1. Blend your ads. Adsense color and font size

1.i It’s tested and it works. Use the same colour of your page background, for the border and the background of the ad.

1.ii Use the same colors used in your page, for the Adsense ad title, text and url link.

1.iiia If possible use the same font in your page, as the Adsense ads. Since the ads have variable text size and font, according to dimension and type of ad, you can never do this 100% right. But every little bit helps.

Real life Adsense font size and type

768×60 Ad unit:
Title: style="line-height:12px; font-size:11px; font-family:verdana,arial,sans-serif"
Description: style="line-height:12px; font-size:10px; font-family:verdana,arial,sans-serif"
URL: style="line-height:12px; font-size:10px" face="verdana,arial,sans-serif"

300×250 Ad unit:
Title: style="line-height:14px;font-size:11px" face="arial,sans-serif"
Description: style="line-height:14px;font-size:11px" face="arial,sans-serif"
URL: style="line-height:14px;font-size:10px" face="arial,sans-serif"

As you can notice above, some ads have the arial font as default, some have verdana. Some have a 10px description text, some have 11px. And besides all that, each box may contain 1 up to 4 ads, and depending on that the font sizes will change. So it’s really up to you to experiment and see what works best for you, in as many cases as possible.

1.iv Try to not separate the ad from the content (like trashing the ad in some remote corner of your website. Integrate it within the content (in, within, next to, above, below etc).

2. Placing ads high on a page is good

Position the ads with the highest CTR, as high as possible in the page, in the source’s order (in the image below, notice that the ad appears just below the body tag). The first ads that appear in the pages (in the source’s order) get the most income per click.

3. Use images. Images and Adsense work together

Use images left or right of the ads. It makes them seen as part of the pages content, and your CTR increases. It doesn’t matter what images you use. Use any plain generic images. If you can, try to corelate those with the niche/domain of your website/blog. Be carefull not to write text, point arrows or similar on the images, as that might be seen as click incentives.

4. Earnings are variable, based on CTR

With the Smart pricing ideea, your income varies a lot, according to each of your channel’s CTR rate.

Now this is very important: It’s account-wide, not channel-wide. So if you have a very good CTR (5%-50%) for one website, and you include it in the same account with a 0.04# CTR website, you will loose money.

Remove all the websites (from your account) that don’t have at least a 5% CTR (or depeding on your overall CTR, remove the ones that are really lower than your average), or you’ll affect the income of all the other good converting websites.

5. Use non-standard types of ads

We all know that web-savvy (eg. webmasters or people that use the Internet for so many years, and know all the standards, convetions and so on) users are ad-blind.

Banners like 468×80 have been on the Internet since it’s creation. Even people who use the Internet vaguely or once a month, are kind of blind to these standard banners.

Instead, use vertical skyscrapers, or boxed ads. They have a much higher click rate. The Adsense team even published a list of their highest performing ad sizes:

• 336×280 large rectangle
• 300×250 inline rectangle
• 160×600 wide skyscraper

End note: I hope these advices help some people. If they did, drop me an e-mail and tell me about it.