These should be labeled under common sense instead of secrets, but I've seen way too many sites that overlook many of the following:

1. If you have a business, don't sacrifice your products/services for the sake of placing your AdSense (or other) ads. You need to choose what your site is really about, showing ads or your products/services. You can show ads AND sell your products/services, but the ads need to be tastefully placed and flow with the content of your site. My recommendation, however, is to NOT place ads on any page where you are trying to sell something because it gives the user less choices to click away from your product.

2. Google allows you to block out competitors ads. USE THIS FEATURE. I've seen so many sites that just throw up AdSense on their site and it promptly displays ads that send traffic to competitors. Would you rather make a sale/conversion, or get $.10 for a click? It boggles my mind when I go on an SEO site and see Google ads for SEO services. If you're going to have ads on a site like that, you might want to go with a different ad provider (at least on that page) so you can display a complimentary rather than competitive ad.

3. Worried about where to place your ads? Google has recommended placement: https://www.google.com/adsense/suppo...y?answer=17954.

4. Trying to optimize your ads? Try testing. Google provides channels so you can track which ad units perform best. Make use of them. You can also use AdSense in conjunction with Analytics, which provides a click-through rate for every link on every page on which it is installed. Wondering about what to test? Try unit size, colors, text vs. image vs. banner, placement...and anything else you can think of.

5. Is nobody clicking on your ads? Well, what does your content look like? If you have content that is poorly written, poorly edited, not useful and it looks like it's been just thrown up there to bring people in to click on the ads, no one is going to click on them. Write for your users, not for AdSense. If you offer no value to anyone, you're not going to get any appreciable traffic or clicks.

There is a lot more that I could write, but I'll probably do it in a blog post sometime in the future. I hope this helps a few of you.

There's no much secrets to it...even poorly placed ads will give good revenue if your site has a lot of visitors, having many page views doesn't tell much about your visitors, normally if you have many repetitive visitors the ad blindness will be high.
I personally never had any success with it, but to tell the true i really never care if it was going to give any money or not, i was more concerned about developing and working out my site without concerning with ads or any other revenue source.
Adsense is all about statistics and probabilities, if you have an huge ammount of visitors (or the right visitors, sometimes clumsy ones that let their mouse slip into the ads ) you may have some success, yet is one those things that can make you win $500 in one month and 1 cent in the next.

Originally Posted by ClaFanN1

Adsense is all about statistics and probabilities, if you have an huge ammount of visitors (or the right visitors, sometimes clumsy ones that let their mouse slip into the ads ) you may have some success, yet is one those things that can make you win $500 in one month and 1 cent in the next.

While having more visitors will generally get you more clicks, you make it sound as if it's all left up to chance. There IS a science to it, but it is the result of optimizing AdSense (or whatever ad provider you use) to your particular site. That's only going to be accomplished through extensive testing.

I applaud your focus on your site itself first and foremost because that's the way it should be. However, as you mentioned, your lack of success with AdSense is probably related to not putting the necessary effort into it.

man that was very informative!