Last week, I made a relatively minor change to the AdSense units on this site and consequently have seen 3.5-6x better CPMs… a remarkable difference.

On blog post permalinks, I used to have a 468 x 60 text unit between the post title and the article. I switched that unit to a large rectangle (336 x 280) that sits between the end of the post and the comments. That change alone resulted in 3.5-6x improved CPMs – sitewide! And that’s without making two changes that are probably more significant / effective:

1) Adding that same unit to the blog’s homepage and placing it between posts
2) Nesting the unit within the article on post permalinks (like below)

Other considerations:
- Testing the color and formatting of the unit
- Test rotation of text, image and video ads (all exist for that size)
- Adding Google Links Ads (you can have three text / image ad units per page and three link units)

Have any AdSense best practices?

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