My Google AdSense Experience

June 4th, 2006

I added Google AdSense to this blog and my most active site Bottle Cap-O-Rama and thought I would write a bit about the experience. First, my primary purpose of either site is not to make scads of money, and I certainly haven’t made enough worthy of mention. But I have been seeing a few clicks a day and thought I could offer some tips for someone just starting out and trying to get it set up.

1. Sign up for Google AdSense. It’s free with some verification, mainly demonstrating your site is complete, well designed, and with enough content to offer. Familiarize yourself with the types and sizes of ads offered. Think about how they’ll look on your site. I personally don’t like ads that are too big and flashy, so I opted for text-only. There are many options for color which I feel should match your site design.

Set up channels so you can figure out where your ad clicks are coming from and what’s isn’t working.

2. This blog runs on WordPress so I added the Google ads by updating the footer and header files, therefore placing ads on every page with just a small amount of code. Google’s indexing does the ad selection. This WordPress plug-in places ads directly in the body of a post via a tag.

For Bottle Cap-O-Rama, I use the Joomlaspan Google Adsense module which puts an ad in a module suited for your site design. Make sure to change the Client ID to yours, or someone else will get credit for your ads.

3. Make sure your pages validate. I noticed Technorati wasn’t picking up my blog posts, due to a few errors – easily fixable – that I believe were preventing this. I like W3C’s validator. Enter in a URL and it checks your Doctype and lists the errors. Another neat validation site is here which will test your page’s loading speed and offer suggestions.

4. Sign up for Google Sitemaps. This gives you the opportunity to correct Google’s mistakes in indexing your pages. It also offers some additional information on what people are searching for on Google when they find your site. Here is a good WordPress plug in. It outputs your site to an XML file stored on your server which you can point Google to.

5. Check your 404 errors via your hosting company. I moved many content pages when I installed WordPress and Google still had the old pages indexed – all missed visitors. I realized this issue after looking seeing discrepancies between Google Sitemaps and my server stats. So I set up a bunch of redirects while I wait for Google to update it’s index.

I’ve concluded that I see a decent amount of traffic with one horizontal and one vertical ad per page. I’ll likely try some more varieties now that the foundation is laid.

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