Lets face it… most sites are created with the intention of making money and one of the most common ways to monetize a site is to place Google Adsense ads in the layout. Every time a visitor clicks an ad the website owner makes a certain amount of profit.
It’s important for designers to know their way around Google Adsense because its used so often in website designs and you should be creating the website layout with ad spots in mind if the client wants to monetize this way.
Placement & Blending is Key
Google ads must be strategically placed and blended into the website layout to make conversions as high as possible, but you do have to be careful, because Google does have a hard cap on how many ads can be on one page and too many ads will turn website visitors off. Plus users that click the ads usually don’t return, so having too many ads on a new website could make you lose valuable visitors.
If you or your client thinks traffic will be very slow at the start then you may want to design the site with little or no Google ads to star, but design the layout in that will allow for the easy addition of Google Adsense ads in the future.
Effective Google Adsense Based Websites
Here are three websites that have well placed and blended Adsense ads. Take a look at them to see where they are placed, what type of units they are and how they are blended into the websites to get an idea of what works well.
CSS Remix
Logopond
Start Drawing
Become Familiar With the System
With that in mind your first step should be to head on over to Google and create an account. Then set yourself up with Adsense if you can so that you can play around with creating ads.
For the time being you can go here to see the different ad types and sizes. Most of them are pretty standard sizes so a lot of Google ads could be replaced with actual paid sponsors ads in the future, or you could use the Google ads to take the place of sponsor ads when you have no active sponsors.
Other Factors to Consider
Remember though, there are a lot of different factors that go into the ad conversion statistics besides placement and color. The quality of the traffic and the type of website also play a large role in the conversion rate. If you have a ton of people coming to the site via irrelevant search terms then they will be less likely to click the ads.
Also more experienced internet users are less likely to click the ads because they are more familiar with them. So tech based sites for example would probably have a lower conversion rate then a website targeted at less internet savvy users.
So take a moment to look for Google ads as your browse the internet and ask your self how you could improve the blending and or placement. Also feel free to post any good examples you find and tell us about your own experiences.
Designers Guide to Adsense Design – Google Adsense