There are 2 aspects to making your Adsense pay, the first is all about how your ads look, and the second is about where they are positioned. Google are not shy on offering advice on both these aspects and they are also happy for you to try out the effectiveness of the ad format by providing a channels feature in Adsense which you can use to track your different configurations and establish the ones that perform best.

So what do Google actually tell you about optimizing your Adsense ads:

• make the background colour of your ad the same colour as the background colour of your hosting page for the position you place it in.

• make the text colour of your ad match the text colour and style of the text for your site

• make the links for your ad the same as the link style of your site links, i.e. link, visited, hover and active as much as possible, the same

• it's better not to use a border on the ad, but if you do, then choose a colour to match your site colours

• the larger ads work best and there are optimum sizes you can select

This is indicating quite clearly that the general idea is to make your Google Adsense ads blend into the style and colour of your site for best results. This sort of suggests that there is a natural aversion to clicking on something that is clearly an advert. So by making the advert blend into the site so that it appears as just another familiar source of information contained within the site content you are more likely to gain a click through to the ad itself. This is after all the whole point of the exercise from the publisher's perspective.

With respect to the positioning of the advert:

• the ads need to be above the fold

• the best position to place your primary ad is just above your page content, after which

• the top left hand corner or under the nav bar (horizontal nav bar)

• then just after your content above the footer bar

• you can also place ads in your content, generally on the LH side works best

These are your placement options, but this does not mean that you should try and use all of them. There are rules anyway that prevent you placing too many adds.

There are different types of ads which you can use in combination and sometimes combining the different types of Adsense ads can give you maximum exposure. But you do need to think about what will turn your visitors off; sometimes less is more.

Stop and think about your visitor, why they are visiting your site and where they might focus their attention. Then try and make the ads compliment your site and add to the visitors experience, rather than get in the way and clutter up the page.

The best way in the end of finding out what works best, is to experiment with your ads in terms of colours, sizes and position to find out what really suits your visitors. Also don't be afraid to change if you find after time that the click through rate drops off again, what might be good one period can change in the next affecting your Google Adsense revenue.