As a fan of gadget blogs such as Gizmodo and Engadget, Tom Whitwell
started Music Thing in 2005 after realising that there were no similar
blogs for music gear. The blog showcases unique and strange
instruments, and traffic grew as gadget sites began to link to Music
Thing. Now, the site receives tens of thousands of visitors each day.In
July 2007, Tom wrote an article for The Times discussing his passion
for his blog's content, despite the low AdSense revenue he had earned
since joining the program in August 2004. His friend James noticed the
article and encouraged Tom to make a few changes to improve his
earnings. According to Tom, "this was the incentive to tidy up my
template a bit, and think more about ad placement."Tom started by
moving the ad unit on his homepage above the fold and opting into image
ads, to ensure that all available ads would compete against one
another. On his article pages, Tom added link units at the top of each
page and placed a medium rectangle below each article. In addition, he
removed the borders from his ads and adapted the colours to blend
better with the site.Using custom channels, Tom was able to compare the
effectiveness of his ad units on his article pages. Tom notes that "the
block I'd considered my main ad (the skyscraper on the right) was much
less effective than I'd thought. As Google suggested, the medium
rectangle that I placed beneath each article is the biggest earner."
Tom also found that small changes could go a long way -- he made a few
template changes to ensure that the highest performing ad unit appeared
first in the HTML code, which helped increase his earnings."It took me
a few hours to optimise the site, after reading a few blogs about
AdSense, looking at the advice from Google and my friend, and trying a
few template changes," Tom says. "The results were amazing - with no
extra traffic to the site, my average daily earnings have increased by
over 500%." Although Tom doesn't plan to quit his day job any time
soon, he notes that "every little bit helps."After this experience, Tom
recommends that other publishers "follow the optimisation suggestions
as long as they leave you with a site you're happy with. If you lose
confidence in your own site, you'll irritate your audience and lose
interest in what you're doing. But at the same time, make sure you
watch your statistics, so you know what works and what doesn't."Do you
also have an AdSense success story to share? Let us know.Posted by Lucy
McKenna - AdSense UK Optimisation Team
