Upon approval of your Google Adsense account, you may now incorporate and place ads with different sizes and a variety of colors on your blog. Most of the sizes will directly fit your blog theme, so the only question that will bake your noodles in your blogging career is where to place the ads. I have three sources for this guide: 1) my personal experience with my blogs, 2) Adsense Help Center, and 3) looking at the hundreds of successful blogs out there. I will try and integrate all of my sources here.

First off, take a look at this ad hotspot map from the Adsense Help Center. The darker orange areas represent the best locations to put your ads.

The areas defined in this image are clearly for elaborate HTML websites. For most blogs however, we can narrow down the the locations to just three spots: the sidebar, the header and the footer. We choose only three spots because publishers are allowed only three Adsense for Content Ad Unit on your blog at a time. The header corresponds to the upper area just above the title of your post or your article, while the footer pertains to the section before or after the blog’s comments box. I had great success with all of these three ad placements but just recently discovered a better place for the header ads. I’m talking about skipping the header and integrating the ads not before but after the title and before the content. This gives the “header” ads more mandatory eyeballs from your viewers, because they will have to scroll down from the title to read your content, unlike before when readers can just directly ignore the ads above the title and proceed to reading directly what you wrote. Before, my stand on this ad placement is that it is intrusive and gets in the way of your readers. But then I realized that if you have great content, nothing’s going to stop your readers from scrolling down and reading your entries. Some bloggers even resort to extreme cases and intersperse Adsense for Content right between paragraphs of their articles.

Here’s a summary of the Ad Unit placements, which is implemented here in BlueMumble:

1. Immediate sidebar, right beside your content
2. Comments section, right after your content
3. Inside the post, after the title and before the content

Please note that the placements above are for Adsense For Content Ad Units only, or the big ads where there is a title, a description, and a URL provided. There is another format for Adsense for Content, called Link Ads, which can either be square or horizontal simple text links based on keywords of your site. Because of their small size, you can practically put them anywhere. Listed below are a few places where you can place them with corresponding formats and a little explanation on the location.

• Post Header, horizontal format, right before the post’s title, so that it will look like as navigation links and therefore highly clickable.
• Corners, square format, anywhere in your blog, to cover other places your readers might be looking.

Clicking on these Link Ads brings readers to a Google search-like page, and only after clicking ads listed on this page do you get credited for the clicks. I might try to implement a link ad right in the footer of BlueMumble and see what the performance will be.

For Adsense For Search, the best place would be to put it right at the top of your blog, on the left or right sidebar corner. Also, make sure you remove the built-in Search widget for Wordpress, so that all searches will come from Adsense for Search. Searches would reveal actual search results on google.com and will have sponsored ads displayed as well. When your visitors click on these sponsored links, you get credited for the click.

For Adsense Referrals, you may try and use the same placement for Ad Content Units. Referrals work like affiliate programs where your users should buy or sing-up first before you get some fixed amount for the referral. Most of my blogs do not deal greatly with affiliates, and as with my stand on this article, I chose not to put any referrals on my site.

Some examples of Adsense formats taken from GuitarTutee

Adsense For Content Ad Unit

Adsense For Content Link Unit

Adsense For Search