Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Now, this is what really made me open my eyes:
"AdSense revenue nearly doubled, to $650 per day."
I clicked the link, and got to -what I call- an ugly site.
(If the owner of this site reads this, I'm very sorry to call your site ugly, but in my opinion it really is, and by the way, I guess I can call your page whatever I want, as long as you earn $650/day.)
I have to say I'm confused. How on earth would this be possible? I've spent about 3 months now on a new site, brand new design, which is good.. Yep, I'm making a great looking page, which also is very userfriendly. But I'm thinking: Should I just drop my design, start all over, make a crappy design, or a "none-professional design", and just don't give a damn about what my visitors thinks of it?
I still remember the discussions we had over this guy who makes what? $10.000 / day with adsense, this dating-guru from Canada.. Everyone was talking about his badly designed page, and I agreed. It was simple, and kind of ugly.. But still! $10.000 a day!
Does anyone of you have any comments on this?
Do you know of more "ugly" sites which brings in tons of silver for the owners? Please let me know, so I can have a few more ideas for my new page-design.
Best regards
IWMI
I wouldn't say that site is ugly tho. To a degree, yes. But i've seen much MUCH worse
Sure, I've also seen sites which really make me wonder if I just should stop surfing the net. I'm talking font size=400, all bold and of course the text is red on a pink background. But these sites doesn't serve as examples on google. And they sure as he%# don't earn that kind of money.
IMHO: If the site I'm referring to makes as much as $650 / day, then I don't understand why the owner doesn't change the design and makes 10 times more..
On the other side, I can understand why google uses this site as an example. People would have to think: If this is true, I'll be rich in a week, and then sign up for an account -> earning google another dime or two ;)
A few months back I was contacted by AdSense and went through one of those optimization thingies... I was hoping for some great, innovative ideas how to improve my ad sizes, placement and colors, get better performance and so forth.
The results? Basically the only recommendation was for another 728x90 banner. Didn't touch my existing ad placements, sizes or colors. Was my site really that "perfect" already? My CTR would tend to say otherwise.
I was a tad disappointed...
- Check the site on Alexa, he is not having as much traffic as you may think he does, I said previously, he cannot be making over 300k visitors per month.
- One possibility is that the ads were not so spammy when he was interviewed, later he got greedy, filled it up, and again I am repeating myself, he is now enjoying a smartpricing bite below the tail.
I was having a root canal on a tooth yesterday, and every time I closed my eyes I saw the image of that frontpage, that's how disturbing it was.
I was having a root canal on a tooth yesterday, and every time I closed my eyes I saw the image of that frontpage, that's how disturbing it was.
Strange. When I saw that page, I tried to take my mind off the pain by closing my eyes and imagining I was having dental surgery.
Seriously, I thought when people talked about ugly sites they usually meant clashing colours and animated gifs. There's a lot worse out there than this site.
- One possibility is that the ads were not so spammy when he was interviewed, later he got greedy, filled it up, and again I am repeating myself, he is now enjoying a smartpricing bite below the tail.
I don't think so. If you check out the link in the first post of this thread, you can see some images of his front page from when he was interviewed (I guess)
- Gave me a good laugh there..
I was having a root canal on a tooth yesterday, and every time I closed my eyes I saw the image of that frontpage, that's how disturbing it was.
I still don't have an adsense account but I'm about to start my first blog today after finding the perfect theme. Don't worry it wont be spammy... I'm going to strive for relevant quality SE traffic, natural backlinks, recognition from other bloggers, etc..
I've been reading that clean and simple is the way to go for adsense.
The whole psychology of clicking a google ad is what I'd like to explore.
On that "ugly" site about the dog stuff, I wonder what the background pattern is doing to visitors. Those grey paw prints seem to create a subtle anxiety for me that makes me want to take an action - which could mean clicking the back button or clicking a link. Plus the background pattern makes the google ads stand out more than other links because the adblocks have a pure white background.
Anyone think the background pattern is boosting CTR? If so, could it be bad for smart pricing because the clicks are casual/exploratory instead of targeted?
Also, does anyone know if smart pricing is directly affected by the conversions from ads that appear on your site... or is it tied to other parameters of your site because conversion data isn't available from all advertisers?
>> clean and simple is the way to go for adsense.
Beauty is relative, more beauty, more relatives, seriously, clean works for me, but you should not be afraid to 'ugly up' as a test and see how visitors react, keeping an eye on the long term effect, you want visitors coming back not visitors running away and burning their history files.
>> what the background pattern is doing to visitors
Again an interesting observation, some people love wall paper in their houses, so another lesson is to test for different tastes and see what the majority of your audience reacts to.. Wall paper? Yuck!
>> anyone know if smart pricing is directly affected
>> by the conversions .. because conversion data
>> isn't available from all advertisers?
big question John,
SmartPricing is for conversions, and all knowing Google has an algo that knows how well your site converts.
(Or that's the story we're fed anyway)
IMHO: If the site I'm referring to makes as much as $650 / day, then I don't understand why the owner doesn't change the design and makes 10 times more..
If my site was making $650/day, I wouldn't change a thing design-wise.
On the other hand, if I land on a page with good quality, informative content, I'll tend to read what the webamster has to say. I'll click on links to the other pages of this site instead of clicking on the ads.
Ironic isn't it?
damn, $650 a day with Frontpage website!
As EFV stated, the platform is irrelevant.
Some of my best performing pages are not even made with frontpage but with Wordpad! It's the content that matters.
I think it's true that people are more interested in quality of information than page design, but I'd argue that good page design helps retain visitors, or makes us feel better about a professional image. My wife was playing with a family history site until recently, and she didn't even bother to present the information in lined up columns! She got quite a few people email her thanking for transcribing the information, and only one person said that aligned columns would make it easier to read. So I guess that if you have the info people want, stylewise you can get away with murder!
They haven't even considered us 800*600 users
People never stop to amaze me ;)
Perhaps we are all trying too hard to cater to smarter tech savvy types when we should be catering to the idiots.
But of course, thats the whole point of google featuring that site as an example. Inadvertant clicks are money makers, go for it!
looks like over 2 million visitors/month
No, see my previous posts in the same thread on that matter. Not even 1/4 that, I estimate 300k visitors per month MAX.
How does he make that much with such little traffic? As said before, relevant content + people click to get out..
What would be amazing is if he still makes that much per month today, that would call for reconsidering everything we discussed here about number of ad units per page, smartpricing and conversion.
[edited by: Hobbs at 7:36 pm (utc) on July 22, 2006]
You have more than 1700 posts on this forum, runs as a senior member, I have the feeling your adsense income is quite big, and then you say this:They haven't even considered us 800*600 users
OK - my kids might think that dinosaurs and my youth were concurrent events (it's our own fault for telling 'em it was true I suppose), but people still do use that particular resolution. We have a variety of computers dotted around the house, with a variety of resolutions that mostly seems to be dictated by whatever kid was playing whatever game on that PC last. The one I just happened to be looking at the site on was set to 800*600, and I do have to say that it does rather irritate me when people make sites and never bother to test on various resolutions. In this case I couldn't see half of the ads as they were on the right of the picture. There you go - new adsense theory:- make sure all the ads you serve actually get seen, and not wrapped off the edge of the screen. That will give them a couple of hundred extra bucks a day in my reckoning :)
With the kind of traffic this site gets, which looks like over 2 million visitors/month, $650/day should be easy. The question is...how does an ugly site get that kind of traffic in the first place! Perhaps we are all trying too hard to cater to smarter tech savvy types when we should be catering to the idiots.
Pictures.
Lots and lots of pretty pictures of cute puppies.
And the tech crowds have a click phobia. It's the normal folk who surf the web aimlessly looking at pretty pictures while downloading mp3's of puppy movies in the background who click those juicy ads.
-P-
Again, thanks for answering my questions Hobbs. It's funny how this adsense works... it's kinda like my biology courses, where the more you know the more you realize what you don't know.
>>And the tech crowds have a click phobia. It's the normal folk who surf the web aimlessly looking at pretty pictures while downloading mp3's of puppy movies in the background who click those juicy ads.<<
exseo, heh.. i'm guessing they probably think the paw print wallpaper is cute too.
I also agree with you on the testing of different resolutions.
It should be illegal to make pages where the users have to scroll broadwise to be able to read the whole sentence.
These days I design to 1024x768 minimum (960 pixels minimum width). I just can't deal with the mega-sized ads that advertisers want AND still have the content I want where I want it at 800x600.
But I will say that a personal pet peeve of mine is sites that specify teeny tiny fixed size fonts everywhere (ie. a specific point or pixel size rather than using relative em's or %'s). Especially since I still primarily use IE for browsing (since that's what the vast majority of my visitors use), which won't resize fixed font sizes.
Well, my monitor is 1920x1200 resolution and if your articles have text that's as big as the fine print on a new car contract, I'm just going to move on rather than go to the trouble of starting up Firefox or Opera.
You really have to take Alexa with a grain of salt. Many many things can effect the rankings over there, such as more techy visitors, visitors from certain geographical areas, etc. etc. the list never ends.
As EFV stated, the platform is irrelevant.
Some of my best performing pages are not even made with frontpage but with Wordpad! It's the content that matters.
I hold site made with wordpad or notepad in higher regard than sites made in frontpage, since the coding is done entirely by hand in wordpad.
But I do agree that the content is way more important than the platform built on.
[edited by: Garfieldt at 8:21 pm (utc) on July 24, 2006]
Well I'm not surprised then.
Even though I run at a higher resolution I designed my site specifically to accomodate such users even though I thought the advice was probably #*$!.
It's pretty good to see from a couple of posts that it wasn't entirely useless!
Saying that, one of our biggest clients has just ditched 800x600 as a resolution they support, and have gone for 1024x768 - but I'm sure they'll lose business for it.
That's a lot lower that I'd have guessed. It doesn't seem so many years ago that I had to test sites in 640x480 because every other bugger was using the lowest resolution going. Now I can't find a single visitor this month that has used that most troublesome of resolutions. When did it die out?
