Scoop Bucket

As you can see, I have reshuffled my adsense ads on this site. Now they are on top of my articles, and midway between them to the left. The middle position aligned to the left allows for my articles to be read easily without interruption because the text flows next to the ads to the right. The reason to place my ads on top of the articles was simply to get maximum clicks. If ads are the first things you see then you are more likely to click on them.

When dealing with adsense, your success depends on how the ads flow with your site naturally. Badly placed ads can be a distraction and make your layout look messy. The same goes with the “look” of your ads. The text and links should match your site text and links in font size, type, and color.

There are a few good WordPress plugins to handle your adsense codes. My favorite is WhyDoWork-Adsense which allows you to pretty much place the ads and forget them. Most of the other plugins require you to remember to place plugin code in your articles in order for the ads to be displayed. With WhyDoWork-Adsense you have multiple ad slots you can paste your code into, then set them up to be positioned automatically in certain parts of your articles, pages, archives, search pages, etc.

The other decent plugins include:

Adsense Revenue Sharing – Allows you to share ad revenues with other authors if you have multiple authors posting articles on your blog. It is a great way to generate text content for your website, but only recommended if you have strict quality control guidelines for your authors. For example a minimum word count in the article, as well as proper grammar. If you fail to establish quality control guidelines then you can end up with a bunch of small paragraph junk articles or “comments” that lazy “get rich quick” bloggers post in order to receive revenue sharing from high traffic websites.

Advertising Manager – A run-off of another plugin called Adsense Manager. Both plugins require you to actually post code into the article, or your WordPress design template. To give it some credit, it does also have a widget so you can automatically place adsense into your sidebar(s). But that is a fixed item. I would like to see this one run similar to that of WhyDoWork-Adsense, because this plugin allows for other ad formats besides Google AdSense. Maybe they will upgrade it down the road.

These are just a couple of plugins, but you have my recommendation on which is best. It is up to you to decide which is easier for you.