A very useful and important tip for all Adsense users

Hello everyone

I would like to share a very useful tip that increases your CTR without breaking the Adsense TOS.

Let's start with something very common I see on many sites (especially blogs) that is against the Adsense Terms of service and may lead to the deactivation of the Adsense ads on your site.

This is wrong:

It is not allowed to put Adsense ads directly under <h1> <h2> or <h3> head titles. The Adsense team has contacted me about this and told me to either:
1) put the adsense ads above the post title
or 2) if I want to keep the ads below the post title, I must put a "Advertisement" or "Sponsored links" label between the post title and the ads, so it should be looking like this:

I was also warned that failing to do so, may result to deactivation of the Adsense ads on the sites breaking this rule. Yes, it is true and I remember also a post at the official Adsense blog mentioning that such placement is not allowed.

Following both of the above corrections I have found that dramatically drop the CTR, something that noone likes. So what do we do in this case?

The best solution is this: Don't use <h1>, <h2>, or <h3> heads.

Open your template files and change them to <h4>

Then put the Adsense ads above them. But why?

If you keep this layout:

the visitors eye focus automatically on the Post title and the post under it and they almost don't see the ads.

But if you change the Post title to <h4> it will be like this:

The adsense ads links and the post title will have the same size, so the visitors will focus first at the ads.

Using this tip doubled or even tripled my CTR and of course increased my earnings while remaining compliant with the Adsense TOS.

Feel free to try it and tell me your results.

 

where in TOS is this mentioned? Can't find it

 

Unfortunately, Google Adsense keep giving me the TOS in my language instead of English so I can't post the relevant paragraph here (I always hated those automatic language detections, not allowing me to read something in English when I need it...). In a few words it says that you should not encourage your visitors to click the ads by placing irrelevant text next or above them.

But as a confirmation, you can read this post on the official Adsense blog,
it says clearly that adsense ads are not allowed below post titles: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2008/03/another-look-at-optimizations.html

 

A quick update, I found the message I had received from Google, regarding this issue (placing Adsense ads below titles on my blog):

and when I made the change I mentioned in my first post, I asked them if everything is ok now and they replied yes, now it's fine.

You may think that thousands of blogs are doing this and we see it everywhere... It does not mean that it is allowed. It only means that they have not found them. As soon as they do, they notify them and if they don't comply, they temporarily or permanently disable the serving of ads on their site (they don't disable their Adsense account, they just deactivate the ads on their domain).