Add In-Content AdSense Block to Maximize Revenue

The single most profitable design change I have ever made for AdSense revenue is putting the ad right smack dab in the middle of where people are reading.

Rationale

I hate seeing ads as much as the next guy. I know it is annoying to readers to have pop-ups, pop-unders, irrelevant sidebars, and ads in the middle of the page. I totally get it.

The thing is that ads work. I pay for this website by selling services, so I don’t have ads for anyone else. I have other websites, however, that don’t sell services actively. Ads are how I keep the site in business.

Take a look at Personal Profitability. I started the site, formerly Narrow Bridge Finance, about six years ago, and it has grown to allow me to hire staff writers and create useful products. The biggest revenue source, though, is ads.

If you look at any random post on Narrow Bridge Finance, you will see an AdSense ad block two paragraphs down on the right side of the text. Adding that block increased my revenue dramatically. I am talking in the range of 10x higher than using a sidebar ad block alone.

Implementation

There are a few plugins that can do this for you, but I always say that you shouldn’t use a plugin where simple code will do the trick. Using a bit of code keeps your safe more secure and speedy than using a plugin in most cases.

The code snippet below will add an AdSense block at the second paragraph of your post, but there is a line you can easily edit in the code to make it show up anywhere you’d like. This code is optimized for a 336px x 280px block to float on the right side of the page.

If you use a different size code, or want it to float on the left, you can just change the line below. Adjust the width and height to match your block and change float:right to float:left to move the block. If you want it to be centered and not have the text wrap around it, just remove the float: right; from the code.

$new_content .= '336px; height: 280px; padding: 5px; float: right;">';

I used Asynchronous AdSense code to speed up my page load speed. Asynchronous code means your other page content can load first, then AdSense will load after. This gives your site visitors a faster load and better experience.

The entire code block is below:

https://gist.github.com/NarrowBridgeMedia/8bd607345d87133f5a77

To install, copy and paste at the bottom of your theme’s functions.php file (or similarly named function file). In Genesis themes, it is the functions.php file in your child theme. Always create a backup of your functions file before editing just in case you break something.

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