Forum Moderators: martinibuster
This site has always had what I would consider a high ctr. I have always used a right hand 180 * 600 skyscraper with the background colour matching that of the site and title and adtext in contrasting colours to those on the site.
I've only ever used 1 ad block and have never tried the new ad-links.
As the page has always delivered a high ctr I have always been loathe to move the adblock in case it screwed everything up.
But, for a long time I've wanted to switch from a table layout to using css-p in order to make the site more standards compliant, accessible, and flexible vis-a-vis SEO.
The changes I have made:
created a new stylesheet and used CSS-P - absolutely positioning all of the layers but delivering them to the browser in an order whereby the SEO'd content gets delivered before the navigation elements.
Ditched the skyscraper in favour of a leaderboard sitting in the upper hotspot according to G's own heatmap. The colours used are exactly the same as before.
I enhanced the visibility of the site navigation that sits in a standard left-hand column but decreased the spacing between each line of navigation.
After having read the excellent results posted by incrediBill from when he revisited adlinks I had decided I wanted to try them out.
I placed a 5 link adlink block directly below the navigation element - this sits above the fold and is also in a hotspot.
The train of thought being that if someone is already reading down the navigation bar then they haven't already found what they want on the page. If they still don't see a match then the adlinks supplied by G may well catch their eye and get a click.
I made this change on Friday.
So far - CTR eCPM and earnings are all up in the region of 70%.
Obviously its way too early to make any real conclusions but after the first 2 days results are very encouraging. Friday and Saturday are normally 2 of the worst days for me for earnings from this site - this Friday and Saturday have been record earners.
So far Sunday also looks to be following the same trend.
Now follows a game of wait and see to see if this trend continues or falls off back to more normal levels.
I am more specific to more cpc rather more ctr?
Earnings and CPC have either bombed today or stats are updating irregularly (hopefully the latter.
Geo - personally I don't know about fine-tuning your CPC. I'm looking at this from the perspective of boosting revenue through increased impressions and increased CTR. I'm not even sure that CPC is even that much within our control (in the long-term). In the course of these changes I have made sure the adsense code is right between the page title / precis and the content and it is possible this has increased relevancy (but then that again should increase CTR not necessarily CPC).
June was my best month ever (with slightly lower traffic than receent months): earnings up just under 70%. The only other thing I did during the course of the month was take Adsense off pages where the CTR was very low (although I might start tentatively putting some back on to see if I can encourage come CPM ads).
Thanks to Incredibill and SpaceyLacie (notable amongst many others) whose threads inspired me to make some of the changes. It really is worthwhile keeping an open mind when you are at first skeptical about some of the posts here - some of them are pure gold.
