Search for “dave taylor” on Wikipedia, and you’ll be presented with a list of 17 different men.  But search for the same name on Google, and askdavetaylor.com pops right up.  So you’d be right to conclude that the owner of this site knows what he’s doing, and - though you probably didn’t guess this - he recently had a little chat concerning AdSense that seems worth repeating.

Taylor was actually interviewed by Arlene Lee of the Inside AdSense team.  His answers were posted on the blog, and you can learn a little bit about what he does and how he came to use AdSense.  We’ll skip straight to the “how I succeeded” section.

Taylor said, “Once I began working with AdSense in earnest, I began to wonder how ad placement, size, color, and design would affect earnings, and how to balance my desire to offer a splendid user experience with the need to simultaneously maximize revenue.  Enter A/B testing.  I read and talked with many AdSense publishers, tried what they suggested and what had worked for them, fiddled with my own ideas, and generally tried every variation I could imagine to see if I could improve the click-through-rate of my ad blocks.”

He then listed some specifics, continuing, “The greatest boosts I saw in clickthrough rate were when I moved the advert into the middle of my articles, when I made sure it had the same color background as the material around it, and when there wasn’t a solid border or other visual element to make the ad stand out from the surrounding content.”

Other tips include creating great content, and while keeping your ads visible, not distracting readers.  Simple stuff, maybe, but what’s good enough to get one guy ahead of almost 20 others in Google’s search results will hopefully help you get ahead of a handful of competitors.

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