Adsense offer a variety of Adsense Ad formats to allow publisers the flexibility to place ads on any spot on their website. There are currently 10 standard Ad formats and 6 Adlink formats.

The Standard Adsense Ad Formats

Horizontal Ad Formats

1. 728 x 90: Leaderboard
2. 468 x 60: Banner
3. 234 x 60: Half Banner

Vertical Ad Formats

4. 120 x 600: Skyscraper
5. 120 x 140: Vertical Banner

Square Ad Formats

6. 125 x 125: Button
7. 300 x 250: Medium Rectangle
8. 250 x 250: Square
9. 336 x 280: Large Rectangle
10. 180 x 150: Small Rectangle

The Adsense Adlinks Formats

Horizontal Adlink Formats

1. 728 x 15
2. 468 x 15

Square Adlink Formats

3. 200 x 90
4. 180 x 90
5. 160 x 90
6. 120 x 90

Why should you optimize the content for Adsense? Simply put, content optimization makes it possible to realize the full revenue earning potential of your website. In a way, it is to find out your "magic recipe" of your website. And this will do primary two things:

• It will make your visitor involved and responsive. What it means is you will maximize the Click-Through-Rate (CTR) and make the visitor want to click on your Ads. This is only possible when the ads are very relevant to the content of the page

• Maximize the revenue you earn from each click. You need to attract high paying Ads to do this.

To maximize your CTR you will need to focus on your choice of ad format, ad color, and ad placement and finally ad relevancy. You need to make sure that your ads are as relevant as they can be, as related ads always generate more clicks than unrelated omes. The number of units per page and your use of adlinks will also effect your click through rate.

To make sure that you are receiving as much as you possibly can from every click, you need to focus on high paying keywords around your niche through search engine optimization of the content and the creation of supplemental content that focuses on high paying keywords related to primary niche.

When you have achieved the above two goals, then all you need to do is to attract targeted traffic. With all this your website will become an automated money machine and makes you money based on how much your traffic is and how profitable your niche is.

Geting rid of unwanted Ads is an important technique in maximising the profits from Adsense. Adsense sometimes serve ads that may not work very well towards maximising the profitability of valuble online virtual real estate (i.e the Ad space on a publishers website). Some of the examples are PSAs (Public service Ads), untragetted Ads, Ads of the competitors etc. A publisher has to avoid these things as much as he/she can using proper content optimization or by using the filtering facility.

Google provides tools in Adsense account such as Competitive Ad filter. With the Competitive Ad Filter, a publisher can choose to block ads that link to specific URLs. The filter prevents all ads from the specified URL from appearing on the publishers web pages. Up to 200 URLs can be filtered like this. While it is good idea to prevent unwanted URLs from apprearing on a website, it is possible that webmasters (i.e publishers, website owner, blog owners etc) may use it a little too much, which can even hurt them. So let us see how and when and to what extent to use this tool.

When and How to use the Filtering Tool?

Now let us consider first of all, 'what Ads are really unwanted?' - There are varous types.

PSAs:

Public service Ads are displayed usually when Google has not yet crawed a web page. To avoid these a publisher can choose to display ads from an alternate URL or just a solid color. These option are provided in the Adsense Setup area.

Competitor's Ads:

If a publisher sells services or products through his site, this tool is very useful, as the publisher can avoid direct competitors from advertising on his site.

To block their URLs, a publisher can find them by searching on a search engine for keywords and keyphrases that are relevant for his business and then look at the AdWords that appear. Then chose these URLs to filter using filtering tool.

Untargeted ads:

Sometimes Adsense serves inappropriate ads that are not targeted to the content under question. Most of the times this has a lot to do with page theming and keyword optimization. It is not enough just to filtering them out, but a publisher should work more at page optimization and make sure that the webpage is clearly themed, so that Google can find appropriate and targeted ads that have a greated chance of producing a click.

Some things to consider:

A publisher may think it would be a good idea blocking ads that he considers paying too low or being slightly off-themed. This however, is not always the case. As Google serves most relevant and highest paying ads first, filtering too many URLs may actually reduce the 'earning per click' (EPC) on page and also the click-through rate (CTR). Also, one has to keep in mind that by entering a top level domain into the filter list, all ads that link to subdirectories below that domain will be blocked. This filtering system, unfortunatly, has its own limitations - : it's not just ads-related, it blocks all the ads (not just the unwanted ones) from a URL.

So,a publisher has to be careful not to do it more than required. A publisher usually finds it more profitable to use the filter for what it was intended: to block competitors' ads or ads and URLs that are really of no benefit.

What percentage of Ad revenue does Google Adsense program pay to its Publishers? This is one of the most troubling and unanswered questions for webmasters. Google does not disclose how much percentage they pay to the publishers and it is perhaps one of the well guardered secrets. Here we try to bring out what we know and what we learned from peers about Googles payting policies and hope to shed light on some of the very interesting areas.

Dispite the secrecy behind this payment percentage issue, Adsense by far exceeds the over all payout performance compared to many other advertising options on most content sites. To keep the publishers (website owners) happy with Adsense is important for Google to keep Adsense as the primary advertisement source for Publishers and to the overall success of the program. So it seems that Google does payout a significant portion of the Ad revenue through Adsense program back to the publishers.

According to Googles SEC filing and an article about Digital Point published in Newyork Times (link here) we have reason to believe that Google pays some where between 70 to 80% of the Ad Revenue to publishers.

Why Google maintains Secrecy ?

The possible reasons for Google's secrecy on payments can be:

• It's a program safety policy. I mean, if you think about it, if Google were to openly announce the share, then the competitors can offer higher percentages to Publishers and this could result in pricing wars.
• The complexity of the process thay follow to personalise and customize for each case is hard to explain. Besides, its not static and fixed and same for all sites. And they can modify it whenever, however they think is appropriate without having to explain and ground their action.
• Knowing who makes what would be a bone of contention for publishers.

Parameters for Calculating AdSense Payout

Basically, what we do know for sure is that Google receives the money from the advertisers any time an impression is registered or a visitor clicks on an AdSense advertisment. Then the revenue is shared with the publishers. It works like this:

• the cost of the click is established by the “smart pricing” system — this is the price advertisers pay;
• an undisclosed percentage is applied to this amount, that results into the shares for the publisher and for Google™.

Smart Pricing

Lets examine what this Smart Pricing is and how publishers who provide solid and focussed content can make use of it to their advantage:

1. Bidding: Pricing starts from the supply and demand ratio, settled in advertisers' bidding. (So far, not much we, as publishers, can do, except maybe for making your best keyword pick.) The price thus established is usually the highest possible, for there follow other factors that influence the CPC.
   
2. Potential Coversion Rate : The result is then modified according to the click's conversion potential. That is, it is not enough to just click on an ad, its value is given by the analysis of the actions following the click — registration, newsletter sign-up for example — in a word, its likeliness to turn into business results.
   
3. Relevence of the Ad: Further, the price of a click is influenced also by content relevance, the type of site on which the ad appears. Keywords and theme that triggered the ad are also analyzed. The more content-relevant the ad, the higher the price for the click.

It is logical that not all publishers be rewarded the same, but taking into account their potential as ROI holders. But we've already seen this as a factor analyzed through the “smart pricing” system.

Now, the shares of payment (between AdSense and publishers) are not calculated all alike, for not all publishers are “equal”; it is known, for example, that big web publishers get to negotiate the rates with Google. Why?

Authoritative, big publishers represent the pledge of high ROI, what makes them “most wanted” by advertisers. Thus, they will represent for Google also an important revenue source. Undoubtedly, they get to be stimulated to participate and stay in the program by means of a preferential treatment. That would lead to the deduction that smaller publishers are granted lesser shares.

Google states this explicitely in their Initial Public Offering Registration Statement (as filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 29, 2004):

Typically, in situations where we pay a Google Network member more than the revenue we receive from our advertisers in connection with paid clicks on that Google Network member’s web site, we recognize the difference as cost of revenues. Due to intense competition for Google Network members and our limited ability to accurately forecast the number of paid clicks that will result, we expect that we will enter into AdSense agreements from time to time under which we will make payments to the Google Network member exceeding the revenue we recognize from the agreement. Cost of revenues also includes amortization of expenses related to purchased and licensed technologies.

But it is not necessary to be an “authority” publisher, or a very big one to convert well your site into money. Smaller sites can have excellent potential in this regard. In an analysis to determine the sites' “monetization” rate, we may speak of an “extended” smart pricing applied by Google.

There are some criteria which are unofficially but almost certainly taken into account, which we chose to expose here for you to see also our perspective on the way Google AdSense™ pays:

• High traffic and impressions — High traffic is not strictly connected to the CPC. Targeted traffic is more valuable as it is likely to convert more. Thus, sites generating quality traffic (resulting in high CTR) will earn more. CTR seems to be taken into account by AdSense™ when choosing the sites for directing higher paying ads.
• Site size and age.
• High Page Rank (with all the parameters it involves — valuable content, relevancy of the inbound links, keyword relevancy).

After all, sites that would meet all of the above criteria are very likely to produce more, the higher their potential to raise a profit, the bigger Google's interest to keep them into AdSense.

The earnings from Adsense can range from a few cents a day from a single website to several thousands of dollars over a network of websites. The Adsense program itself has nothing to do with how much a publisher can make using Adsense. Its all about building quality websites that attracts visitors and trageted Ad market. Once you have got targeted traffic, you can monitise that traffic using Adsense. Building quality and focussed content which has some commercial market value and attracting targeted traffic to the sites you build are the keys of making money on web using Adsense.

So, here are a few things you need to learn to succeed with Adsense:

Building quality content sites that focus on a specific niche that interestes the audiense of that niche.

Finding right keywords to target the market and build websites suitbale for those markets. Keyword Research is an important skill

Finding niche markets that has high demand and low supply.

Search engine optimisation of your webpages is important to make your web pages rank well on search engines.

Building links with similar suits will improve the page rank for your pages.