Some time ago I talked readers about how to make a diagnosis when Adsense income is down. Ad Design have a significant impact upon the earnings of your Adsense ads and is certainly One of possible cause. In my old article I also mentioned that one of the better way to check out which ad design is works best for your blog is to run a split testing campaign.
If you want direct answers on how to do this, here an article on how to make easy to keep track of your Ad Design. Don’t worry. The process is enough simply to set up.
What Is Split Testing?
This system also called A/B testing allows you to compare two different version of an Adsense ad unit on your blog, so that you can check which one works best. To starting with the split testing all you need to have is two versions of the ad for each visitor. For example one ad unit of 250×250 and one ad unit of 300×250.
If you want to get enough samples, you should do some test on a large number of visitors in order to get more conclusions about which ad design works best in that particular ad position. In brief, you’ll need create two channels inside your Adsense account so that you can track the results and then add a piece of code around the Adsense code and put it where you want it to show.
Here’s how to incorporate the code into your blog:
1) Go into your Adsense account and then create two different custom channels called something like “test A” and “test B”
2) Create two different ad units with identical sized formats but set two different color palettes. Once got the Adsense codes use them in the next step.
3) The following code below allows you to see the two different color palettes rotating on your blog. Ok, tak the codes generated first and put the two ad units codes within the bolded lines.
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var random_number = Math.random();
if (random_number < .5){
//your first ad unit code goes here
} else {
//your second ad unit code goes here
}
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”></script>
4) Put the intere code into your blog’s template(within index.php, single.php, etc) and positiones where you want it to show.
With the above code you should now see the two different color palettes rotating on your blog. You can choose to set the split test to 50/50 or another 60/50, or 70/50 and so on in order that only a small number of your readers see the new ad unit. All you need to do is to set the “.5″ to another number. For example .8 would show one ad 80% of the time.
Now you can be sure to get a lot of information from the script, and know which one is performing best. Give it a day or two to run before you make too many changes as it can take a little while to get the ad having shown enough times to draw any solid conclusions. Once you find which of two ad units works best, compare your best ad design against other to see if you can find one to better it.
