A couple easy Adsense hacks that could triple your CTR

Recently, I found some interesting settings in the Google Adsense setup that I discovered might have been hampering my CTR. After searching the topics to find out other people's experiences with them, I found out that many had 3x to 6x the CTR after implementing these, that they did beforehand. And, unlike most other things, these work for ALL Adsense implementations - including HubPages, because they involve only settings in the google.com adsense setup that you need to change - not changes in the code, javascript or in the html of every website that you put Adsense on.

There are three of these little settings to change. First, you have to go to www.google.com/adsense to login to your account.

Now that you're logged in, see the top bar with the tabs for Reports, Adsense Setup, My Account, and Resources? Okay, now you have to click on My Account.

Once you're there, you will be in the subtab Account Settings. This is the right subtab, so no changes needed from here. But anyways, scroll down. Ignore all of the settings about login information, payment information, address information, etc etc etc.

There are three settings areas that you want to pay attention to, after scrolling past the login and tax information. What these are are "Ad Display Preferences", "Interest-Based Ad Preferences", and "Third Party Ad Preferences".

First of all, the Ad Display Preferences. Click this. You'll find options to change the font face, change the text size, and change whether your ad units serve text and image, or text only. Make sure this last one is set to "text and image" - even though your CTR might be just a tiny bit lower, you will have more ads competing for space on your site. Leave the font face the same, unless it doesn't match your site - then, change it to match the site. With the font size, change it to "small" - I find that these ads will be less likely to blind users, and that the small font will entice users to read the text more than large fonts will. Large fonts killed my CTR - small fonts sent it through the roof.

Next up is "Interest-based Ads Preference." What this does, ostensibly, is tracks Google searches made by users, and delivers ads based upon previous searches that your users have made? Translation? It serves irrelevent ads. It sounds great in theory, but how are advertisers going to target your site if your users are viewing ads that don't even relate to your content? Disable this - that way, you can better target keywords on your site.

Finally, you have "Third Party Ads Preference". The question here is much like above: do you want third party ad networks using Adsense to show their ads, to gather user information using tracking cookies? No. Number one, I don't like tracking cookies. And number two, this is another way that irrelevant ads will get shown on your websites. If I have a car site, I don't want bodybuilding ads showing to certain users, clothing ads to others, and "make money online" ads to still others. I want CAR ADS. And I want the ad targeting to be as direct as absolutely POSSIBLE.

I mean, it sounds great in theory to have ads showing based on what users are interested in, but the topic that my ads are targeting on MY SITE, might be something that users don't know that they are interested in, but that the ads BUILD interest. If interest is built out of nothing, that makes a click more likely.

So what has my CTR done since I flipped the last three settings? It's up from just over 1 percent to over 4 percent, consistently. My CPC is very slightly less, however, the CTR far more than makes up for it. My CTR is now almost as high as my Kontera CTR.

Will this setting change do the same to your CTR? Most likely. Even if it doesn't increase your CTR too much, it's still good to target your keywords better, and to battle what I consider is an unnecessary nuisance and privacy invasion: tracking cookies.