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When Amit Kumar co-founded MegaGames Forum in 1998, Google Inc. was being run from a Menlo Park garage and AdSense didn’t even exist yet. Fast-forward 9 years to 2007: Amit still runs MegaGames Forum just as a hobby, but he earns enough revenue through the AdSense program to run a dedicated server and continue growing his site. Amit wasn't so successful with AdSense right from the start. When he first started using the program in 2005, his earnings were nothing to write home about, and it was largely because he chose his ad placement, formats, and colors at random. After recently optimizing his ads, however, Amit was able to more than double his AdSense revenue and even improve the user experience on his site. Results may vary since every site is unique, but here are some tips that any forum site, large or small, can also try out to increase revenue. The welcome box ad Many forums have a message above the fold on their pages welcoming users to the site and encouraging them to re...

Would you like some tips on maximizing your AdSense ad performance? Check out our recently updated Optimization Demo . In about five minutes, we cover popular topics from optimal ad locations to the best performing ad formats. Once you’ve watched the Optimization Demo, you can start applying these techniques to your ad units immediately. Good luck optimizing! Posted by Alton Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

In case you missed our recent webinar called Taking It to the Next Level: Improving Your AdSense Performance , we've posted a recording on our Help Center . Specialists from the Publisher Support team offer tips and suggestions on how to make the most of your AdSense account. You can also find transcripts and presentations from past webinars. Posted by Laura Chen - AdSense Publisher Support

Are you looking to make the most of your AdSense account? If so, then you need to attend our upcoming webinar, Taking It to the Next Level: Improving Your AdSense Performance . It'll be held next Wednesday, May 16th at 10:30am PDT. During this one hour overview, our support specialists will provide you with tips and suggestions that we’ve found to significantly improve AdSense performance. Topics covered will include: - Using channels to track your ad performance - Optimizing your ad placement, design, and layout - Noticing trends and making proactive improvements to your site - Keeping your account in good standing We’ll also leave time at the end of the webinar to answer any questions or concerns regarding your ad performance or other account issues. To register, click on the link below or paste it into a new browser window: https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/onstage/g.php?d=574860052&t=a Instructions for participation will then be sent to you via email from WebEx. I...

If you've logged in to your account today, you've probably noticed the new 'Recent messages' section in your AdSense account. We're happy to let you know that this is your personal inbox where we'll send you customized optimization tips. More specifically, our system will automatically analyze your account and ad settings. Based on these findings, you'll receive a notification each month in your AdSense account if there are changes you can make to improve your overall AdSense performance. While we're not able to guarantee results from implementing these suggestions, we've found that these techniques have been successful for many publishers in the past which is why we've developed this feature for you. If you don't receive a notification during a specific month, don't worry. You've probably implemented all of our current suggestions and we'll be adding more tips in the future. Happy optimizing! Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publis...

If you've been looking for ways to improve your referral earnings, we're excited to introduce you to a few new resources. First is our updated referrals optimization tips page , where you can find our top suggestions for selecting referral products and how to best promote them on your site. We've added new, detailed tips as well as example implementations to help you get the most from your referrals. Next is our very first referrals-themed case study . Learn how Randy Brown, site owner of GrownUpGeek.com, has used referrals to double his earnings while endorsing a product that he really supports. Do you have a referrals success story that you'd like to share? Send us a note and maybe you'll be featured soon. Posted by Dan Friedman - AdSense Product Marketing

As you might already know, a great way to increase your AdSense earnings is to place multiple ad units on webpages that are rich with content. Here's a way to maximize your revenue with multiple ad units: Make sure the ad unit with the highest CTR is the first ad unit in the HTML code of your page. We've heard that there may be some confusion on this, so here's some clarification on how we serve ads to a page once we know which ads win the auction. Currently, the first ad unit on a page always shows the top ads that win the ad auction. Also, if there aren't enough ads in our ad inventory to fill all of the ad units on a page, the first ad unit on the page will display ads first. This is why I recommend using custom channels to determine which of your ad units has the highest CTR, and then placing that ad unit first in the HTML code. For the purposes of this post, the first ad unit on the page is defined as the first instance of the ad code within the HTML of the pa...

It's hard to believe the month is already over. It seems like just yesterday when Mike Gutner first announced that August was Optimization Month. Since then, members of the AdSense optimization team and Googlers representing other products have shared their findings and best practices for how to optimize your AdSense earnings. We hope you've come through the month with an arsenal of insightful tips and tricks for optimizing not only your AdSense ads, but also your site content for your specific audience. We'd like to leave you with the following: Nothing warms the hearts of our team more than hearing success stories from AdSense publishers. Please tell us yours ! The road to enlightenment begins with the Optimization Tips page. If you haven't seen it yet or it's been awhile, be sure to check it out. Teach a person to fish, and you feed them for a lifetime. The AdSense Help group is a great community to post optimization tips and swap best practices with other pub...

If you've taken the time to make changes to your site over the past month, it's important to monitor their effects. Here are my top three tips to ensure you make the most of measuring your results and gain a deeper understanding of what's happening with AdSense on your site. 1. Get accustomed to custom channels. The single most effective way I've found for publishers to measure their results is by using custom channels . Custom channels are the ideal way to determine how a recent change in ad placement or ad format has resulted in improved performance. Many publishers fail to keep their custom channel list up to date each time they make a change -- or even worse, don't take the time to set them up at all. Not knowing if you've made the right decision for your site's visitors will make it even more difficult to take the next step, so use custom channels like a tracking device to ensure you're on the road to success. 2. Be analytical in your approach -- us...

The “back to school” buzz is in the air, and just as it was key to organize your papers in middle school using your trusty Trapper Keeper, it’s important to manage your ads using your AdSense data. Doing so lets you to see the effectiveness of the different implementations you’ve tested out this month and make decisions about next steps. So let’s flash back to the good old days and apply what we learned in middle school. Vocabulary: Understanding your data Before you could use a new word from your vocabulary textbook, you needed to understand its definition. Similarly, there are several important statistical values on your Advanced Reports page for which you should know the definitions before doing any analysis. I recommend that you check out our glossary for each of the terms ( Page Impression , eCPM , Clicks ) to understand how these values are affected by the changes you make to your site. Foreign languages: Translating your data Learning a foreign language involves taking a great ...

So you’ve optimized your pages and implemented our best practices. Now what? It’s time to take a look at your results and decide where to go from here. To close out Optimization Month, this week we’ll share tips on how to monitor the performance of your account, how to evaluate your results -- and how to figure out what to do next. Now that you’ve implemented some of our optimization tips and best practices, hopefully your revenue is on the rise. But what if you see ups and downs in your stats? Never fear -- it’s quite common for revenue to fluctuate over time for any number of reasons, like which ads your users click on, or changes in ad inventory. Seasonality can also affect revenue. If you run a fan site for a TV show, you might see a drop in revenue after the season finale due to a reduction in advertiser inventory or a decrease in the number of site targeting campaigns. Or, if you run an education site, you may see revenue decline during the summer vacation due to decreased page v...

As an AdSense publisher, you've probably put a lot of effort into making your website the best it can be -- optimizing your ads, building good content, and driving high quality visits. But there's one crucial step left: to see just how effective these things are. How many visitors are you getting each day? What pages are they visiting? Where do they come from, and which keywords brought them to your site -- both from pay-per-click efforts and from natural search? Many website owners push their site live, and then leave it at that, remaining in the dark about all these questions. Google Analytics can enlighten you. We think it's much more fun to have the answers to these burning questions, and that you owe it to yourself to know for sure. After all, this is the payoff for all the hard work that's gone into creating your site. When you launch or make a change to it, there's that initial excitement of wondering who's going to check it out. And Google Analytics can...

You're an AdSense publisher, and you've got great content, but you want a) more people to know about it and b) your loyal readers to know when you post new content so they can visit your site easily -- maybe by the click of a button. By building up traffic, you can get more eyeballs on your content and of course your AdSense ads. This is where Google Toolbar comes in. There's more to Toolbar than just web search, pop-up blocking and auto-filling web forms. With the recent release of Google Toolbar 4, millions of Toolbar users are now adding custom buttons directly to their browsers. You can help users visit your site (and more) with just a click. By adding your website's custom button to the Google Toolbar, people can instantly: Visit your website Search your website by entering a query into the Google search box and clicking your custom button Get the latest feeds from your website by clicking the drop-down menu next to your custom button Sound daunting? It shouldn...

If a tree falls in the forest and no one can hear it, does it make a sound? Even more perplexing: if you have a great, content-rich website and nobody visits it, is the content useful? Rather than debate this, I'd like to share with you five ways that Google webmaster tools can help you drive more users to your site and improve the visibility of the site content you've worked so hard to create. 1. Submit all of your pages to the Google index – for free. By using Google Sitemaps to submit your URLs , you help Google's web crawler do a more complete and efficient job of crawling your site. Sitemaps enables you to submit all of your pages to the Google index, and it's particularly useful for making sure that we know about all dynamically generated URLs or pages that are not adequately linked to on your site. But please note: submitting a Sitemap will not guarantee inclusion or influence your PageRank, and isn't a replacement for creating compelling and useful content....

If you've been following this blog for the past three weeks, you've already seen a ton of great tools to make your site as compelling as possible with AdSense...and if you haven't, what are you waiting for? Scroll down and read about all the techniques that we've touted during this Optimization Month. And now that you have all these great tools at your fingertips, it's time to roll up your sleeves and get to updating your site. I'll wait until you're finished. [time passes] Congratulations! Now your site is ready for all your eager users, but wait ... wouldn't it be great if more people knew about your site and could truly enjoy the fruits of your labor? Of course it would -- that's why this week we'll focus on tips and tricks to drive quality traffic to your site. We've assembled a team of specialists across Google to enlighten you on the many Google products that can help you optimize your site traffic and content. I've no intention of ...

I hope this week you've discovered a new feature or learned how to improve your use in a way that will benefit your site and your earnings. Today I’m going to share my top 3 tips for getting the most out of AdSense. As a bonus, my advice will also help you climb the social ladder at your school or workplace. Prepare to grow your revenue...and your popularity. 1. Be friendly with everyone – If you want to be more popular in school, you can’t only get to know the drama students -- you have to make friends with the basketball team, the marching band, and the A/V club too. So many friends competing for your time makes it more valuable, just like more advertisers competing for your ad space makes it worth more. Without opting in to text, image , and video ads, you can't expect to get the most revenue possible for your ad space -- you need more advertisers competing in order to bid up the price of your ads. When the highest-paying advertiser wins, you do too! 2. Look your best – Y...

UPDATE: Sorry, the Onsite Advertiser Sign-up feature is no longer available . For today’s optimization tip, I'd like to focus on a site targeting feature: Onsite Advertiser Sign-up . This enables advertisers to quickly and easily target cost-per-impression (CPM) ads specifically to your site, from your site. As a publisher, you'll be automatically opted in to Onsite Advertiser Sign-up. You can also customize the landing page advertisers will see when they click on the ‘Advertise on this site’ link within your ad units. This is your opportunity to market your site to advertisers, so don’t settle for the default description – this won’t convince advertisers why they should site target you. Write a sharp and compelling paragraph to engage advertisers and let them know what your site’s all about. You'll benefit when more advertisers sign up to advertise on your site, since more competition among ads means more money for you. Just remember - keep it advertiser-friendly! Posted...

If you haven't tried our AdSense for Search feature yet, now might just be the perfect time to put it to use -- we're pleased to announce that you can now display AdSense for search results within your own site. This way, you have the freedom to offer users web search while still maintaining the look and feel of your site. For example, you can keep elements like the header, footer, and site navigation panel the same for the search results page you create. To use it, just choose the "Open results within my own site" radio button when you're generating your AdSense for search code. You'll also need to identify the page where you'd like to display your search results. We'll give you two sets of code: one for the search box, and one for search results. Place the first set on a page where you'd like the search box to appear, and the second set on the page you'd like the search results to appear. Whenever users perform searches on your AdSense for s...

Back in May, we launched our new and improved referral buttons . Now these new buttons are available for additional products and languages. You can choose from several different colors and options, and the buttons are in a sleeker, web-friendly GIF format -- all the better to blend in with your site. Publishers have found that it’s most beneficial to place referrals where they're relevant. Do you run a photo blog? Try using a Picasa referral button. Looking to boost revenue for your web hosting site? Implement a Firefox referral button and watch your earnings grow. Don’t forget you can also implement referrals in a text link format. Text links easily integrate into your site and often convert better than buttons. Here are a few tips on generating more revenue with text links: You can endorse products you've enjoyed using and encourage your users to do the same. Use text links to integrate the ad more seamlessly within your site content. Try having the text links inherit the ...

At this point, you probably know your ads like the back of your hand. You've removed the borders, relocated them above the fold, and are awaiting results. In the meantime, you might be asking: "What else can I do to optimize?" I’m glad you asked. AdSense isn't just ads; within your account, there are a number of features that you might never have noticed. This week we'll be focusing on some of these less-visible gems that can also contribute to revenue increases. As the saying goes, don't put all your ads in one basket. ;) Diversify with some other features! Maybe your site is full of great content users will love (if only they can find what they're looking for) or maybe you're already using your own search model, but don't have a way to monetize it. In either case, AdSense for search is a great solution. If your users are always looking for new products and services to try, and you're looking always looking for a new revenue stream, give ref...