Frustrated with my CTR, willing to accept advice...

how can I boost my CTR

[Ducain3]

Hello all. I've only posted here a few times recently, but I am VERY impressed with this place. =)

Here's the deal. I run a gaming site, with content updated daily (news posted daily), and with about 4 million pageviews per month.

Right now I'm running a 120 x 600 google ad on the right side of my page, with no borders, and colored to look like the links on my site.

My site is generating 50-60,000 impressions per day, but my CTR has never risen above 0.9%.

I'm flummoxed, and am at a loss as to how I could boost my CTR.

I realize that I'm not allowed to post URL's here, but I would be glad to email my site addy to someone willing to take a look (I hope it's ok to announce that).

Thanks alot. Any advice is welcome.

[MrAnchovy]

Have you tried inserting an ad block with news posts that wrap around it.. like all the major news sites do with their articles?

You alos may want to check out the following... it got some basic starting points for ya...
[webmasterworld.com...]

[Ducain3]

Thanks very much. I just read a few of those posts that you linked me to, and have already 'learnt' some stuff. =)

JH

[Atomic]

Do you run AdSense in a forum?

[jetteroheller]

Most important would be to know the theme of the site.

I run with absolut same layout and ad placement a series of different themed web sites.

The difference between best and worst is about 1:10 in CTR

[Ducain3]

Atomic: I do run a fairly large forum, but right now the Adsense ads are only running on my website. I'm using CPM ads for the forum.

After looking at some of the articles here, I think I realize what's going on. Most of my visitors 'hang around' for awhile, and view the different pages.

I have about 110,000 visitors per month, and out of the actual 'visits', most of them view 3-6 pages per visit. That would be why my CTR isn't that high.

What I'm thinking of doing is creating a channel for most of my site pages, analyzing the traffic, and then maybe rotating some other CPC ads on those pages.

What think ye?

[arrowman]

0.9% is not high, but it's also not absurdly low. Some sections of my site are not much different.

I guess lots of people come to game, not to find information.

[Atomic]

My experience has been that members,even when reading articles, click less than someone that stumbles in from Google. So I don't show any ads to members. When I did that my CTR improved significantly.

I can't say 100% for certain there is a direct corelation but revenue increased as well.

I have a game related site, too and eventually dropped all ads from it. That crowd didn't do much clicking at all.