Google AdSense is a fairly easy advertising solution for small-to-large publishers to use. However, questions always come up, and it’s nice to exchange information and experiences with others who also earn via Google’s contextual advertising network. There are a few options as far as Google AdSense forums go:

• Google Groups – AdSense Help: This official forum helps AdSense publishers keep up to date with program and product changes, and share issues and problems for solutions from the community and Google employees (known as  ”AdSensePros”, easily identifiable by a blue-boxed G next to their name). There are sections for AdSense Setup, Implementation, Troubleshooting, Earnings & Payment questions, and Feedback to the AdSense team for future upgrades. A Google account gets you in.
• Digital Point’s Google AdSense Forum: This enormously popular forum has existed for almost as long as the AdSense program has, and enjoys a flood of daily traffic and use. New publishers can ask the community for help with compliance (for example: what content types violate the TOS?), placement and layout (including submitting your site for advice from the community), reporting and statistics (and how to make sense of them), and payments (when to expect them, and what to do if they don’t come in).
• WebMasterWorld’s Google AdSense Forum: Requires payment for the ability to post, but passive reading is still free. WMW is the place for publishers to discuss search engine traffic, Google updates, and other matters important to those earning a living from online advertising. The AdSense forum, while not as heavily used as the DP forum, still enjoys steady activity and substantial crossover from users who are pros at SEO and understanding the relationship between content, traffic, and earnings.
• Joel Comm’s AdSenseChat: This site is a favorite among affiliate marketers who might be running AdSense on their remnant inventory and still want to make that perform well for them. AdSense optimization is a favorite topic; users touting milestone earnings and substantial improvements abound, along with the tricks that made them happen. The second most popular forum section is the “critique my site,” which invites users to offer suggestions on layout and placement for revenue maximization (naturally, YieldBuild would be the right answer for all but those who like to do manual experimentation).

There are several other forums on sites dedicated to discussion on AdSense, but they typically don’t have the critical mass of users to make participation with them worthwhile (some examples include Search Engine Watch’s, Webmaster Talk’s, etc.).

Three months ago, I blogged on Google’s Ad Manager, which allows websites to manage their own direct sales and remnant ad inventories (with the latter, presumably, filled primarily by Google’s AdSense). At the time, the service was limited to a small pool of clients. Google has now announced that Google Ad Manager is open to all AdSense account holders—although it does mention that you do not have to run AdSense on your sites to use its service.

Google’s product helps sites that have their own direct sales team manage inventory and creative, and it provides a convenient, popular back-fill option with AdSense. The publisher first starts by specifying ad spots (similar to YieldBuild ad zones) that can be filled with ads. It then uploads any direct-sold creative, and any impression or click caps associated with each creative. Finally, it asks the publisher to specify what it wants done with remnant inventory (ad spot impressions that can’t be sold via direct-sold ads)—AdSense and other participating networks can be used to make sure ad spots don’t go unfilled. There is some basic optimization, as well; Google can decide whether a remnant ad can outperform a direct-sold ad, and serve it instead.

Why is this useful? The chief benefit to site owners who choose to use Google’s product will be the reduction of mucking around with code. Ad tags are generated once and installed on a site template once; the rest of creative and inventory management is done through the Ad Manager console. Google also touts the savings from not having to host your own ad server; Google provides the hosting for the ad server and creatives.

What does this all mean? Google’s clearly looking to dislodge ad serving solutions like OpenX (formerly OpenAds), which provide a similar set of services through an installable program running off an ad server. Google’s solution offers the same benefit its many other products (Google Apps, Gmail, etc) have over their competitors—the cloud—although OpenX has developed a hosted version of its product, too. It will also, ideally, assemble some popular ad networks in order to optimize against something other than just AdSense (although DoubleClick, a Google ad network, is sure to figure prominently in the mix as well).

When you toss around terms like “ad networks”, “yield optimization”, and “reporting”, the new Ad Manager can sound similar to YieldBuild, which is an ad network management and format optimization service. Ad Manager, however, does not address format optimization (algorithmically determining the optimal background colors, border styles, positions, sizes, and formats for ad layouts on a page) that YieldBuild does. And, due to competitive interests, there are likely to be some ad networks that will resist working with Google, that a network-agnostic (and network-unaffiliated) service like YieldBuild, in rounding out the ad network management picture.

Rather, Ad Manager seems to be fleshing out an important part of the online advertising long tail, so well that Google will likely dominate online ad distribution.

For the smallest publishers, AdSense is the only viable option since they don’t have minimum volume requirements. In order to launch to the next level where vertical ad networks and direct sales are possible is around the 300,000 PV/month point, where the added layer of management that Ad Manager offers makes sense. Doubleclick delivers for high-volume publishers, 50+ million monthly PVs. With Ad Manager, Google is able to serve the middle ground, at least partially.

Although this blog has earned plaudits for covering contextual advertising, popular networks like AdSense and YPN, and developments in online advertising, we are not, by any means, the only enthusiastic bloggers in our space. There are a number of blogs whose RSS feeds I’ve added to my reader, and discussion forums dedicated to AdSense and contextual advertising that I refer to.

Here are some blogs on AdSense and contextual advertising:

• YieldBuild Blog – the contextual advertising blog, typically with several posts per week on performance tips, optimization advice, discussion of studies and news relevant to online publishers.
• Inside AdSense – the official blog for Google AdSense. Includes a mixture of advice for publishers, and announcements about changes in AdSense service.
• YPN Blog – the official blog for Yahoo Publisher Network. Similar to Inside AdSense, the YPN Blog offers details advice and insights to publishers, as well as posting announcements and information about other Yahoo service integration.
• JenSense – Jennifer Slegg is a contextual advertising consultant, and maintains this blog to share her insights on how to make more money from AdSense and other popular contextual advertising networks.
• Optimizing AdSense – Danny Gabriner, contextual advertising optimizer for CNET, maintains this blog full of useful advice and insights on how bloggers and site owners can make Google AdSense perform better.

In addition, there are a few forums that have active discussions on AdSense:

• WebmasterWorld Google AdSense forum – information exchange, announcements and reactions, and even rants and flame wars (hey, this is a discussion forum!)
• AdSense Chat – Joel Comm’s vB forum on everything AdSense. Includes discussion on all matters related to AdSense, including a critiquing “workshop” and help from the community for newbies
• Digital Forum’s AdSense Forum – another active forum, mostly questions and answers by the community

What contextual advertising is, a description of the most popular networks, and how it compares to more traditional forms of Internet advertising.

Contextual advertising uses the topical context of a page in order to match the most appropriate ads to serve onto a page. A contextual advertising network will spider a page, gathering information about what the topic of the page is, and then serve up ads that match that same context. A page on how to groom your pet, for example, might serve up contextual ads on dog grooming supplies, while another page on the same site on makeup application tips, might serve up ads on beauty supplies or beautician schools.

How does it work? The contextual ad service sends a page crawler (a “spider”) to scan each page and determine what it’s about, usually by the prevalence and density of keywords in the page (although companies touting technologies that determine “word shape” and semantics promise more accurate, relevant matching). Then, the topic of the page is matched up against existing advertiser inventory with a high degree of contextual relevance to the page, and the ad is served on the page.

What are your contextual advertising options?

Google AdSense is, by far, the largest contextual ad network. Its enormous and highly diversified pool of advertisers ensures both breadth of coverage and relatively high bids (and payouts to publishers). However, both Yahoo and Microsoft have contextual advertising networks that are making headway into Google’s publisher base; in fact, in many instances YPN outperforms AdSense.

Here is a list of popular contextual advertising networks:

• Google AdSense
• Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN)
• Vibrant Media
• Kontera
• LookSmart
• Chitika
• Proximic
• Peer39

You can read more information on the first six contextual ad networks and the final two semantic ad networks.

How does contextual advertising shape up against display/banner advertising

On high-traffic niche or brand sites and blogs, premium ad inventory is typically served through a vertically-oriented ad network, which is subject to caps or placement requirements, while remnant inventory is filled using contextual ad networks such as Google AdSense or YPN. This is due to the fact that blogs typically source a great deal of their traffic from regular readers, who can be profiled demographically and geographically in order to pair with niche ad networks. (Our list of the most popular blog ad networks)

However, on topically-diverse content sites such as HubPages or About.com, contextual ad networks dominate, since the majority of traffic is sourced through search engines and the only thing binding visitors is their interest in the topic of the page.

In terms of earning: both types of ad networks vary in the ranges of CPMs they can deliver to publishers.

• For niche, premium blog ad networks, for example, $5-30 CPMs are not uncommon, while premium publishers (such as newspapers, A-list bloggers) can command CPMs closer to $100. Blogs not accepted into more exclusive ad networks can expect to earn in the $1-5 CPM range for display/banner ads.
• For contextual ad networks, the topic and quality of traffic are the biggest modifiers of CPM. Finance, business and legal topics tend to earn more, while entertainment, celebrities and photos tend to earn the least. Traffic sourced from search engines tends to earn the most, since visitors are keenly interested in searching, while regular, routine visitors tend to be the worst-clicking bunch. All said, CPMs can range, on a site like HubPages, from $0.50 to $50.

Last week, Steve Jobs announced that 60 million iPhone apps had been downloaded, averaging 2 million per day. While there are questions of whether these stratospheric download numbers translate to equally impressive usage numbers, some wondered how those apps will monetize (particularly the very popular free ones). The overwhelming case for most online applications, whether those featured on Facebook, or those syndicated through widgets throughout the blogosphere, is through ads. So how exactly do ads on iPhone apps work?

For the most part, ads on iPhone apps seem to mimic the formats we’ve come to know via more traditional online browsing on PCs. A relatively non-intrusive banner typically shows up at the top or bottom of the open screen. (I have yet to see an app that forces a “pre-roll” ad before the app runs)

However, with the relatively slow data transmission speeds we see on iPhones (even those lucky enough to enjoy consistent 3G connectivity) and a clunkier way of shuttling between different browser windows and applications (the iPhone does not allow apps to run in the background, so exiting an app to visit a Website will shut down the app), user engagement with ads is a far more disruptive event and much less likely to happen among those users who don’t want their workflow or play interrupted.

Branding opportunities remain, though, especially on a new platform where novelty of the medium commands users’ attention. And hypertargeted ads tailored so well to a user’s needs might also perform well enough to cross the “interruption chasm”.

There are already several ad network/platforms available for iPhone apps. Here’s the current list of offerings:

• Crisp Wireless – currently creates banners + microsites; used by the New York Times and Washington Post apps
• PurpleTalk – allows creation of customizable text banners; features ad exchange “Partner Network”
• AppLoop – claims to be the first real-time, location-based mobile advertising network
• Pinch Media – widely-used ad network on dozens of iPhone apps
• Medialets – offers CPM, CPC and CPA advertising run natively through iPhone apps
• AdMob -offers rich-media (video-, map- and Apple App Store-integrated) banner ads on iPhone apps; also has an impressive list of signed clients

How do iPhone app ads work?

Although the solutions are different in terms of how they render in an app and what the engagement and payment models are, they typically comprise clickable banner ads, which either link to an iPhone-optimized microsite, a Web page, or, in the case of AdMob’s banners, even video, map or App Store integration.

Here’s an example of Crisp Wireless’s ad for Westin Hotels on the New York Times app:

The banner shows up towards the bottom of the front page of the app, and is, at least in this case, visually contrastive.

Clicking on the ad takes you to this microsite, with several information and engagement options.

The click-to-call link allows you to directly call Westin for more information about their package deals.

Here is a demo by AdMob that demonstrate how ads are rendered in the app, how they engage with the user, and make use of other iPhone functionality, including GPS:

AdMob (1m57s)

How much revenue are publishers earning via AdSense? While certain figures are not publicly disclosable, due to Google’s TOS, there are a number of examples and data points that help paint a picture for AdSense publishers:

• An AdSense optimizer based in Dublin, Ireland, shares his tips and tricks that raised a science Website’s AdSense revenue from about $10 per day to around $1700 a day [AdSense blog]. He offers great rules-of-thumb on AdSense formats, background color, and placement (although we’d like to remind everyone these are just rules of thumb, and we’ve seen plenty of exceptions, so it’s always worth it to test)
• a straw poll on Digital Point Forums shows that almost 2/3 of respondents are earning less than $10 per day, a quarter earn between $10-50 per day, and 13% superstars earn over $100 per day.
• a 3-year-old thread on Webmaster World turns up publishers running the gamut in terms of AdSense earnings – $300 per month on an 8-month-old hobby site; $40 per month on a 3000-impressions/month site; a couple of publishers earning $7000-8000 per month. In a more recent thread, 2 publishers said they made the most in 2006, one said that 2007 was his best year, and one said that 2008 was shaping up to be his highest-revenue year.
• a Washington Post article in 2006 pointed to a few publishers and their reported earnings: PodcastDirectory.com was earning $30,000-40,000 per year via AdSense; Freeweblayouts.net earned its owners approximately $100,000 per year; SeatGuru earns $10,000-20,000 per month via AdSense (half of the site’s total revenue)
• a thread at HubPages, where most authors earn the majority of their revenue via AdSense, shows a wide variety of earnings. Maddie Ruud earned over $1000 in one month on about 170 pages of content.

So why do some publishers make a negligible amount of money through AdSense, while others can easily quit their day jobs? There are several variables that affect your overall AdSense revenue:

• traffic volume: the more people that visit your site, the more people that will click on your AdSense ads.
• traffic type: regular visitors (like blog readers) tend to not click on ads as often as one-time visitors; visitors from search engines tend to click the most, because they are strongly motivated to find information on a topic
• click-through rate (CTR): the likelihood of a visitor to click on an ad. Solutions like YieldBuild will help you maximize your site’s CTR by tweaking your ad units’ background colors, border styles and colors, formats, sizes, and positions on the page (yes, the right formats and layouts can make a big difference in CTR)
• revenue per click (RPC): this is the amount of money that Google pays out to you as a publisher per visitor click. The RPC depends on topic (mostly), but there is suspicion that Google uses some sort of publisher quality score in deciding how much to pay out per click. Recent data by YieldBuild shows that AdSense RPCs are growing, broadly speaking.

If you want to increase your AdSense revenue, there are several things you should be doing. First, you must focus on getting more traffic to your site. Currying the favor of the search engines, like Google and Yahoo, by creating high-quality, niche content, and setting up your site for success by following the best “white hat” SEO techniques, will help the search engines pave a path to your site’s door. Matt Cutts, Google’s own SEO spokesperson, offers these whitehat SEO tips for bloggers. You can also consult this article and this one.

To increase click-through, the easiest and best option is to use YieldBuild–you can optimize the variables that contribute to CTR automatically, with one installation. Alternatively, if you like to have a hands-on, tinkering-with-the-engine approach, we suggest following an AdSense optimization protocol of your own design. It might be considerably more time-consuming, and you likely won’t be able to test all the same variables, but your effort will pay off and you should see revenue lift.

Finally, to increase RPC: this is largely a function of topic. Business, financial and health topics tend to have considerably higher payouts per click than do topics like entertainment, celebrities, and photo galleries. Since most sites are generally geared towards a particular topic anyway, there probably isn’t much a publisher can do to change this. But, to the extent that you can choose the additional content you choose to write and publish (which is a good idea, anyway, to attract more search-engine traffic), you might choose to write unique, detailed information on topics that tangentially relate to your site’s topic but also overlap with one of the higher-paying topic areas. For example, if your site is about New York City, you might find that pages on NYC banks and NYC brokerages might turn out a higher RPC than pages on NYC skyline pictures. You can use this method to get an order-of-magnitude estimate for RPC payouts for keywords you’re considering targeting.

YieldBuild CEO, Paul Edmondson, spoke at a panel today at the Digital Hollywood Building Blocks conference in San Jose, entitled The Performance-Based Advertising System. Moderated by Short Hills Media Group President Ron Yurman, the panel discussed the technologies, advertiser and consumer receptiveness, and regulatory environment surrounding ad targeting and optimization methodologies.

The panel members included:

• Paul Edmondson, CEO, YieldBuild
• Chris Hansen, VP Performance Marketing, 360i
• Don Mathis, President, Epic Advertising
• Assaf Igell, VP, Syntryx
• Jodie McAfee, Managing Director, Boomerang iTV
• Alex Briele, Sales Director, MediaBank

Yurman opened with an analogy to Ginsu knives, which was at the forefront of performance-based advertising back in the 1970s–continuously refinining both the message and media buying. Don Mathis went on to say that today’s performance-based advertising (PBA) grew out of the offline direct response space, and is still manned by the “data junkies” that track conversion from impressions to purchase/action.

Chris Hansen said CPA is the only important metric; other metrics are ancillary. He said performance-oriented direct marketers have distaste a for anything not tracked, while the challenge is different for brand advertisers: how to convince them that online display advertising will eventually convert to customers.

Paul added that among online publishers, brand advertising through PBA is available at an effective discount, because PBA’s pricing models effectively include impressions-based brand advertising as part of their delivery. Top-end publishers are not having any difficulty selling premium advertising, and filling their top inventory. Medium-sized publishers have experienced some market softness–partly due to economic conditions–while selling performance-based advertising in remnant inventory is common.

The discussion then turned to behavioral targeting, “the holy grail” over the past 2 years, according to Hansen. He mentioned its ability to recognize and target consumers’ purchase intent and place in the purchase cycle. Behavioral targeting is more reliable than registration data because it relies in browsing habits, rather than stated demographic buckets. Recently, we’ve seen innovation in this space, around better data sources and predictive models. Privacy issues & regulation continue to be sussed out. Network Advertising Initiative (industry self-regulation on privacy) might satisfy the FTC.

Paul said that display advertising (banners) typically experience a much smaller clickthrough rate (CTR) compared to contextual advertising, less than 1% for display vs around 5% for contextual advertising, on the same sort of Web page. So display advertising can be the first step in the conversion-oriented sales funnel, although its relatively low rate of engagement means that you have to get a much larger volume of viewers to properly “prime the pump.”

Don said today’s CPA (online) is analogous to the traditional direct response (offline), at least until now, although metrics relating the value of online branding efforts to final conversion are beginning to take shape. The “viewthrough” metric (someone sees an ad, doesn’t actively engage with it at the time, but takes action at a later date) is one such metric being explored. 4A is currently working on a project on it – can we come up with a standard that quantifies how brand awareness spend connects to customer acquisition?

At an audience member’s prompting, the panel concluded with a discussion on consumers’ response to behavioral targeting, which can get creepy. Paul mentioned that the management of user behavior data is forming around the new “social data” space, and solutions are coming about that will likely accommodate users’ concerns, probably by giving users control over the ads and advertisers they’re exposed to, as well as over the profile that advertisers and social networks have assembled about them. Opt-in and user control will be key.

In a probable attempt to help advertiser targeting of its Right Media ad exchange network, purchased in April last year, Yahoo has announced the integration of LucidMedia’s (formerly Entrieva) ClickSense contextual matching engine.

What does this mean? Right Media has a fragmented network of small- and medium-sized publishers, which only make sense in the eyes of an advertiser in aggregate. Much like Technorati, which has recently made blog tags the basis for assembling verticals for advertisers to its Technorati Media ad network, Right Media will use ClickSense to categorize publisher inventory in order to build the basis for higher CPMs through more relevant ad delivery.

Because Yahoo didn’t choose to extend its own in-house contextual matching solution, presumably used for the Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN), to Right Media, I can only assume that it expects to pick up some of LucidMedia’s technology and process for possible integration into YPN. LucidMedia provides front-end interfaces for both publishers and advertisers with a dashboard view into categorized inventory:

Since both AdSense and Blogger (Blogspot) are owned and operated by Google, integration between the two services is fairly tight. But there’s more to making money than just dropping in AdSense ads. What we’ll provide here is advice and tips on how to install and make AdSense perform best on your Blogger/Blogspot blog.

How to install and optimize AdSense on Blogger (Blogspot)

1. YieldBuild: You can install AdSense and optimize it automatically by using YieldBuild, the only service that performs sophisticated optimization tests on your AdSense ads to come up with the best-performing ad layouts and formats for your blog’s design and traffic. YieldBuild uses its smart machine-learning algorithms to find out the ideal background color, border color, border style, position, format and layout for each page to maximize revenue. [Sign up for YieldBuild»]

2. Manually: If you’re the type that likes to tinker with ads and wants to have a hands-on approach for optimization, start off by placing AdSense Page Elements in your Blogger blog. (Note that, unlike with YieldBuild, you will not be able to tweak ad formats at the per-post level—they will be the same across all your blog posts.)

1. On your Blogger Dashboard, click the Layout link. (Or, click the Layout tab when in Edit mode) Does yours say Template instead? Follow the directions below 8.
2. Click the Add a Page Element link in the WYSIWYG layout editor under the Page Elements sub-tab.
3. In the pop-up, click the Add to Blog button under AdSense.
4. Enable AdSense for your account, if you haven’t done so already.
5. Choose the Format and Color for the first ad you’d like to add to your blog. (You can position it later) Need advice? Consult our AdSense Formats post for our suggestions on ad sizes and colors. If you want to customize the colors and need the hex codes, take a look at Webmonkey’s chart.
6. Hit Save in the pop-up window. You’ll see a Page Element called AdSense inserted into your blog.
7. Drag-and-drop the AdSense Page Element to where you want it in your blog. If you need advice on where to position your ads, take a look at our AdSense placement tips and advice. Keep in mind that some of your positioning options are limited to the Theme (template) you’ve chosen.
8. Repeat this process for the number of ad units you want to place in your blog. Keep in mind that more isn’t always necessarily better, and you might consider running optimization tests to determine the optimum revenue-generating layouts.

Do you have the older “Template” version of Blogger? You have two options: upgrade your template (by clicking the Customize Design sub-tab), which will enable you to follow the steps above, or, if you’ve already made changes to your template HTML and don’t want to lose those changes by upgrading, you must follow these steps:

1. Log into AdSense.
2. Click the AdSense Setup tab.
3. Click the AdSense for Content link
4. Walk through the wizard to create each ad unit. At the final step, you’ll be given specific Javascript code to embed into your blog template HTML.
5. Carefully insert the AdSense Javascript code into your Template HTML. Click the Save Template Changes and check your live blog to make sure the ad units are showing up in the right place on your blog, and not breaking your page.

AdSense for Blogger (Blogspot) Tips and Tricks

1. AdSense allows you 3 ad units and 2 text-link units per pageview (either your full blog index, or individual post). If you try to serve up more, Google will simply limit the number displayed, and you lose some control over which. Keep in mind that serving the maximum number of ads won’t always earn you the maximum revenue. Often, fewer ads translate to higher revenue. (It’s impossible to know if that’s the case with your blog unless you test) 
2. The general rule of thumb is to go with the three main ad sizes: 300 x 250 (”medium rectangle”); 160 x 600 (”wide skyscraper”); and 728 x 90 (”leaderboard”).
3. Place your ad units ”above the fold”, and abutting each other in the L-formation, whenever possible.
4. If you have a white or light-colored background, choose a background color that blends into your page background, or is just a shade darker. If your blog has a dark background, choose a bright, contrasting color, or one that is a just a touch lighter than your blog’s background.
5. Make the border color the same color as your background (the effect is called “invisible borders”) or a shade darker. Rounded borders typically outperform squared corners.
6. Just a reminder that if you “hot-swap” a new template, check your ad units and adjust your ad unit formats and placements as necessary (unless you’re using YieldBuild, which will adjust to the new environment automatically).

There are several methods to put Google AdSense on your WordPress blog. I’ll share the most popular AdSense plugins, as well as our tips and tricks to make AdSense perform best on your WordPress blog.
 

WordPress for AdSense options

1. YieldBuild: the ad format optimization will help you find the best spots on your blog to run AdSense, it will guide you through the installation process, and it will optimize those ads’ background colors, border styles, border colors, sizes, placement and formats automatically, to maximize revenue. YieldBuild is used successfully on a wide range of hosted WordPress blogs, including Elliott Back’s popular WordPress blog. [Sign up for YieldBuild»]
2. Plug-Ins: The next-best solution is to use a free WordPress plugin, which won’t do the optimization for you, but will at least make installation considerably easier.First, via the AdSense console, choose your ad unit’s size, format, background color, border style, and border color. (Take a look at our AdSense formatting tips for the best rules of thumb for these). Also, grab your AdSense account number from your AdSense account.
   • Choose and format your ad units and grab their code here
   • Grab your AdSense account number here (at the bottom of the page, under Property Information, as AdSense for Content)

   Plugin Options: There are several options based on where you want to place AdSense ads. Keep in mind that you’re limited to 3 ad units per viewable page, but Google will simply not serve more than what’s allowed. (i.e. you can place code wherever you like, but you’ll only see 3 ad units at once on the page)

   • AdSense Widget for WordPress Sidebar: Installs AdSense into your blog’s sidebar widgets (under Design/Presentation)
   • MightyAdSense: Allows you to place your ad units from a console within WP admin. Somewhat clumsy UI but works reasonably well.
   • Adsense Injection: “injects” AdSense code at a random spot in your blog posts, reducing consistency and fighting ad blindness
   • Author Adsense: a great solution if you have multiple bloggers and want to share AdSense impressions for any author’s posts with the blog owner.
   • Shylock: Allows you to time your AdSense ad unit types (i.e. specify ad unit to show up a certain number of days after publication)
   • Adsense Deluxe: Allows placement and color management for your AdSense ads.
   • Adsense Earnings: Allows you to see your AdSense earnings within your WP dashboard.
   • AdSense Sharing Revenue and Earnings System: want to give some of your AdSense impressions to someone else? You can do so with this plugin.

   As with all plugins, download the plugin, upload it to your wp-content/plugins/ folder, and then activate each by going to your Dashboard, navigating to Plugins and clicking the Activation link. Be sure to update the plugins every once in a while when your Dashboard gives you notification (keep in mind that plugins come and go, and some might stop being supported).

Tips and Tricks for AdSense on WordPress

1. Keep in mind that you’re allowed 3 ad units and 2 text-link units per (visible) page. If you install code beyond that, you will still not be able to exceed that limit. Remember, though, that the maximum number of ads won’t necessarily earn you the most money; sometimes, less is more. (Although, unless you have YieldBuild, you won’t know until you test)
2. Unless you have a testing protocol in place that demonstrates otherwise, your best rule-of-thumb bet is to go with the three main ad sizes: 300 x 250 (”medium rectangle”); 160 x 600 (”wide skyscraper”); and 728 x 90 (”leaderboard”).
3. Keep your ads above the fold whenever possible, and “touching” in the L-formation, whenever possible, too.
4. Choose a background color that matches your page background, or is a shade darker, if you have a white or light-colored background. If your background is dark, choose a bright-colored ad, or one that is a shade lighter than your background.
5. Make the borders either the same color as your background (“invisible borders”) or a shade darker. Rounded borders generally perform better than square ones.
6. If you change WordPress themes, make the necessary adjustments to your ad unit formats and placements (unless you’re using YieldBuild, which will make those changes automatically) to reflect the new ad “environment.”
7. Although it is more difficult to do so, consider embedding your medium-rectangle into a post. Without the use of a plugin, you can do this manually by opening your Single Post theme file, looking for the <?php the_content… string and embedding your AdSense code immediately before that. Be sure to add an align=left or align=right (or style=”leftalign”/”rightalign”) attribute to embed your ad unit to the left or right of the start of your content.