Forum Moderators: martinibuster
So what I'm trying to do is get people to click more. The main draws of my site are instructional videos, and a discussion forum. But most of the users are regulars and are relatively young males, and therein lies the problem I think.
I serve up a couple million page views per year, which is quite high for the limited audience.
Should I ever bother in trying to push this forward? My CTR is currently 0.78, and it looks like I'll make about $70 this month. My costs to run the site are 0, so I don't feel too bad about it, but I'd like to find something that nets a bit more usable return than that.
I have a lot of other interests that I could potentially build a site around, but what I struggle with is that I already have a very highly ranked site with thousands of users and good traffic and don't want to start from square one again. It's soooo hard to get a solid user base.
I'd appreciate your thoughts on the matter, and to those with successful adsense revenue, perhaps you could discuss what niche you are in, in general terms. I think it would be helpful to see how you dealt with your particular market.
Thanks all!
Example: I decided early on that I wanted only one adblock per page, and I started with a narrow skyscraper on the right of the page, below the title, top aligned with the top of the content. After a while, I tried it on the left, and CTR literally doubled, and stayed there.
You also need to use channels, if you aren't already, to see what's working and what doesn't. I discovered that certain pages on my site, which are basically visited by regulars looking for information, just never worked for AdSense. No clicks to speak of, and the clicks I did get weren't worth much. I removed AdSense and used affliate program links its place, and my AdSense earnings actually went up.
Feel free to take a look at my site, in my profile. It's a fairly small niche, with maybe half your # of page views per year, and about ten times your income....
Now, back to the matter at hand. I've heard adsense doesn’t perform well on forums due returning users eventually figuring out the "links" are actually ads.
As others have said try placing ads in different positions around the page. Also, make your ads blend in as much as possible with your site.
Finally, make sure you read the adsense tips from google.
I should clarify that by "free" I meant that I don't have to pay for hosting, as my friend handles that, but it is a real site with domain name, etc.
Now, I have experimented with ad placement a decent amount. Right now, my forum pages have a horizontal ad block at top and bottom, and honestly that's about all I can do on there. We all know forums are not the greatest for this.
My other content pages though have nicely blended ads that are close to the main content. For example, on an instructional video page you'll have the page title, a short comment, the video, then the ad (moving from top to bottom).
As to visits, let's take March 2006. I had 8500 unique visitors, with 16,000 visits, and 130,000 pages.
That's 8.7 pages per visit. Most of that is going to be in the forum.
I also use the google search box on a dedicated search page and in the forum, but that generates basically 0.
I checked your site and immediately noticed something. Interestingly enough, it's your "lack of design" that I think is working you.
I am a graphic/web designer and hence, my sites are quite highly designed with much more in the way of custom graphics. Because of that, my ads "stand out" a lot more, no matter how well they are blended, simply because they are usually surrounded by areas of much more obvious design.
Your site has a consistency of presentation that makes the google links look like everything else.
This concept it frankly painful and foreign to my aesthetic design sense, but I can completely see why it works.
I am in no way putting your site down, but I honestly never would have conceived of such a design direction.
Very very interesting....
The design has been pretty much the same since early 1996, with some minor changes in approach, and a redesigned home page.
Given my niche, I don't NEED to change it, and frankly, I think it gives me a certain credibility. I'm no slick Willy! (not that you are, of course)
what I'm trying to do is get people to click more
In other words, you're trying to raise costs for your advertisers.
This is the part of AdSense that I hate. The Google middleman totally discourages publishers from treating advertisers as the valued customers they should be, from considering how to meet their needs in addition to the needs of website visitors.
Instead, the faceless page of AdSense statistics makes publishers just focus on doing anything to increase short-term income. SmartPricing helps ensure that "short-term" means "really, really, short-term".
Right now, it looks like all your Adsense ads are "tucked away" where people might stumble across them, but they aren't really where people are looking for stuff.
That may be your intention so that the ads aren't so "in your face", but "tucked away" and low CTR go hand in hand.
Like on your videos page, I would suggest testing different ad placements/sizes and colors:
Snippet
Adsense (rectangle, blended, similar colors as your website, stand out colors)
Video
Adlinks
On your main page try moving the ads from tucked away in your sidebar to front and center in the welcome area (might be a good place to display your products as well).
On your "explained" page, your adsense is tucked off to the side again. Try putting it front and center into the content (maybe before the first paragraph or after, or both).
Try moving the adlinks above, in the middle or below your sidebar navigation.
Looks like there is still a lot of tweaking and testing you can do on the site.
In other words, you're trying to raise costs for your advertisers.
If it's a targeted site with good content and quality traffic, that seems like what the advertiser would want as well.
Advertisers want their ads to be seen and clicked on.
If you can increase the traffic to the advertisers site so they can then convert more customers, that seems like a win-win.
Google provides pages of tips for optimizing the adsense ads so they can be seen and get more traffic to advertisers sites.
Isn't that what it's all about?
Why would an advertiser want their ad to be tucked away so it's not seen or clicked?
the best way to lay out a page with rich media like that is to position the ads around the media, and directly against it, not just beneath it.
putting the comment above the real content gives the text waaay too much emphasis... the primary reason that text is there is to rank the page in the search engines, so put it beneath everything else, depending on where it sits wrt the fold... the people that visit the page are there for the rich media, so position the ads accordingly... at the minimum, i'd suggest an ad block on the left side of the video screen, and a banner beneath it, with your page text beneath that.
remember that web surfers are trained to look at menus on the left side of the page, because that's where most sites locate menus... so your ad block should be there; they will watch the video no matter where it is located, as long as it's above the fold.
your other big problem is that you aren't seperating the video pages from the forum pages, wrt the ctr... since forums don't pay much, you should be developing the video pages, and using the forum to drive traffic to the video pages.
use channels to seperate video pages vs. forum pages, and also to tell you what ad position on the video pages gets clicked the most.
the biggest caveat here is that without sufficient advertisers in your sector, you'll never make money... with enuf advertisers, there will be plenty of ads to surround the rich media screen area, and the ads will get noticed more.
ron burk does a good job playing the devils advocate :-) but the fact is that if your page has highly targeted, relevant content of high quality, every advertiser you can think of will want to be positioned right next to that rich media block.
so split up your pages via channels, and get back to us in a few days with data that compares the forum ctr to the video page ctr.
First, I'm confused by my daily revenues. It is so wildly fluctuating that I cannot explain the differences at all. We're talking changes from $.30 a day, to $20 a day on pretty much the same traffic.
Also, I have every page or directory on a URL channel, but over the last week I've pretty consistently had only a few of my clicks in those channels, everything else (probably 75%) is "somewhere else" and I have no idea where...very confused by that one. Today I had 4 clicks, adn they were reported properly, but most of the time it doesn't work out that way.
I haven't had time to do other channels for specific ads yet will experiment with that soon.
