Forum Moderators: martinibuster
My site has been online since 1999, and will continue with or without advertising income. I've spent the last few weeks working on my site without the constraints of thinking what the impact might be on adsense. I've made quite a lot of changes, and have been doing a limited test with adsense on a couple of pages.
Because of the number of changes, I can't possibly guess the impact of each and every one and it's relevance to adsense. I'm going to briefly list the changes I've made. Many here might say that these changes should have been there in the first place, and to an extent that is true but I think it's worth mentioning them.
Firstly, I looked at the speed my site loaded. It's fine on broadband, but what about dial-up? I read a report recently that half of the UK is happy with dial up access even if broadband was available in their area. So I've optimised my site for dial-up. Server speed and capacity is important, but the fastest server on the planet doesn't help shove more bits down a dial up connection any faster! I removed excess graphics, combined external style sheets into the page and simplified them. I moved to a CSS layout a few months back. I also made the site more google-freindly. I'm not going to go into this, as there are a few pages on Google that discuss this.
The result of this is that the site is now at position 3 on Google (up from 5/6), Alexa says the speed of the site is average now (it was slow) and traffic is up.
Editorially, I have long since wanted to run a monthly article on different aspects of the topic on the front page. I haven't done this as I've been worried about the ad targeting. But thinking about it, I decided that due to the lack of advertisers, the new feature may just widen the pool of relevant, good quality ads.
So, the first monthly article is on a test page. The targeting is dissapointing in that I'm not really seeing many changes, but the new blood seems to be enough to keep off some of the MFA's.
I'm also using a/b testing to see what ad format works best. The problem here is that I honestly think that the improvement in ctr and epc is not due to dfferent ad formats, but entirely due to the rotation of ad blocks! The impressions, ecpm and earnings are equal, but the clicks and ctr are different. So I guess that a/b testing (or ad block rotation) is here to stay.
So how have the changes to the site speed, traffic and editorial style affected adsense? It's only a limited trial, but the outcome is that it may well be worth rolling out adsense on to selected pages again. Epc is up, as is ecpm and ctr. If this improvement can be see site-wide is difficult to predict, as I don't intend changing the text on most of the pages.
combined external style sheets into the page and simplified them
If the aim is to speed up page load, I have found the best way is to include the CSS directly in the head *on the first page visited* and also have the call to the include file there, so that it caches, and then only have the include file on subsequent pages of the visit.
Your main page undoubtedly has at least one graphic on it, which means IE is going to open a second connection. The overhead of sucking down a separate CSS file of modest size is small compared to the already-incurred cost of opening that second connection and asking for the graphics. Having the server transmit appropriate caching instructions can make all subsequent pages load noticeably faster (with reduced load on your server).
