Do you want your sites to click and convert better for you? The "peel and stick" method is the answer. It's just that this time you're not "peeling and sticking" keywords; you're "peeling and sticking" targeted web sites. This way your ads more closely match the content of the sites that you're advertising on.

You delete a web site from one ad group, insert it into a new ad group, and write an ad that matches the thinking of the folks who are coming from that site or group of sites. That's means you want to understand the people who are coming from those sites: their hang-ups, their psychology, their wants. Then again, that's exactly what you do with keywords, isn't it?

Because with site-targeted ads you're no longer mixing results and statistics from regular Google, search, and AdSense traffic, when you create ads and they start to show, the comparison with any other ads you've been showing is direct, apples-to-apples. You can compare the clickthrough rate of one ad with the click-through rate of another without having to factor in all of the vastly different types of places that it's being served.

WHAT ADSENSE ADS AND TURN-THE-CORNER KEYWORDS HAVE IN COMMON

With regular Google search ads, you're trying to be there for the people who are looking for you. With AdSense the psychology is different: you're now writing ads to interrupt people.

This is also the case for turn-the-corner keywords. Those are the keywords you bid on to position yourself as an alternative. You know, selling Austria tours to people who are looking for Swiss vacations. This psychology of interruption permeates AdSense advertising.

Banner ads have always worked that way. Knowing how to create effective image-based banner ads to run on Google's networks is yet another way to multiply your clicks.

IMAGE ADS

This is one of the few places on earth where you can create an image ad entirely on your own, have it run as the only advertisement on a web page, and (when it's AdSense you're running) pay only when people click. The first thing you need to know is that size does matter. You've got a choice of multiple sizes for your ads. And it's no surprise that the larger ad sizes will earn you more clicks. They're more invasive, more noticeable. Tiny strip-ads squeezed in at the very top or very bottom of the page are less so, and likely to bring you a lower CTR.

Good copy brings clicks, but don't assume that multiple ads of varying sizes are performing differently only because of their copy. Size can be the bigger determiner. Split-test pairs of ads in the same size categories. Run ads in all of the sizes that Google makes available. Otherwise, your numbers may only tell you which size is most likely to draw clicks.

Surprise. Image ads earn better CTRs than regular content-targeted text ads. And not just the big ones, either. Even the smallest image ad can average a clickthrough rate two to three times that of a text ad. The biggest reason for this is that visuals are always more impulsively compelling than mere words. Plus with image ads there's less competition; you may be the only Google advertiser that's showing on a particular page.

The flip side to this is that your image ads will get fewer impressions than text ads. There's simply no way that image ads can be served as frequently as text ads.

It's not unheard of for some image ads to pull in CTRs ten times as high as text ads with identical copy. But even with their good CTRs, image ads get shown much less, and because of their impulse appeal, the traffic they bring in tends to be lower quality and won't convert as well to sales.