Are you wondering why your AdSense earnings completely bites?  Is your click-through rate for your AdSense beyond abysmal?  If there was something I could claim to be good at, it would be AdSense placement and optimization.

In the image above, the optimum ad placement of a site is pictured.  This ad placement works with nearly every type of site out there (not just information related sites).  If you’re trying to make money with affiliate products, AdSense, Amazon, etc., this is the layout you’re going to want to have.

When someone comes to your site, for whatever reason, there is a certain area of your web page that they’re likely to click which is depicted as the green triangle.  This triangle is prime real estate on your site and you will get the highest paying ads in that area of your site.  Placing ads outside of this triangle (with exceptions) is like shooting your site’s foot off with a shotgun.  Sure it can stumble around getting some clicks, but it’s no where as good as a site with two working feet.

There are three types of clicks that visitors will do on your site:  bored clicks, lazy clicks, and call-to-action clicks.

Bored clickers are people surfing at home or at work with no real purpose.  They’re impulsive and fairly random.  They’ll click on anything with a blue hyperlink that seems interesting.  Bored clickers aren’t worth nearly as much as lazy clickers and call-to-action clickers.

With lazy clickers, they’ll click out of your website to avoid a block of informational text.  Pretend you have a website about caring for dogs.  A lazy clicker types into Google “caring for dogs” and finds your site in the number one spot.  They’re interested by the snippet of text Google provided and click into your site.  Once they arrive at your site, they see it properly designed and very inviting.  However, they see 400+ words of text which is your article.   Since they’re lazy, they decide on to read the article at all, instead, they see the perfectly placed ad about caring for dogs at their eye level.  They click that ad and make you some money.  These clickers are worth more than bored clickers.

Finally, you have call-to-action clickers.  These are the best types of visitors on your site and are worth a pretty-penny.  These visitors are on your site because they have something to solve or do.  They usually have  a full wallet and will open it and give you money if you play them a pretty enough song.  These people will usually read your articles and then click out using a call-to-action ad.  Call-to-action ads need to placed at the end of your articles.

After the types of clickers and ad placement, the next thing that will impact ad performance is size and color.  Certain sized ads are completely, and I mean, completely ignored by people.  Banner ads… they suck.  Skyscraper ads… they suck too.  They’re great for catching the occasional visitor but they’re going to have a dreadfully lower CTR% compared to rectangle and square ads.  If and when possible, use rectangle ads, your AdSense account will love you.

Color is the final thing that impacts your AdSense clicks.  The rules are simple for coloring your AdSense ads:

• NEVER have borders (color should match background).
• ALWAYS have the background match your website’s background.
• Title text color should match the color of the links on your website or be blue (#0000FF).
• Body text color should always match the text color of your site.
• URL text should be gray, silver, or black.  Sometimes doing blue or red works in your favor.

And that’s pretty much it.  If you follow image and the guidelines laid out here, I can almost guarantee your site’s AdSense click percentage will increase by at least several points.