Linkrain Articles

This is a question that had been discussed on a lot of webmaster related forums and there are still a lot of different opinions about this. I think it all depends on on the type of site your are running. A website with a lot of quality content and long pages should use more than one Adsense Unit while websites with poor content, maybe offering some kind of online tools, shoul use as few Ad Units as possible.

Where should I use more Adsense Units?

• On content rich pages
• Long pages

And less Adsense Units?

• On websites that offer any kind of service
• On websites that offer online tools
• On short pages with less content

Both options have some advantages and many webmasters swear that less Adsense Units mean more money while others say “the more, the better”.

To decide how many Adsense Units you will place on your pages, let’s have a quick look on the advantages of both options:

• If you display more Ad units, you click through rate will probably be higher

The more Adsense Units you have on a single page, the more links you are able to display. By displaying a lot of related links, the visitors will have more options to choose from. This is the majore reason why the CTR is higher with more advertisements.

• Higher CTR does not mean more money

A few experiments on Adsense have proved that higher paying advertisements are shown at the top of the page, in the first Adsense block. If you have only one Adsense block on your website, instead of three, the shown ads will pay much higher. Anyway your visitor has only a few links to choose from and if he does not see any interesting link, he will not click on your ads. Less choice for the visitor means less clicks but at the same time the clicks are paying more.

My tip would be: “More content, more units”. Let’s imagine you are going to put some Adsense Blocks inside your articles. If the article is very short, you can place one Adsense Unit at the top of the article and the visitor will see it even after he has finished reading. If the article is long, you might consider adding another Adsense Block at the end of the article. Once the visitor has finished reading it, offering some topic related links at the end of the article is a must. It’s much more probable that he is going to click one of these links instead of returning to the beginning of the article and click and advertisement of the first Adsene Block.

The interesing thing is that this click will pay less than a click on the Adsense Block a the top of the page. In this case you could think “why not remove the Adsense Block at the top of the page? The advertisements at the bottom of the article would pay me much more”.

This sounds really logical but as far as I concern it is not working, at least for me. I made a little experiment on this a few months ago.

The Experiment

For 1 week I removed the Adsense block at the bottom of my articles, keeping only the advertisements on the top. A week after this, I removed the Block at the top and kept only the one at the bottom. Finally I decided to test two Adsense Blocks (on the top and bottom of the page) for another week.

My click through rate increased when I removed the Adsense Block at the top of the page! By leaving only the Ad Unit at the bottom of the article I got much more clicks BUT…the click were paying much less than the ones from the top advertisements.

I had the best results by using one Adsense Block at the top and one at the bottom of the page. My CTR was higher than the CTR with only the bottom ad and also higher than the CTR with only one advertisement at the the top of the page. Also my earnings where higher because I was recieving a fair amount of clicks on the top advertisements and at the same time some visitors clicked even the ads at the bottom.

From this experiment I’ve learned that “more Adsense Units = more money” .  Remember that it all depends on the niche of your website, your content and your site structure. “More Adsense Units = more money” works for me, but don’t be sure it will work for you either