The leader in the pay per click (or PPC) market is Google, with its Adsense program, but if you're already an Adsense subscriber, with adverts on your own pages, you might not realize the importance of the design of your advert and the placement of the advert on the page.

You probably already noticed that the Adsense ads on this page are slipped inline into the main text, on the left. Further, you have also probably noticed that there isn't some strong color scheme and border lines blocking off and visually distinguishing the Google ads from the rest of the content of the page.

I've experimented and I can tell you that these two steps (putting the ad in the middle of the content and removing any overt border colors) can at least double your click thru rate (or CTR) and that means that you'll be making more money with the same number of visitors. And that's a good thing.

So let's have a look at how to do this.

First off, have a look at the different ad formats. Most people seem to go with the default "banner" format ads, which is too bad: after the last few years of surfing, I think people have been trained to ignore these banner adverts. Even the spiffy new graphical banners, like this:

Instead, pick out a different size and think about how you can get creative with the placement. Also, if you're going to have an advert, why not offer the most options for your readers and have a layout that has at least four ads, if not five? Really, the one-ad box makes no sense to me: if you're going to have an ad at all, why not maximize the chance it'll have something of interest to your reader?

Anyway, off that soapbox!!

How do I accomplish the layout trick I have on this page? I do something a bit sneaky: I drop the Google ad into a <table> and then use the attributes of the table to shift it left and let the text flow right around it:

<table border="0" align="left"><tr><td>
    Google adsense code goes here
</td></td></table>

To learn how to tweak the colors of your Ad without using the Google tools, you'll want to read this pay per click article too: Double your Adsense PPC click thru rate.

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