You may try all three types of advertising styles to see which works the best for your particular site, but in general the premier one to use is by far the first one, Adsense for Content.
- Adsense for Content: This is cut and dry the most popular and highest performing.
- Adsense for Search: This is a nice feature to use as visitors can search your site or have the option to search the internet with Google search engine, with results mainly adwords customers so you get paid for your Adsense on clicks.
- Referrals: This targets specific items and requires the visitor to take an action beyond the initial click for you to earn money.
Adsense for Content is the blocks of text ads or text/images ads. The ads appearing inside each block are automatically generated based on the content that is on the webpage. Adsense for Content puts ads on the page that are relevant to the text that is on the page. Having ads that target your market makes sense, and that is why it is by far the highest performing type of ad. Adsense for Content is broken into two types:
- Ad units contain either text ads, image ads, or both. The ads are targeted to the content of your page using contextual and site targeting. These come in standard banner, button, rectangle, and skyscraper shapes. This is the one I recommend using. It appears all over the Internet and people are more accustomed to seeing it and clicking on it.
- Link units display a list of topics that are relevant to your page. When users click a topic, they're brought to a page of related ads. These are smaller groups that fit better into smaller areas of your webpage. For the most part this is not nearly as strong. Because it requires the user to click twice, once to get to the results page and then once on the results page, it does not have nearly the same success rate as Ad Units.
Important note: Google policy allows a maximum of three ad units and three link units per page. This is important, your pages will become distorted if you try to use more and the googlebot visits Google Adsense serving pages very often and this is a great way to get your account terminated by breaking the program policies and the terms and conditions of Google Adsense.
Adsense for Search uses a Google search engine to retrieve whatever is searched for with ads alongside that pay you if clicked on. You can customize it to search your page if you would like as well. It is advantageous to include one of these on your website for surfers to use with the potential of getting paid if the surfer clicks on one of the resulting ads. Many visitors find a search box useful to help them locate the content they want quickly, and there is no better recognizable search engine then Google so users are happy to use it and it works great for helping them get what they need and helping you make some money.
Referrals are a way for you to promote Google's extensive list of products which advertisers pay to be placed on your site if the product is clicked on and the user does some sort of action. The action is what makes Referrals a tougher means to make money. Users need to actually buy a product, download a demo, sign up for a newsletter, enter their email for you to make money. The pay is pretty good as the advertiser is getting exactly what they want, but its success rate is significantly less. In summary, compared to Adsense for Content, Referrals normally do not have the same return rate for publishers so experiment with them but stick to your bread and butter Adsense for Content.
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