Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I'd focus more on improving content to attract "buying" visitors and more attractive ads.
Improving ad blending may help - but it could also increase "Ad Blindness" and could make things worse (Q: What's worse than 5 days with 0 clicks? A: 6 days with 0 clicks!)
"keeping some images near the ads(the size of the image matching the size of ad)"
Careful. Donot draw attention to ads. Do stay within the TOS.
"try different headings for ur site and keep a 728 horizontal link just below the heading and cross your fingers ,some times u get the ads in link as exactly the same words as in your heading.(i get that right often)
Inducing clicks by too much blending/or by user error will lead you to be smart priced. Not worth it IMHO.
Just some friendly advice.
Just because someone else tries something ang gets away with it is no excuse and no defence.
What you describe sounds, at best, to be close to the limits if not actually breaking the TOS.
You should do nothing that causes anyone to click on an ad unintentionally, nothing that misleads visitors into think the ads are just links, and nothing that overtly encourages visitors to click on the ads. Don't advise people to do these things.
This may be considered "click fraud" which would risk a ban. If you escaped that, it is likely that traffic from your site would not convert well for your advertisers - this would then subject you to smart pricing.
The way forward:
1 provide good, orginal worthwhile content for your visitors - hopefully this will attract good ads.
2 present your content and ads appropriately. Try to reduce Ad Blindness whithout drawing unnecessary attention to your ads.
I suggest you look at some of the sites you visit yourself. How do the good ones present Ads? What temps you to follow an advertisment link?
To much blending can lead to inadverent clicking and if this clicking does not convert well for advertisers , the publisher tends to be smart priced. The fall in EPC more than compensates for any increase in CTR. Technically, blending is not against TOS and Google even encourages it. The problem is that TOOOO much of it can lead to a fall in total revenue over the longer term.
On the same lines, using only one adSense block, per page can reduce CTR but can increase EPC.
Blocking MFA ' s will normally increase EPC, but may reduce CTR.
You need to find a balance for your site and also stay within the TOS.
So experiment and then try to stabilize things a bit. Stable pages tend to do well in the long term.
But my priority would be to promote the site first. The impressions are fairly low, and gaining more traffic is important.
OK - to improve your ctr. As the others have said, do not encourage clicks. Stay within the Google TOS if you want to keep your account. Check if the ads correspond to the page content. If the ads are not relevant then ctr will be poor. If they aren't then there are various ways of tuning your page to have a better selection of ads. Blending is an option, but take care to use the Google tools for colour selection and not try to use other colours.
You might like to try a different layout. Google have a heat map on the adsense site detailing where they have found clics are most likely to come from. Also worth trying is to change the ad block for a different type. In addition, if you have multiole ad blocks on the page that will cause a low ctr due to the number of impressions being counted.
I think overall your best use of time would be to work on content and increasing traffic. Even if you have achieved a high click percentage of 10-20% you are still only looking at a few clicks per day at the most.
