Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Disappointingly there has been no corresponding increase in either Adsense revenue or inquiries from the site. This particular site is recognised as an authority site in its field having been established for four years and holding the number one position for the main keyword.
What is also a concern is that inquiries for the service offered appear to have dropped. I am now wondering if the presence and position of the three ad units on the home page could be chasing my visitors away. As a result I was wondering if it would be better to remove some/all of the home page ad units to catch visitors attention first. It may be that the ads are chasing them away before I have captured their interest.
Thoughts?
I know that the argument gets pretty invalid if you analyze deeper but that's the way I tick. I must add that I myself have 3 different activities (so I am not judging you!) but I try to keep them separate in the way they are displayed. For example, no paid for services mixed with ads.
Were the improvements for your benefit or the visitors?
CSS, html, php, whatever, it means nothing to the vast majority of surfers.
Maybe what you (and others who are hardly going to say anything other than you want to hear) think is a better design isn't in the eyes of visitors.
As to ads on homepage, I have them on some, but not on others. For a consultancy website I would not.
three ad units on the home page
Way excessive. Makes it looked like a parked domain or scraper site. It'd be hard to find your offering in all that stuff.
I have one AdLinks block on my home page, which is all I would want to have. I recently redesigned my site, to make it more user-friendly, and CTR on that block is about half what it used to be. People seem to be more likely to travel on into the site, which is great, but not so great that income is down!
Were the improvements for your benefit or the visitors?
Maybe what you (and others who are hardly going to say anything other than you want to hear) think is a better design isn't in the eyes of visitors.
The improvements were mainly for my visitors benefit. The site was rebuilt on CSS so that the pages would load more quickly and I standardised on text and links. The people I asked to critique the site were told to do just that and they had no reason to be sycophantic :)
I am in an engineering/technical discipline and I changed the colour scheme of the site from a cool blue shade to a dark red. It may be that this is putting engineers off?
I strongly suggest an experiment. Remove at least two of the AdSense blocks for a week and see if your inquiries improve (I assume your consultancy business is more important to you than the AdSense income?).
I think I will do this. I have been using 468x80 banners at the top and bottom of the content and 120x600 skyscraper in the side navigation panel. I will try removing the banners to leave the focus on the content of the home page.
I created a related site that offered a free service about 11 months ago. I was hoping I could move some of the ad focus to this from the main site but unfortunately it is still sandboxed.
Does anyone remember a thread where this has been discussed before? (I mean trying to find a balance between ads and retaining credibility.)
For me the best has been to put a square of ads (blended) below the 1st paragraph. This happens to be in the visual hot spot too. Header and left and right border areas are very sparsely populated so the page looks clean upon first view.
This is what I am trying. I placed skyscraper in the navigation column, which is on the right hand side. I also put a banner at the bottom of the page. This leaves all the content of the home page uninterrup[ted by adverts. I am now beginning to think that I have too much content on the home page. This may be driving people away but the content is what gives me my G rank and traffic ... catch 22.
For me the best has been to put a square of ads (blended) below the 1st paragraph.
Do you mean below the fold?
Did you try changing the color back to blue? I think visitors are more likely to click on a cool blue than a dark red.
How many of the large online stores do you see with red layouts? They all have blue/white, green/white or something similar. And since people expect that from professional sites now, give them what they're familiar with.
If your site is css-based it should be easy to change it to a blue color scheme and change the ads too, but keep the new layout. Do it for a week and compare... I think you'll be pleasantly surprised...
Good luck :)
My site revamp is pulling in more traffic and my Adsense earnings have sunk to their lowest ever level They are currently only about 25% of what I was getting before I changed things.
I also removed last week all adsense code from 2 minisites as this was supposedly helpful. I am still waiting. 25% down.
An ad for abviously spammy stuff hurts your credibility, especially with people who tend to notice such things, and even more so on a business/consulting site. (Your audience is engineers, right? They're a pretty tech-savvy bunch and can recognize spam when they see it.)
I've had to block a lot of new spammers lately.
