AdSense Tips – Heat Maps & Naming

2 simple AdSense Tips to keep handy before you even create your first AdSense Ad.

In the previous article, we covered “What is AdSense“. Now before we get into the creating our first AdSense ad unit, let’s briefly cover some AdSense Tips that will make the whole process easier and more understandable.

AdSense Tips – Heat Maps and Naming your Ads

You create AdSense units to place on your web pages.  There are various kinds and sizes of ad units you can create to place at different locations on a web page. Knowing how to optimize your ads can make a dramatic difference to the revenue you could earn.

Optimizing your ads just means different ways to ensure you get maximal income for your ad-efforts.

Optimizing your AdSense ads also affects what kinds of ads you will create.

Optimizing Your AdSense

I have personally found that optimizing your AdSense can actually make as much as a 300% difference in AdSense revenue. So definitely worth doing.

Factors Affecting AdSense Revenue

• ad format (e.g. Content ads, Search ads,
• ad size (e.g Banner, Half-banner, Leaderboard, Square, etc.)
• color you set for your AdSense ads
• where you place the ads on your page (Heat Map)

I will deal with Heat Maps first. It is one of the easiest to deal with.  It is a great guide.  It helps you visualize what kinds of ads you might want to create.

AdSense Tips #1: Heat Maps & Ad Placement

Below are samples of ad heat maps from Google AdSense and from Chitika.  The darker colors represent “better earning” placements.  Use these as guides, not laws.  As you can see, both AdSense and Chitika have similar but not identical heat maps – different ad locations where they indicate might give you the most clicks.

Google AdSense Heat Map

Chitika Heat Map

The heat maps allows us to visualize:

• what kinds and sizes of ads we might want to create
• where we want to place our ads

Important : Remember to keep in mind the AdSense Basics – including Ad Placement Policies covering the number of ads you can place and what you can and cannot do.

AdSense Tips #2: Naming Your Ad Units

Each time you create an ad unit, you will be asked to name it.

I recommend, as you create your Google Ads, to name them in some standardized way so that you know:

• Site – which sites the ads belong to (if you have more than one site)
• Ad Type – format and size of each ad
• Ad Location – where a particular ad is placed

This way, you can easily find a particular ad in your AdSense account as well as determine how a specific ad is doing – e.g. are the ads place in the right-top doing better than the bottom ads, etc.

Suggested Ad Naming Format
The naming format I use is:

site_typeSize_location

For example, if

• I was creating an AdSense ad for this site (NetWebbing)
  => abbreviation: nw
• and wanted to place the ad at the Top Left of a page
  => abbreviation: tl (see image below for abbreviations on locations)
• then I might choose a Vertical Banner ad (120x240px)
  => abbreviation: vbanner 120x240_tl

In this instance, I would name my ad as:
nw_vbanner120x240_tl

AdSense Heat Map – use locations as part of ad name

Note: An ad name cannot be changed.

Now that you have some preliminary idea of:

• Ad Placement Heat Map – where to best place your ad per page
• Useful ad naming convention

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