Putting My Channels Back

[jeepers]

After Anne posted success with eliminating channels, I decided to join her. I have experienced a small decrease in revenues and have decided that I really miss (and to some extent need) the information channels provide.

Other changes were made to my site, when I deleted the channels so I can't really say what the effect was.

After looking at my site honestly, I have decided what I really need to do is go back to the basics. Review my content and analyze just what keywords or phrases I'm targeting, and look at the general layout of my pages.

I also tried just writing content without worrying about SEO or keywords in any manner whatsoever. While "over optimizing" a page may be very bad, I'm beginning to believe that no optimizing is just as bad. So the goal today is to add "just a touch" of keyword optimization.

Jeepers

[Ganceann]

I was tempted to remove channels, but the information they provided was a useful enough reason to keep them for me... and I have noticed that PPC cost has fluctuated continually anyway.

With regard to no SEO, I would agree - if you use a CMS to manage the content, then having basic SEO for it should suffice in as much optimization as you need.

I have one site that I feel is suffering from over optimization, while another site, using a CMS, still draws in a few visitors (albeit not many, since it is a lot newer), but the quality of visitors seems to be higher... (I started getting referrals from finance.google.com which was unexpected, and I tracked it down to one page on my newer site that google picked up on... which is good, if I could replicate it for each page then it could prove to be quite useful).

If each page was able to draw in 5 or so visitors from such a referral, coupled with organic results, the cumulative total visitors sitewide could prove to be highly beneficial - especially since it would be related info and as I witnessed, a decent CPC in excess of $0.70 from those referrals...

[TheDonster]

I finally got around to removing a lot of channels on my site just this week. I was curious about Anne's experiment but the post came out while I was on vacation and didn't have time to try it. My results so far; I had the second highest earning day since I started AS for over a year now. CTR and traffic remained constant while eCPM rocketed up. Today, the second full day in the experiment I've seen rock bottom eCPM while everything else remains normal, including earnings. So don't ask me what that means!

A couple of observations about this idea that I've noticed so far:

I didn't remove all the channels, only the big ones that signify leaderboard and footer ads on about 5K pages.

The channels info was helpful but not necessary for me since I track my site through other means.

I know Anne got a lot of grief for her post and she mentioned she felt "attacked" at many times. I think her contribution was an extremely valuable one and I'm glad she shared it. What works for some is why we come to this board, to get ideas, and to find out things that never occured to us. Whether the theory works is something we may never know for sure since each site reacts to changes differently.

Personally, I'm not sure it has to do with the channel info but possibly the fact that you are updating your site in one massive retrofit. My highest earning day ever came after I redid all my ad formats and updated the site in one shot. It may be that the updating reconfigures Smart-Pricing in some way but how, well we'll have to kidnap a Google engineer to find out that one.

Last, I'm willing to let the channel-less idea run for at least a few weeks. If the earnings stabilize higher, hey why not?

[jeepers]

I do think that changing the site has something to do with it. I've also noticed that my monthly income usually starts out strong and then dissapates by the end. Although this month seems to be an exception. I had a very weak start and now things are feeling more normal.

I have set up a more disciplined work schedule so that I'll be refreshing all of my sites on a more regular basis.

Oh, and this isn't meant to be an attack on Anne, because it didn't work for me. I just thought that some of us who tried it should post. It was interesting to do, and it has spurred me on to look at my sites more rigorously.

[uhwebs]

I didn't see ann's original post... why would anyone eliminate their channels though? How can that affect earnings?
I would think it would be useful to know where your strongest ads are, etc...

[hunderdown]

uhwebs, and anyone else interested, here you go:

[webmasterworld.com...]

LONG thread.

[castar]

I personally want to thank Ann for having the courage to open up the discussion that she did. It is through those insights that we are able to tweak our sites to be more profitable. For me, her example did not work, which is fine, but other scenarios have worked and I also want to thank Brett for providing this venue to share.

[trannack]

Yeah, I would also like to thank Ann. Surely this is what WW should be all about. The sharing and pooling of ideas. Yes, sometimes what works for one doesn't work for another - because at the end of the day we have a broad array of sites out there. No pain, no gain. You just don't know until you try these things. I wish more people would share their trials and tribulations. Although lately I have been a bit slack, I used to try to upload at least one page a day. When I uploaded, instead of just uploading the new page, I used to upload the entire site again. I think this used to work pretty well for me, as I think it possible that it refreshes in Adsense somehow. Any ideas?