When you are an Adsense publisher, or even if you are just looking to make more money from your hobby website, one of the most important things you can do is experiment with sizes and placement.

Most of the time, publishers use a single template for all of their page/posts; however, this doesn’t always give the highest payouts. If you are using a CMS, that allows you to have different templates that will often allow you to experiment. If you are using WordPress, this feature was recently added. If you haven’t done any Adsense optimization recently, I’d suggest reading the Adsense Optimization Techniques post from the Adsense Blog. Using the techniques there, you can make changes that will quite often have a dramatic impact on your earnings. How dramatic? I’ll show you …

Adsense Earnings

You can see that the earnings for any single page on one my websites is fairly consistent for most of the year. However, right after reading and implementing the changes from that Adsense post mentioned above, I changed the placement and size. You can see earnings showed a nice increase. More importantly, the earnings have remained at a higher level. Let me put it to you another way: for less than 15 minutes worth of work, I was able to nearly quadruple the amount of money that page generated in a month. So it might be something you want to try. Here’s my advice:

• Look for pages with good or better traffic that aren’t generating much revenue
• Put those pages into custom templates
• Experiment with different ad placements, colors, and sizes
• Try to let each experiment run for at least a week
• Look at Adsense revenue–don’t be lured off track by high CTR or high eCPM
• Once you have found the optimal format, try it on other pages and see if revenue increases
• Lather, rinse, repeat

Originally published at Graywolf’s SEO Blog