Increasing CTR for a broad topic site

[must learn more]

Hi,
My website gets around 200-250 visitors and 1,000-1,500 each day. It is a website that is kind of a portal. It covers a large number of different topics. So the adds that show up are varied. However, my problem is i have a very low CTR. 0.20%!

My website does not have too many adds. It has only one add block on top. I do not want to put to many add blocks, cause it makes the website look a little "spamy"! I am actually concentrating on "branding" which is going pretty well. I am getting at least 20% return visitors each day. But my problem is CTR is terribly low.

I guess my return visitors look at the articles and do not really concentrate on the adds any more. But that is just my personal conclusion for the low CTR.

Any ideas how I could improve the CTR situation.

If there is some more info you need, please do let me know.

Looking forward to some help.

[OptiRex]

Hi, we're not supposed to do critiques here however you have a nice, clean, fast site and I understand your not wanting to have too many ads.

Have you considered the same 468 x 60 in your footer area, or an horizontal AdLinks unit, since it is quite possible that when travelling from one page to the next that the reader does not see the ads?

The ads seem to be pretty well-targeted here in the UK, are they same in India?

One thing I would definitely do and that is in your titlebar move your "company.com" name to the end so that the page title is seen first by the spiders plus you have no meta keywords included.

[I Will Make It]

Another thing which might bring you some more clicks, is to have one more ad block in the middle of your page..
Maybe even try a link ad unit. They tend to do pretty well sometimes.

Since your main page(home page) is kind of "long" - the users have to scroll a little bit, and the people who are regulars to your site knows this, and don't pay attention to the top (they already know what page they are on).

So my suggestion would be to add just one more ad, or link-unit somewhere in the middle of your page. Maybe between your: "Other Recent Articles!" and "Our most popular articles:"

This will help to get clicks from your regular visitors as well as the first-time-visitors...

Good luck!

[must learn more]

What do you think will be the effect of putting a banner under the "Next-->" & "Previous" links of each article page. How will this affect branding and the way people see the site. Will the website look a little too commertialized?

Also what do you think will be the kind of CTR I can expect. I am afraid that it might lower my PageViews/Visit and hence have a bad effect on my long term branding!

What do you think?

Can you suggest a add position on the articles pages that will not stand out and look too ugly and commertialized!

My adds are quite well targeted here in India. Atleast I do not get MFA adds.