November Adsense Modifications
As I previously mentioned, November saw a remarkable increase in advertising revenue for my sites. Sure, the bulk of the increase was related to an increase in readership. However, a slight change in design yielded remarkable results. Not only did the new design offer more advertising possibilities, it also placed the ads in more prominent positions.
The Change
Recently, the web development community has been discussing (1,2) the possible ways to help the reader by better using the page’s footer. Agreeing with this thinking, I decided to add this functionality to my site and, hopefully, make some money doing it.
Instead of the page footer, I decided to place more links at the end of each individual post (not on the main page). I’ve included a list of previous posts, related posts, and Google’s Ad Unit.
The Results
By itself, this addition brought in 65% of October’s revenues. Not bad considering it actually provides the reader with something they desire, a place to find more information. With the success I’ve experienced implementing this on one site, I will be similarly updating my others.
Future Improvements
Though the changes helped, there is room for improvement. Ideally, the text in the footer section should be the same. Since Google doesn’t give that information away, I have to do some research to find the correct font-family, font-size, line-spacing, and word-spacing.
Also, though not an Adsense issue, the footer looks cluttered/crowded. I may have to modify the WordPress plug-ins used for the Recent Links and Related Links columns to allow for unordered lists. That should clean everything up.