Adsense Optimised Sites - Visual Breakdown

I was inspired to write about this after reading an article on how Engadget is filled to the brim with ads. First and foremost, I believe that if you have quality content, your readers will not mind the ads as they realise it takes time and effort to write good articles. I am not here to criticise bloggers who earn alot of money but actually learn a trick or two of how they do it.

So, after reading through the MalaysiaBloggers forum, I came upon this topic where most of the top earning bloggers in Malaysia discuss how much they earn. So, I took a screenshot and colored the areas indicating where are the main article, ads, comments, navigational area and so on, like the legend shown below:

I'll present my analysis in the order of how much they are reportedly earning on a monthly basis (might not be accurate since some of them are a few month's old):

1. LiewCF: US$13XX [PR6]

As we can see, LiewCF concentrated on areas above and below the main content and also introduced alot of navigational areas so that he can blend the ads in. I would like to point out the ads which are just below the headline, as that would be where most readers will point their eyes to and are forced to read a few lines of the ad before continuing to the main content. Also note that there seems to be like an 'F' pattern of the layout of the ads and content which is a webuser reading trend Jakob Nielsen has discovered:

2. Paul Tan: US$7XX [PR5]

Paul Tan has great content as he has carved out a very specific niche for himself - automotive blogging and I would say this is a very good example of great content and great revenue. As we can see, there's not that many ads but they are all strategically placed - 1 as the navigational bar, 1 within the main article itself, another 1 right at the end of the article. I think the genius of it is that since he writes pretty long article compared to the rest, the embedded ad within the article is probably the one he makes the most from.

3. Kahsoon: US$6XX[PR5]

Kahsoon's blog is another interesting one as it kinda combined the best of both LiewCF and Paul Tan's methods: He has 1 ad right below the headline, 1 in between the article and 1 huge section in between 2 navigational areas. Also, I have colored an area right below the comments in magenta, and it seems that he installed a plugin which showed the search keywords that reaches his site. This is very interesting because one of the ways older websites used to manipulate the search engine ranking is to have a lot of keywords in the page, so that search engine bots will be alerted of it.

Portable Gadgets focussed almost entirely on the top half of the webpage and has distinct T-shape for the ad layout. I personally liked having ads in between the main article and the navigation sidebar because readers who would like to read more of your content will most likely look for the navigational areas and as a result, will see the ads. Furthermore, it's not too intrusive as it has its own defined area.

5. MP3 Player Reviews: US$4XX [PR5]

MP3 Player Reviews is another blog which focusses on a very specific area and the ad layout is pretty unique I would say, as it is more like a reverse 'F'. I think the reason for a pretty high ad income is due to the mixing of ads and navigational areas so that readers are kinda captured to the ad areas.

I think that is all for now. And I'll hereby summarise the main methods used by all of the 5 blogs above:

• An ad link unit just below the header to blend in like a navigational bar
• Skyscraper ads laid out within the navigational bars
• Ads immediately after the headlines
• Ads embedded within the article

Hope you enjoyed this article and it would be helpful too if you can highlight a few more sites which enjoy high adsense revenue.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 15th, 2006 at 9:56 pm and is filed under Wordpress, Blogging, Adsense. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.