advice in this post in proper context:

• AdSense Formats & Formatting - choosing colors, border styles and ad unit sizes
• AdSense Placement - choosing the optimum layout and positions for your ad units
• AdSense Optimization - choosing a testing protocol and optimization methodology

The basics

Formats: Follow our advice on how to choose colors - which is largely dependent on the color palette of your blog and the position of the ad units (i.e. whether they are above or below the fold).

Sizes: Stick to the most popular three (350×250, 160×600, 728×90) unless you have a narrow-format blog template, in which case you should swap out the last in favor of 468×60. (For Blogger, we suggest a link unit above the title, since this is relatively easy to implement)

Blogger (Blogspot)

Since both Blogger and AdSense are owned by Google, installation and tweaking AdSense isn’t too difficult.

For tweaking color, made simple in Blogger’s AdSense interface, use this web color picker to determine the hex value (#123456) to deviate from any of the standard colors Blogger preselects for you.

Position: This is fairly easy to implement, using Blogger’s Edit Layout feature. Add Page Elements, choose AdSense, and add:

• a five link unit above the blog title (at a width that your template can accommodate)
• a banner or leaderboard between the blog title and blog post
• a skyscraper in top position in your left- or right-rail

Click on this thumbnail to see how these will be represented in the Blogger Edit Layout interface.

Wordpress

Wordpress is a little trickier, but the process is made a great deal easier using a plugin, which also allows you to automatically embed ad units at the top or bottom of your post. This obviates the need to get into your Theme Editor and muck up your php in order to get ad units to install contextually.

For your header (banner or leaderboard) and left- or right-rail (skyscraper), you’ll have to pull up your Theme Editor (under Presentation for versions 2.3 and earlier, under Design 2.5 and beyond), and, depending on your particular theme, install your code here (which you should have grabbed from your AdSense account):

Header (header.php)

near the bottom of this template:

<div id="container">

<div id="header">  

[Your Header]  

[insert AdSense code here]  

</div>  

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

  

Sidebar (obar.php)

<div class="sidebar">

<ul>

<li>

[insert your AdSense code here]  

</li>  

[other list elements for blogroll, categories, syndication, etc.]  

</ul>  

</div>

  

Single Post (single.php)

(make sure to place the code in red right after the code landmark in black; feel free to change float:left to float:right to serve up your ads to the right)

<div class="entrytext">

<div style=”float:left;”>

[insert your YieldBuild code here]

</div>

  

Main index template (index.php)

(make sure to place the code in red right before or right after the code landmarks in black)

<?php $count = 1; ?>

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>

[...]

<div class="entry">

<?php if ($count == 1) : ?>

[insert your YieldBuild code here]

<?php endif; $count++; ?>

  

TypePad

TypePad makes it fairly easy to embed AdSense ad units via a TypeList in your navigation columns. Add a TypeList, choose Note, and enter your ad unit code in the Note field (the Label field is optional). Position this TypeList at the top of your navigation column (left-rail or right-rail); having it above the fold will improve performance.

With more coding finesse, you can embed AdSense between posts (only available to Pro, Premium and Business Class users). Please follow these instructions on how to do so.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 3:56 pm and is filed under Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.