Atomic - 2:03 am on Jun 4, 2011 (gmt 0)

I've gained both traffic and earnings with my primary site. It is not a big brand but it's 15 years old. It has 2 Google ad units right now. Used to have more but I removed all but the 2 while improving the site over the last few months. The intent of the redesign was to improve user experience. I decided to do this after taking some HCI and social computing classes.

I not only removed ad units. I also moved them far away from the content.

I looked at what visitors clicked on/used and removed anything they didn't. Amazon links shot to the top of that list.

Bounce Rate is down 10%.

Traffic is up about 12%.

Time on site is up 10%.

Pages per visit is up 10% or so.

Earnings are up a lot more. I figured earnings would go down when I removed all afilliate links and 2 AdSense units. I figured wrong.