How to A/B Test AdSense Ad Unit From AdSense Dashboard

In the past, we have talked about A/B testing and undoubtedly it’s one of the web standards to find high performing pages, ad units, words, designs and many more.  There are many case-studies available which shows what kind of design or call to action works, but don’t forget that every website is different and as a blogger it’s our job to run A/B test on our blog. Now when it comes to AdSense, one of the biggest challenges and questions we have in our mind are:

• Which Ad format works better: Text or image?
• Should we use the border with our AdSense ad units or not?
• And similar many more questions, where answers are different for every website.

And, the best way to find the answer is by running split testing. That means, running different colour, style variation of ad unit to find bets performing variation.

AdSense A/B testing let you find best ad unit:

Few days back, AdSense added a default feature in AdSense dashboard which will let any publisher to run A/b testing on their ad unit without changing any code. This new feature can be used for existing Ad units or for new ad units you are creating. With this feature, you can run different of the same ad unit and can find which ad unit it performing the best. Let me explain you how it works:

Login to your AdSense Dashboard and click on My Ads. Under Myads, click on Experiment > New experiment. Now give your experiment a name, and add notes about what you are testing. Using the drop-down you can select your previously created ad unit to run the test.

Now under variation tab, you can optimise the colour, border, select only image or image+ text variation. In short you are creating an alternate variation of same ad unit size, and testing it to find which one will make money for you.

In terms of split testing, you can specify if you want AdSense to optimise the traffic split, or you can custom select split testing for both the variation. Just uncheck the box in front of Traffic split and use the slider to set split testing. I would recommend you to let AdSense optimise the split testing or if you are trying custom split testing, keep it 50:50 to get more accurate result. Once everything is set, click on Start experiment and your AdSense A/B testing will start.  You can find more details about AdSense split teasing over here, and you can learn about how you can find which ad variation is performing better.

If AdSense is your main source of blog income, I highly recommend you to experiment to find the best ad variation for your blog. Do remember, what works for me might not work for you, and what works for, might not work for you. So it’s better to run your test, and find out what Ad unit and colours will give you the best AdSense results. Selecting the right variation will help you to get more CTR and hence more money from Adsense for the same ad unit.

If you are looking for A/B test different ad size, I would recommend you to take advantage of AdRotate plugin, and run different ad units at the same spot to find which ad size is best for your blog. Where he shared some easy to implement tips to improve your AdSense earning with existing traffic. Do share your experiment results and share this article with your other friends who are using AdSense to monetize their blog.