Simply slapping AdSense on your site is one of the easiest, but not necessarily best, ways to monetize your website. There are a lot of factors that go into getting the most out of your ad units. They range from placement, color, ad network, or even time of day. Each of these factors can affect ad performance

YieldBuild, a new service from the company that launched HubPages, will take a stab at optimizing those ad units for you. It’s similar to the Rubicon Project, a highly rated ad optimization platform in beta that finds the best mix of ad network and demographic data. However, YeildBuild has a focus on layout and design.

It uses computer algorithms to automatically optimize your site’s ad spots with the most profitable combination of ad layout, style, and network. The system continually tests alternative configurations of layouts, networks, and color, looking for the highest performing ones. You can see a timeline of the system substituting ads below. It takes about 100,000 impressions to train the system. As users become unresponsive to the ads, the system is supposed to switch in a more profitable combination of layout and networks.

They’ve been privately beta testing the system with some fairly well known startups and saw improvements of 50% to over 100% in effective CPM rates on user profile pages. They’re currently looking for more beta testers to try the system out on.

For those advertisers and Websites finding it difficult to keep up with the 300-plus ad networks out there, a new startup called the Rubicon Project promises to simplify the process of placing ads online. It provides one dashboard to manage all of a company’s ad campaigns, and tries to optimize across ad networks—from Google, Yahoo, and Tacoda (AOL) to AdBrite to HispanoClick—to deliver the most bang for the buck. The service breaks down ad inventory into 9,000 micro-segments by geography, demographics, and context. A private beta opened up today with 500 spots. If anyone signs up, please report back your experience in comments below.

The Rubicon Project is an LA-based startup that raised $6 million last week in an A round from Clearstone Venture Partners (with $2 million of that coming in the form of venture debt from Square1Bank).