SUB-Ingredient:

Contextual Ad Helpers

Products to Download/Use Luke Parker's AdSense Wrapper utility  Adsense Logger

Training Documents (PDF) - Requires Adobe Reader Coming Soon

Using Contextual Ads, Such as the Google AdSense program, is great because people simply click more on advertisements that are on the tightly-focused topic at hand. However they are usually pretty bland-looking, and there are many things to learn and keep track of inside of the ad’s control panel.

AdSense, in particular, is such a complex beast that no matter how much reporting Google can offer for it, people still want more. That’s because we push it to the extremes, and we make whole careers out of it. One of the tools above, AdSense Logger, is the best full-featured AdSense reporting tool I’ve heard of, although it’s complicated to install on your server.

Luckily, most people won’t need that level of reporting, because AdSense already does allow quite a lot of data with it’s 200 default Channels that you can track. (And they don’t have to be per domain, you can have one define a whole group while another just defines a single ad box.)

If you’re reading this page, no doubt you’re on the AdSense Farmer (VRE) Assembly Line. Some Directory Runners use AdSense too for supplimental income, so they don’t need to take this next statement as seriously as the VRE owners:

If you’re going to make your career using AdSense, you need to start by reading all of the AdSense website help articles:

The AdSense help center at Google

Pay particular attention to the page placement charts and the differences in the ad layouts. This alone can improve your clickthru 100% or more.

Now that you’ve absorbed how to PROPERLY use AdSense, let’s work on how we can push the envelope. (I like to think of this as “Overclocking” AdSense.)   The main reason I created this sub-category is to have a place for apps and strategies that take ordinary AdSense ads, or even other contextual adls like the Y!SM ads, and make them perform much better. (Without breaking the terms of service, of course.)

The most widely agreed-upon way to boost them is to do something that draws the eye to them. (Assuming you haven’t placed the Ad directly in the most “hot” spots already.) Usually an AdSense tower will be way over in the right hand side column or be just a horizontal strip that people never see. It’s your job as a farmer to get them to see the ads more often, and the best way we know to do that is by placing pictures beside or around them.

AdSense “Wrapping” is a way that you can make the AdSense ad appear to be in the middle of a photograph, therefore doing the best job of drawing the eyes to it. The software it took to create these “wraps” was quite expensive when they first came out, but now I’ve found a way to run the software right here form this website, so you can make your wraps for free. Simple click on the link above and you can design wraps for your website today. 
 
Matt Callen’s HyperVREis the only other program I know that automatically puts pictures beside AdSense for you, I don’t think it wraps them, however. Still, it is interesting to note that the pictures it uses are on topic & pretty, so they both draw the eyes and don’t look out of place at all.

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