Once your website or blog is getting traffic, one of the easiest ways to monetize that traffic is with Google AdSense.  However, most site administrators and bloggers just put some Adsense ads on their pages and wait for the money.  While some money may trickle, most sites leave money on the table because they don’t optimize Adsense.

There are two highly related reasons, why Adsense goes un-optimized.  First placing the AdSense code in between the code of your Drupal theme takes some technical skill.  Second, because it is not easy folks look for the easy places to place it and don’t optimize all the space on their site.

There are many ways to place AdSense ads; it really depends on your skills and preferences.  While coding slows some folks down, as noted above, that might be your preference:

Drupal AdSense Module

For most people the easiest approach is to add a module.  The Drupal AdSense module provides web content providers with the means to earn revenue from visitors by displaying ads from Google AdSense on their sites.  This module allows ads to be targeted towards the page content in Drupal which insures the ads that are displayed are highly relevant.  As any advertiser knows, the more relevant the ads the more clicks.

All you do is setup this module to use your Adsense ID (something like pub-5546333582380768) and it will then automatically insert relevant Adsense ads into pages, news, forum posts and blog entries.  Voila - Google adwords appear like magic and you earn some money. The module protects you from displaying more ads in a page than the maximum allowed by Google.  This module is so popular that you even have companion modules, like AdSense Injector.

Do AdSense yourself

Don’t like modules.  That’s okay as there are many ways of displaying Google AdSense ads in a Drupal web site. The simplest way is to display the ads in blocks.

• Log in as the site administrator
• Go to Administer > Blocks
• Add a block
• Give the block a descriptive title such as  “Google Ads”
• Paste the AdSense code from your account. Make sure that you paste the entire code as it is and not miss any lines.
• Make sure that the type is PHP. If you do not see a type PHP, then add it in the Input Format.
• Give the block a description, such as  “Google Ads”
• Click on Save

Now once you have created the block, you need to enable it and position it on your site:

• Click on the Enabled checkbox
• Select a weight for the block
• Select if it is to be displayed in the right or left column.
• Click on Save

Drupal Advertisement Module

Combining the module and the do-it yourself approach is this ad module which is a powerful advertising system for Drupal-powered websites. It supports the random display and tracking of graphical (banner) and text ads.  This module does not limit you to Google AdSense - but likewise it does not have AdSense specific features like controling the number of AdSense ads per page.

This module records comprehensive statistics about when and how often ads are viewed and clicked, including a plug-in module for generating graphical time-based reports. Ads can be assigned to multiple owners, each of which can be assigned their own set of permissions.  Because an API is provided (if you don’t know that API is Application programming interface than this module is not for you) you can develop additional functionality and even integrate it with other Drupal modules.

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