Adsense Split Testing Guide For WordPress and Blogger Blogs

Testing the attributes of Google Adsense units may have a significant impact on your overall Adsense earnings. Not just proper placement, but the colors, backgrounds, palettes and ad- size plays an important role on the performance of your ad units.

The older way of testing and optimizing your Adsense ads is testing them one after another. There is nothing wrong, but it may not produce accurate conclusion. Let’s say you experiment with two ad units by running them for 1 week each. You can judge the performance of each ad unit after two weeks, but you are just experimenting with them. This is not a complete comparison as the traffic and reactions may vary during the course of time.

What is Split Testing?

Split testing is a way to directly compare the performance of different ad setups and see which one of them performs better under similar circumstances. Also known as A/B testing, this method allows you to test the performance of two ad units parallely.

Example: You want to test which Adsense format works best for you under the main content section – the 333 X 280 large rectangle or the 300 X 250 medium rectangle. You create two ad units from your Adsense account and wrap them in a php code in such a way that the advertisements are rotated automatically. So if one of the pages of your site gets 500 impressions a day, each ad unit gets an impression of 250 (approximately).

Advantage: The Split testing method is useful because you can compare the performance of two ad setups parallely. It also helps to see which attribute is the cause of increased or decreased Adsense income.

Implement Adsense Split Testing in WordPress

All you need to do is create two separate ad units and assign them unique channels from your Google Adsense account. Next, copy the following code and paste it in your themes’s file, wherever you want the ads to appear.

The above code is using a simple PHP variable to switch the ad units for every new page impression. In short, the code shows the first ad unit to one visitor and the 2nd one to another and so on.

Implement Adsense Split Testing in Blogger Blogs

If your blog is on the Blogger platform, the PHP code mentioned above won’t work. Use the following code to rotate the ads:

Before you add the code in your Blogger template, the following things needs to be taken care of:

1. Replace pub – AAA with the publisher ID of your Google Adsense account.

2. Compare the original code of your Adsense units and replace the ad slots, ad width and ad height values. This step should not be ignored as according to Adsense terms of Service, modifying the Adsense code is strictly prohibited.

3. After implementing the code, check the page source of your blogger blog. Check the generated code of the ads and compare them with the original ad codes. The code generated at the page source must match exactly with the original code of your Google Adsense units.

Change the Look and Feel of Advertisements

Once you have implemented the codes, you will see reports of the ad performance in your Google Adsense account. To change any of the attributes of one ad unit, go to Adsense Setup > Manage Ads and click on “Edit Ad settings”.

During the course of the experiment, run each ad set up for 2 days and record the logs in an excel spreadsheet. After the end of the experiment, you will be able to judge which ad set up converts the most and brings maximum revenue. (also read: Implement Adsense Revenue sharing in Multi author blogs)

How to Track the Results

Log in to your Google Adsense account and go to “Manage reports” panel. Select a date range and the channel whose performance you want to track.

Hit the display report and you will see the complete data about page impressions, earnings, CTR and eCPM. In this way, you can compare which ad unit converted the most in a particular time period.

How To Complete your test and come to a Conclusion

There are 5 attributes in an Ad which you can change and optimize. They are:

• Font type – Adsense default font family, Arial, Verdana and Times.
• Font Size –  Adsense default font size, large, medium and small.
• Ad unit type – Text ads, image ads and a combination of  Text/Image ads.
• Ad unit size – Lot of formats to choose from but we will stick to 336 X 280 and 300 X 250 rectangle units.
• Color Palets – depends on your site’s design template.

You must test each and every possible combination of all the attributes listed above. The best way to do this is rotating the attribute you want to test while keeping others constant.

I think you have got the idea. Fix all other attributes and rotate the font family after every two days. At the end of the week compare the results to see what works for your site. Then rotate another attribute and this process continues until you know the best combination of ad format, font family, font type and the color palette of the Adsense ads. (Tip: Show Adsense ads only to search engine visitors)

Split Testing Report – Sample SpreadSheet

And here is an MS-Excel report sheet that Adsense publishers may use to record and track the split test data.

Have you performed an Adsense Split test experiment on your blog? How do you test the ad units for maximum performance? Please let us know your ideas in the comments section.