Google's Adsense enables you to monetize your sites easily and if used properly can generate a great income. However, if you're not using it properly and maximizing the income you squeeze from it, your leaving money on the table – something we all hate doing.

Boosting your return from Adsense can be done very easily and quickly, and you'll be amazed by the results.

The first thing involves making only a few simple changes to the format and positioning of your Adsense ads. Forget about using banners or skyscrapers. They don't work as well as other formats.

1. Use the 250 x 250 rectangle format 2. Make the background color of the ad the same as the background color of your site, or as close to it as possible. 3. Make the ads borderless by setting the border color to be the same as the background color of the ad.

These changes can be made by logging into your Adsense account and creating a custom format. Just select the 250 x 250 ad format, and create a custom color palette. Use the color picker to pick the coor you want. The Javascript is automatically generated at the foot of the page, ready for you to copy and paste into the pages on your site.

Now, you need to position your ads where surfers are most likely to click on them. Research using retina scanning technology has shown that the place that surfers tend to look at first and most often is the top left. I don't know the reasons for this, perhaps it's because that's where we're used to seeing the most useful search engine results (at the top of the rankings) and search engines are the sites we most often visit, so we automatically look at the same place on other sites.

Whatever the reasoning, as soon as I made the above changes to my Adsense ads, clickthrough rates doubled, immediately.

You can also place ads within the text with 468X60 ad format.

A new technique is Adlinks. Adlinks can be placed near the top of the page and will look like links within your site. This makes it very tempting to click. This displays a series of links on your page in the same style of Ad unit as regular Adsense ads. When a user clicks a link they are taken to a page of adverts that resembles regular Google search results. As a publisher, you are paid every time a user clicks one of those ads.

Most Adlinks get about a 25% higher CTR then regular Adsense ads. There's no clear reason for this but one explanation may lie in the fact that clicking on an Adlink takes the user to page of 'results'. When a user clicks on one of these, you are paid for the click. If the user finds what they want, great, if not, it seems that they hit the Back button on their browser and try again, just as you would for normal search engine results. Then they click on another result, and you get paid again. So it's possible to be paid more than once from the same Adlink click. Now, this reasoning is speculative, but it does make perfect sense in the light of my Adlinks results.

So if you take some time making a few adjustments to the Adsense ads on your sites, you can very quickly treble your Adsense income. Give it a go, you'll be amazed by the results.

[Rickard]

In my forums, i don't want big irritating ads in the size you recommend - does anyone? And does it work in a forum, is there anyone out there who has got large square ads in a forum that one could get a peek at?

I have found that placing a textlink ad just below the menu in top has given me almost as much income as the leaderboard, the leaderboard has earlier been the biggest incomesource, but now since i added the textlink (729X15PX) in the "catbg.jpg" place this textlink gives me almost as much.
You can take a look at it here http://www.varmepumpsforum.com/vpforum/index.php

The skyscraper in my left blocks column works better when i make it display on a light yellow color.
I guess the way you say one shoud make ones ads display is good as a general recommendation, but i think that changing and making notes of the income before/after changing the ad-style is a good way to maximise the income.

Since i started optimising my sites i have gotten from approx. 0.5% clickrate to approx. 1.2%.

I know that this clickrate is quite low, but being a forum "strictly" for nordic users i think it is quite good.