Back to AdSense

I recently decided to add AdSense to an older blog, hosted on Blogger, and using the old Layout. Here's how that went. This is one of the articles that is not necessarily meant for everyone, but rather for me to keep track of what I’m doing (i.e., it doesn’t take you from zero level, but the info here is probably more useful than what you get in such articles).

Just to recap, the best ad sizes are 300x250, 336x280, 728x90 and 160x600 and it’s best to place ads toward the top of the page, where they are most likely to be seen. Here’s a primer on the necessary jargon from “yahoo answers”:

CTR is the Click Through Rate. That is the percentage of visitors who click on an ad. out of the vistors who visit the page the advert is on (page impressions). 2.67% is quite high but why is this? Is it that your page holds no interest for your visitors and they 'escape' through an Ad?
CPC is Cost Per Click. That is what Google pay you per click. 0.50 is fairly low.
Presumably RPM is Revenue Per Month although it is expressed as eCPM (estimated Cost Per Month).
Don't forget that Google do[es]n't like webmasters discussing actual rates, earnings etc. so never do this whilst disclosing the URL of your site.
Of course, the first thing to worry about is visitor numbers. Until these are above 400/500 page loads a day (in your case maybe 1000/2000) you are wasting your time looking at Adsense revenue.

It’s a bad idea to place too many ads on a page. Here’s what Google says:

Publishers may place up to three AdSense for content ad units on each page. Out of those three ad units, no more than one can be size 300x600. Publishers can place more than one of all ad sizes except the 300x600 on each page. In addition to three AdSense for content ad units, publishers may also place up to three link units and two search boxes on each page. These policies apply to both desktop and high-end mobile optimized sites.

You can use only "sponsored links" or "advertisements" to label ads – I got burned before with a template that had coded in as text in image a different heading.

When I first looked at this particular older template, the AdSense code (to be controlled by the checkmark in the “Layout”) was as follows – in the main “Posts” widget:

<div class='begin'/>
                <b:include data='top' name='status-message'/>
                <data:adStart/>
                <b:loop values='data:posts' var='post'>
                  <b:include data='post' name='post'/>
                  <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
      <b:include data='post' name='comments'/>
                  </b:if>
                  <b:if cond='data:blog.disableAdSenseWidget != "true"'>
                                <div style='float:right;padding:5px;'>
                                    <data:adStart/>
                                    <data:adCode/>
                                    <data:adEnd/>
                                </div>
                  </b:if>
                </b:loop>
                <data:adEnd/>
            </div>

The old conditional statement was

<b:if cond='data:post.includeAd'> (now replaced with “disableAdSenseWidget”)

The “Start” and “End” have also been dropped. Here’s what the auto generated widgets looked like now:

<b:if cond='data:blog.disableAdSenseWidget != "true"'>
<data:adCode/>
</b:if>

I also tried adding the asynchronous code to the template, but Blogger wouldn’t let me. Adding the old synchronous code was difficult to mange with the div tags (i.e., move to right or left) so I resorted instead to the asynchronous code with the “sync” attribute removed – that whole “script” statement can probably be ignored, since it was already called earlier. It may be worthwhile testing the async=”async” as in so-async.

This particular older template has two <data:post.body/> instances: one for the frontpage and one for individual articles. This is important, because I want the smaller, half horizontal banner for the front page and the 300x250 rectangle (or the larger one, at 336x280) for each article page.

The code above was for the front page. For each article page, the code to be used is:

<div class='entry'>
                  <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
                               <b:if cond='data:blog.disableAdSenseWidget != "true"'>
                                      <div style='float:left;padding:5px;'>
                                         <script src='//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js'/>

<ins class='adsbygoogle' data-ad-client='ca-pub-2994845083618859' data-ad-slot='***' style='display:inline-block;width:300px;height:250px'/>
<script>
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});
</script>

                                     </div>
                            </b:if>
                  </b:if>
                           <p><data:post.body/></p>

<b:if cond='data:post.hasJumpLink'>
<div class='jump-link'>
<a expr:href='data:post.url + "#more"'><data:post.jumpText/></a>
</div>
</b:if>

It is also possible to add the code as follows, for the beginning of the article:

<div class='post-header'>
<div class='post-header-line-1'/>
<center>your Adsense code</center>
</div>

However, I did not find this last iteration very helpful to me.

I’m not necessarily advocating for AdSense use – unless you have many visitors, it’s more trouble than it’s worth, and if you have many visitors, why bother with it?

Sources / More info: pfQ1, hl, ya, wiki-ctr, wiki-ppc, top5, terms, loc-terms, policies, specific-policies, so-async