How To Test The Effectiveness of Your Adverts

This is Part 6 in our series “How To Make Money From Your Blog”.

You may be earning very little from your chosen advertising solution. You’ve experimented with different layouts and designs, yet it can sometimes be difficult to tell what is the best design and type of ad for your blog. There are a couple of similar ways of addressing this.

Use Mulitple Palettes

Web Ads Blog talks about a way to reduce ad blindness, that is people getting used to your ads and therefore ignoring them.

1. Log in to your account at https://www.google.com/adsense
2. Click the AdSense Setup tab and choose AdSense for content as the product
3. Choose an Ad type and format.
4. In the Colors drop-down box, click “Use multiple palettes”, then select up to 4 color palettes by holding down the Control or Command key
5. Copy-and-paste the AdSense Ad code into web pages

This will only change the colour of the same ad type, to test different types of advert, use A/B testing.

A/B Testing

A/B testing is simply testing the performance of ad A versus the performance of ad B. You need to set up the two different types of advert (ad units) you want, on two different channels. Then simply use a piece of javascript to randomly display either one or the other. You can then measure the performance of both of them. Google themselves provide the code:

<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>

Good luck!

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